Chapter 61: Cellular-Level Nuclear Fusion
They felt as though they had witnessed an angel—a divine presence. Perhaps they might even become saints themselves. And now, the Umbrella Corporation had offended the gods. Even though that angel claimed to merely be passing through, who could guarantee it wasn't more than that?
Chang Wei had put on a public display of divinity but didn't bother considering whether Alice and her group might lead this world astray.
After all, he hadn't left behind any evidence—no images or records—so there was no proof of what had occurred.
As for why he didn't choose to harvest the world of Resident Evil, it was because it wasn't necessary. The Umbrella Corporation was already enacting a global harvest. When the time came... should he step in, select Alice as the last human survivor, and purify this world alongside her?
"Forget it. That's a question for later. First, I need to figure out nuclear fusion."
Glancing at the Hive facility beneath Raccoon City, Chang Wei pondered for a moment and decided to move his research to the Sahara Desert. That way, even if something went wrong, he wouldn't accidentally sink a landmass. While it was unlikely to happen, the damage could still be substantial, which was best avoided.
With telekinetic constraints applied to nuclear fusion, Chang Wei avoided the need to search for specialized materials or evolve the Blacklight Virus to withstand extreme heat. After all, his goal was thermonuclear fusion, not the entirely unscientific cold fusion touted by Iron Man—a concept that was barely theoretical at best.
Once he achieved nuclear fusion, Chang Wei would become akin to Godzilla: a self-sustaining, immortal being, an eternal lifeform.
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"Boom!!!"
A mysterious high-energy heat source appeared in the Sahara Desert, capturing the attention of various nations. Satellite monitoring revealed that the heat source on the surface exceeded the levels typically generated by low-yield nuclear explosions.
"What's going on?"
The Sahara Desert had always been steeped in mysterious tales, such as those of death worms. However, there had never been an event resembling the Tunguska explosion or an apocalyptic detonation.
In response, nations assembled their own exploration teams to investigate the phenomenon in the Sahara Desert.
This wasn't idle curiosity; in an age of advanced technology, humanity would not tolerate unexplained phenomena—let alone one of this magnitude.
The energy released far surpassed that of a small nuclear warhead. Even if it turned out to be a natural phenomenon, it had to be identified and understood. This wasn't like observing hurricanes, which, despite releasing energy on a scale that dwarfed thousands of nuclear bombs, were still observable phenomena.
The explosion in question, however, was unobservable by conventional means.
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"Typical of the ever-present fifty-year curse—no matter how finely attuned my telekinesis is, down to the molecular level, this is still incredibly difficult."
Deep in the desert, a thousand meters underground, Chang Wei had created a space the size of a basketball court. This was where his experiments on controlled nuclear fusion were being conducted.
But after months of effort, the only notable results were several near-death explosions and slightly extended reaction durations. Progress otherwise was negligible.
"One minute and thirty-two seconds… my telekinetic strength is still insufficient."
Taking a deep breath, Chang Wei reflected on the challenge of sustaining thermonuclear fusion. The immense solar-like energy would burn through his telekinetic barriers. It wasn't that he couldn't withstand temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees—he could handle nuclear explosions with ease. The problem was the terrifyingly high temperatures at the cellular level in this microscopic domain. His telekinesis simply couldn't hold up.
That said, the one minute and thirty-two seconds of fusion left Chang Wei feeling immensely powerful. He felt as though, with one punch, he could shatter a continental plate—if only he could evenly distribute the force. Otherwise, the pressure would merely result in a massive hole.
Sinking an aircraft carrier with a single punch was no problem. In fact, even before absorbing Alex Mercer, he could achieve that. But that required sustained attacks. Now, Chang Wei suspected he could destroy a carrier as if it were a toy, with just the shockwave of a punch delivered from hundreds of meters away.
In that state, he was unstoppable—a god-slayer. The heat generated was so intense that Chang Wei had to release it through radiation beams to cool down. These beams, with temperatures conservatively estimated at tens of thousands of degrees, could instantly vaporize iron.
Using these radiation beams continuously would rapidly dissipate heat and extend his active time, but the destructive power was so terrifying that Chang Wei wouldn't consider it unless he planned to scour the Earth's surface.
Each Blacklight Virus cell in his body functioned as a thermonuclear reactor, capable of producing more than a thousand kilowatt-hours of electricity per second. And because the cells were at the molecular level, his cell count far exceeded that of an average human.
What's the concept of a thousand kilowatt-hours? One kilogram of TNT releases only about 1.2 kilowatt-hours of energy!
Take the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima by the U.S. as an example. It contained 64 kilograms of uranium-235, but post-event investigations revealed that less than 2% of the nuclear material reacted. The rest was essentially wasted.
Even so, the explosion produced energy equivalent to 15 million kilowatt-hours of electricity. If the bomb's efficiency had been increased to 90%, the devastation in Hiroshima would have been exponentially worse.