Time passed quietly.

Under Tom's full-throttle construction and the entire industrial system's full-throttle production, millions of Deuterium-Deuterium fusion power stations rapidly appeared on various planets, replacing the original Deuterium-Tritium fusion power stations and beginning to supply power to the entire industrial and research system.

A single Deuterium-Deuterium fusion power station can only produce a few hundred kilograms of helium-3 per day, which seems insignificant, but it doesn't matter—their numbers are sufficient!

In the Pegasus V342 star system, in the smallest gas giant, a massive flight formation of millions of Jupiter aircraft flew day and night in the harsh environment, separating massive amounts of deuterium from the gas giant's atmosphere, then gathering them onto the Black Bird platform.

Shuttle spacecraft traveled back and forth between the Black Bird platform and the energy distribution center, transferring massive amounts of deuterium to heavy transport spacecraft through a transit point.

This entire process was remotely controlled by millions of clones and Bluetoth, with specific frontline tasks handled by humanoid general-purpose robots, completely eliminating the hidden danger of biological entities being affected by the gas giant's excessive gravity.

Heavy transport ships then delivered hundreds of thousands of tons of deuterium to every planet where nuclear fusion power stations were built, pouring this deuterium in like water irrigating fertile fields.

Deuterium began to fuse in the reactors, producing massive amounts of energy to power the entire industrial and research system, while large quantities of the fusion byproduct, helium-3, were continuously generated and temporarily stored in the storage tanks present in every Deuterium-Deuterium fusion power station.

Trains or railways speeding across the planet's surface traveled back and forth between each Deuterium-Deuterium fusion power station, collecting the helium-3 produced by each nuclear fusion power station, and finally consolidating it at the helium-3 distribution centers built on every planet. From there, it was transported via Space Elevator, heavy transport ships, and other means, towards the magnetic monopole detector construction area designated by Tom.

On the first day that all millions of Deuterium-Deuterium fusion power plants were put into operation, Tom produced a full 400,000 tons of helium-3!

By the ninth day, the helium-3 reserves had reached 3.6 million tons, which was already completely sufficient to support the construction of a high-performance magnetic monopole detector!

Thus, under the command of numerous high-precision components produced by the industrial system, and many clones and Bluetoth involved in planning and design, general-purpose robots and intelligent machinery began busy construction in space.

Beyond the first magnetic monopole detector, Tom now finally possessed a second one.

This was just the beginning.

Massive amounts of helium-3 and massive amounts of components were still continuously converging in space.

In deep space billions of kilometers from Pegasus V342, at the Lagrange points of massive rocky planets, at the Lagrange points of gas giants and large moons, in even deeper space hundreds of billions of kilometers from the star, in galaxy corners far from the ecliptic plane...

Under different environmental backgrounds, numerous magnetic monopole detectors were successively built.

They were like spider webs, quietly spreading out in this vast and profound starry sky, waiting for the appearance of "little flying insects" that might appear at an unknown time and impact from an unknown angle.

Tom did not know when his magnetic monopole detector would be able to capture valuable signals, or if his theoretical framework was fundamentally wrong, and that magnetic monopoles simply did not exist in the universe—this was also possible.

Tom only knew that the more "spider webs" he spread, the higher the probability of capturing magnetic monopoles.

Since that was the case, he would continue to build them. Even if magnetic monopole detectors were more difficult and costly to build than proton decay detectors, he would still build a thousand of them!

At this moment, the numerous nuclear fusion power stations were both energy suppliers and material producers, continuously providing massive amounts of helium-3, powerfully supporting Tom's construction, which was so vast that the Bluetoth could not even imagine it.

At this moment, Tom once again truly felt why large-scale breakthroughs in basic physics theory must occur within a galaxy and cannot occur during interstellar travel.

Taking the production of helium-3 as an example, how much deuterium would such a large amount of helium-3 require? How many nuclear fusion power stations would be needed? How immense an industrial strength and how vast a material supply would be required?

Only in a galaxy with abundant, almost inexhaustible materials can such a massive supply of materials be met.

Time quietly passed as Tom continuously built, and in addition to maintaining normal production and scientific research, Tom madly increased the number of magnetic monopole detectors at an average rate of one every 9 days.

This construction speed was unimaginable for any civilization.

Do they really think such large-scale, high-end, and advanced detectors are toy cars that can be mass-produced at will?

Which grand scientific apparatus is not extremely rigorous and solemn, requiring repeated demonstrations, repeated designs and iterative optimizations, taking decades and the full effort of a civilization to complete?

But for Tom, magnetic monopole detectors were being built at hundreds of construction sites simultaneously, just waiting for enough helium-3 to be produced and injected, and then a detector would be completed immediately.

Thus, more than ten years passed quietly.

Over 5,000 days of time passed, allowing Tom to possess over 500 magnetic monopole detectors. At the same time, the one thousand proton decay detectors that Tom had spent a lot of time building earlier had also been operating for a full 5,000-plus days.

During this time, the average single detector detected hundreds of thousands of Cherenkov radiation events, with a total of one thousand detectors detecting over 100 million events.

Over 100 million clones, as well as specialized research AI, diligently studied these events, but the final result disappointed Tom.

All of these 100 million-plus radiation events were neutrino collision events or interference; not a single one was a proton decay!

This made Tom's heart grow heavy.

"If the proton's lifespan is 10^{36} years, then my detectors should have detected over 500,000 proton decay events in approximately 14 years...

But why haven't there been any?"

This leaves almost only one possibility.

He had greatly underestimated the proton's lifespan before.

Its lower limit of lifespan is not 10^{36} years; there is a difference of 100,000 times between the two.

Only then can the fact that he did not detect a single proton decay in 14 years be explained.

So... what should be done next?

Continue to increase the number of proton decay detectors to seek a higher detection probability?

But, that doesn't seem to work.

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