48: Chapter 48 Discovery of Rare Minerals

After seeing off the energetic Hao Linger and her group, Cao Xiao was the only one left in the villa.

Closing the electric gate and the iron villa door, Cao Xiao went to the wine cellar on the first basement level. The detection panel appeared before his eyes, showing the underground situation within a hundred-meter radius. In an instant, the soil layer a hundred meters below the villa's foundation vanished, replaced perfectly by a massive block of Lava Stone. This transition had no impact on the villa above; the ground within a hundred-meter radius had turned into Lava Stone, with only a three-meter layer of soil left on the surface. It was as if the entire villa foundation had become a single, giant rock.

The four walls and floor of the wine cellar had turned into Lava Stone. He removed a five-meter cube of Lava Stone from the center of the cellar to create a hollow space, leaving a downward-sloping staircase on its four sides. Cao Xiao descended the stone steps to the bottom, where he removed a vertical circular hole three meters in diameter from the center, just piercing through the Lava Stone foundation. The circular stone walls featured a spiral staircase winding downward, complete with a 1.5-meter-high handrail. He took out a high-powered flashlight, turned it on, and descended the stairs. He then instantaneously removed another hundred meters of soil and replaced it with Lava Stone, continuing the three-meter diameter hole and staircase connection. Cao Xiao repeatedly dug deeper in this manner.

At a depth of over two hundred meters, it was no longer a soil layer but had transitioned into sedimentary rock. Cao Xiao stopped using sintered Lava Stone as filler and instead melted and reshaped the extracted sedimentary rock before putting it back. The Earth's structure is divided into the crust, mantle, and core. The crust is the solid outer shell below the Earth's surface and above the Moho discontinuity. The thickness of the crust is uneven, with an average thickness of about 17 kilometers. The continental part averages about 33 kilometers, while in mountains and plains, it can reach 60 to 70 kilometers. The oceanic crust is thinner, averaging about 6 kilometers. Generally, the higher the elevation of a large-scale solid surface, the thicker the crust; the lower the elevation, the thinner the crust. Besides sedimentary rock, the material composition of the crust is primarily granite and basalt.

The central region where Huanghe City is located is a plain, so the crust would not be shallow. Cao Xiao had dug down over a thousand meters and was still in the sedimentary rock layer, without even hitting groundwater. He could clearly feel the temperature rising as he descended. Crustal temperature generally increases gradually with depth, rising by an average of 30°C for every kilometer. The detection panel currently showed the sedimentary rock's temperature at 22°C. The temperature outside was much higher; Huanghe City is a famous "furnace city," with summer temperatures often exceeding 30°C. Cao Xiao found this depth's temperature quite cool, but the rising trend worried him. He considered whether he should just establish the underground space at this depth, as the temperature alone might force him to give up if he went any deeper.

However, he decided to continue downward, believing he could find a way to solve the temperature issue. A depth of over a thousand meters wasn't secure enough. Back in the nineties, the US had developed bunker-busters capable of striking targets 250 meters underground. If replaced with nuclear bunker-busters, the geology within a thousand meters would be severely impacted. Moreover, with today's more advanced technology twenty years later, the strike depth of such weapons would be even greater; even a depth of a thousand meters might be directly hit. It wasn't that Cao Xiao had a persecution complex; rather, as an ordinary person who had suddenly gained a powerful "cheat," he lacked a sense of security. Another point was that his hypothetical enemy was an unknown extraterrestrial civilization. Since obtaining the industrial mother machine, he had felt a sense of crisis. Its appearance proved the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations, meaning Earth's civilization was no longer alone. Cao Xiao felt he had to be prepared for the unknown, though he admitted this might just be his own paranoid overthinking.

Still, building an underground space at this depth to serve as a decoy wasn't a bad idea—a "wily hare has three burrows," making things safer. For now, he set that aside; today's main goal was to check if the underground geology was suitable for a base. As he continued digging, he stopped going straight down. Instead, he first dug a 200-meter-long square horizontal tunnel in one direction before resuming the vertical descent. After digging another thousand meters, he found the sedimentary rock had disappeared, replaced by gabbro. gabbro originates from basaltic magma in the deep crust or upper mantle through intrusion. Cao Xiao wasn't surprised to see it in the upper crust; geological changes are naturally complex, and some gabbro can even be exposed on the surface.

But after digging down another two hundred meters, the gabbro changed again, its color shifting from black to grayish-brown. Cao Xiao reflexively checked the material composition list on the detection panel. What he saw made him ecstatic. This wasn't gabbro at all; it was clearly magnetite ore—specifically, titanium concentrate from the vanadium-titanium magnetite category. Normally, titanium concentrate is refined from ilmenite or titanomagnetite, but the ore here required no further refining and could be smelted directly. It was a rare, high-grade natural titanium concentrate deposit.

Looking at the detailed composition analysis and the surrounding ore layers, Cao Xiao suddenly felt overwhelmed with joy. The minerals contained 32.7% iron, 48.6% titanium dioxide, 0.85% vanadium pentoxide, 0.015% cobalt, 0.35% nickel, 2.37% aluminum oxide, 2.45% silicon dioxide, 1.1% calcium oxide, 4.55% magnesium oxide, 1.4% manganese oxide, 0.65% sulfides, 0.01% phosphides, 5.8% platinum group metal compounds, and 0.4% scandium compounds. The quality of this titanium concentrate was extremely high, with the content of rare metals like titanium, vanadium, scandium, and the platinum group exceeding any other titanium concentrate discovered to date. This meant the price of this ore would be significantly higher than other similar ores.

Finding this titanium concentrate was a godsend for Cao Xiao. Although he didn't know the exact reserves yet, even a few tens of thousands of tons would be enough for most of the materials needed for the atomic energy reactor. Once he purchased a few other minor metals and obtained nuclear fuel, the energy problem plaguing him would be completely solved. Then, he could move forward with giant strides. By then, Hao Linger probably wouldn't complain about him being idle anymore. Imagining himself as a slave owner constantly exploiting Hao Linger, keeping her busy 365 days a year from morning till night while she begged for mercy and told him to stop working so hard and rest, Cao Xiao was deeply entranced by the thought.

He stood there grinning like an idiot for a long time until he was dripping with sweat from the heat. The underground temperature was now over forty degrees. Until he solved the high-temperature issue, this wasn't a place to linger. He decided to first determine the reserves of this titanium concentrate deposit; there was no need to dig deeper for now. It wouldn't be too late to continue after mining the ore and solving the temperature problem.