Following Tom's command, in the Aerospace Carrier's hibernation chamber, countless hibernation pods sealed for hundreds of years slowly opened their covers, and the equipment within each pod began injecting awakening drugs into the sleeping clones.

One by one, the clones opened their eyes, re-established their consciousness connection with Tom, and then either walked independently or, with the aid of robots, moved to the recovery room to begin the recovery process.

Meanwhile, about half of the approximately one billion clones who had remained awake now arrived at the Aerospace Carrier's berths, entering various types of spacecraft.

The spacecraft, silent for hundreds of years, finally stirred at this moment.

Nuclear fusion reactors began operating, surging with immense heat and energy, and from the engine nozzles, propelled by scorching exhaust flames, millions of various spacecraft, like a swarm of bees, departed from the main fleet and flew toward the massive satellite nearby.

Even before the fleet had docked, Tom had already dispatched an environmental survey fleet to thoroughly explore the Altair System, examining the resource reserves and distribution of every major planet, large satellite, and dwarf planet, and had pre-planned the entire engineering project.

At this moment, Tom no longer needed any delay — construction could begin immediately.

This stage of development would undoubtedly focus on the large satellite comparable to a major planet, because it was large enough to have sufficiently rich resource reserves.

At the same time, its proximity to the gas planet — its parent world — made it extremely convenient to acquire fusion fuel.

Now, under the dazzling illumination of Altair and the looming presence of the enormous gray gas giant, this massive satellite, with its thin atmosphere and active geological surface, finally welcomed its first intelligent and self-aware guests since its formation.

Hundreds of millions of clones, billions of intelligent machines, millions of spacecraft, and an endless stream of equipment converged upon the planet like a flood.

Under Tom's command and Hestia AI's coordination, massive construction began instantly.

A strange and magnificent scene unfolded across the planet's surface.

In the geologically stable areas chosen by Tom, countless machines moved back and forth, quickly leveling and compacting the ground, breaking down mountains, and filling in valleys.

Factories rose from the ground, heavy-duty railway lines stretched everywhere, trains sped by, spacecraft took off and landed, and intelligent machines and clones bustled about in all directions.

Beyond these stable regions, violent volcanic eruptions spewed lava skyward, while intense earthquakes split the ground apart. The changes were as catastrophic as the collapse of heaven and earth, and to make matters worse, numerous asteroids joined the chaos.

Every day, large numbers of asteroids impacted this massive satellite.

Smaller asteroids merely created craters, but larger ones could trigger powerful earthquakes and eject massive amounts of material into space.

On one side was bustling construction — a scene of civilization and progress. On the other, it was chaos and destruction, a hellish landscape of constant cataclysms.

The gas giant, named Altair A by Tom, possessed a mass far greater than Jupiter's, and its gravity was correspondingly immense. The number of celestial bodies in this young system was staggering, making Altair A act like a powerful vacuum cleaner, attracting an endless stream of small celestial bodies that bombarded its surface.

According to Tom's estimates, more than one hundred million celestial bodies, large and small, impacted Altair A every day, with a total mass exceeding one trillion tons.

It was precisely because of these frequent impacts that Altair A's color had turned gray, unlike Jupiter's pale yellow hue.

However, the frequent collisions also caused collateral damage to the nearby satellite, which Tom named Altair A1.

Even if only one ten-thousandth of the impacting mass struck Altair A1, that still amounted to roughly one hundred million tons — equivalent to tens of thousands of ten-meter-wide asteroids.

Because the gravitational acceleration of Altair A1 was so immense, even such small impacts released energy as high as 3.2 × 10¹⁵ joules — equivalent to 800,000 tons of TNT!

Such violent explosions occurred tens of thousands of times across the planet every single day.

It was easy to imagine how harsh the environment on Altair A1 truly was.

Of course, asteroid impacts did not choose their targets. They would not deliberately avoid the geologically stable areas where Tom's forces were building.

The reason those regions remained unscathed was that Tom had dispatched large numbers of spacecraft to intercept and destroy or divert any asteroids that might impact them.

While massive ground construction continued on Altair A1, development on Altair A — the gas giant — also proceeded.

Tom specifically selected areas with relatively stable airflow and released a large number of modified Jupiter-class aircraft into the atmosphere.

Unmodified versions would have been useless — the gravity on Altair A's surface was ten times stronger than Earth's, and any unreinforced craft would have collapsed under their own weight upon release.

In such an environment, the clones working inside the Jupiter aircraft suffered immense strain, leading to extremely high attrition rates.

But there was no other option. To extract sufficient quantities of deuterium, they had to operate within Altair A's atmosphere.

Under Tom's full investment, regardless of cost or clone losses, vast amounts of deuterium were continuously extracted and transported like a flood to the fusion power stations, fueling every aspect of Tom's expanding industrial empire.

In less than a year, Tom's forces had established over ten thousand large factories, and a fully functional industrial system had begun to take shape.

Beyond numerous fusion power plants, mining complexes, and steel refineries, Tom's industry was now capable of locally producing advanced technological creations such as warships and spacecraft within the Altair System itself.

However, the current industrial scale was still too small. The next step was to develop more planets, construct more factories, and, using the existing industrial foundation, perfect the entire system until production capacity reached its peak.

Only then could he truly focus on advancing technology, gathering resources, and preparing for the next interstellar voyage.

But expanding industrial capacity required solving one critical issue first — the same one that had troubled Tom before.

The Altair System was far too chaotic. Asteroid impacts were simply too frequent.

This problem had to be resolved before any talk of large-scale expansion could even begin.

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