Chapter 328 The Roaring Yellow River: The Earth's Divine Manifestation
The difficulty of dredging the Yellow River is self-evident, as evidenced by a poem:
"The cracked rocks penetrate the clouds, the dangerous narrow pass imprisons the prisoners; the collapsed cliffs roll up the snow and the raging waves flow; the hanging river hangs upside down like a sword, and the silt locks the deep hills. The flood peaks take advantage of the situation, and the wild horses escape; the old roads change shape, and the people worry; the accumulated troubles for thousands of years have frightened thousands of miles away, and the water dragons at the center of the earth are difficult to tame."
Over the past two thousand years, the Yellow River has undergone six major course changes, the most recent of which occurred during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when the river changed its course from flowing south into the Yellow Sea to flowing north into the Bohai Sea.
There is drought in the dry season and floods in the rainy season. The upper reaches are steep and the water is turbulent, and the lower reaches are a hanging river for 800 miles.
So far, the Yellow River flood problem has not been truly solved.
Especially in Kaifeng and Xinxiang areas, the highest points of the hanging rivers are 13 meters and 23 meters above the ground respectively. It is truly the "Yellow River flowing from the sky". Once the river water rises sharply and the levees burst, the consequences will be disastrous.
Many people have proposed solutions, the most eye-catching of which is to adjust the Yellow River to its old course during the Ming and Qing dynasties, dredge it and make it navigable, while at the same time leveling the 800-mile hanging river, which would completely solve the problem.
However, the real challenges are much greater than this.
First of all, why did the Yellow River change its course? That's because the original river channel was silted up and had originally become a river on the ground. After the dam broke, the water flowed to lower places and changed its course.
The original river channel is 4 meters higher than the ground on average. Even if the original river channel is restored, the workload will not be easy.
Secondly, after so many years of the Yellow River's course change, less than one-third of its original 728.3 kilometers of course has been completely preserved, and other parts have long been used for other purposes.
For example, in Dangshan County, the 46.6-kilometer old Yellow River course is covered with yellow sand. In order to control the sand, local people choose to plant drought-resistant pear trees. Today, the coverage rate of pear trees exceeds 70%. Dangshan pears are sold all over the country and are extremely well-known.
In addition, more than 10 natural scenic spots have been developed along the old course of the Yellow River in Dangshan, including "Wulong Covered with Snow", "Ancient Yellow River Reflecting the Snow", "Pear Tree King" and "Pear Capital Museum". In 2016, during the Dangshan Pear Blossom Festival, the number of tourists to Dang exceeded 600,000, and the comprehensive tourism income exceeded 240 million yuan.
After it was shoveled away and turned back into a river channel?
Obviously unrealistic.
In fact, the Yellow River has been under control, such as the water and sediment control measures of the Xiaolangdi Project. However, this takes time and there may be significant results decades later. However, there will be a major flood in the summer of the following year and we can’t wait any longer.
Li Xiang stood beside Hukou Waterfall, looking at the rushing water, with a lot of thoughts in his mind.
His figure flashed and he arrived at the source of the Yellow River. He performed the earth escape technique and went down along the Yellow River waterway. During the process of escape, his ability to sense the earth veins was fully activated, covering an area of 35 kilometers in radius.
It took two days and two nights to conduct a careful survey all the way from the source of the Yellow River to the mouth of the Bohai Sea, and we obtained a lot of information.
Afterwards, he came to the imperial capital, took out his laptop and wrote a plan in Jiang Caier's study.
Jiang Caier was naturally very happy to see him, but she was busy with an important project and had no time to accompany Li Xiang.
"You don't need to accompany me. Wait for me to finish writing the plan in a few days, and then you can help me revise and optimize it."
The main reason was that Jiang Caier was too busy and Li Xiang didn't want to take up too much of her time. Otherwise, it would save a lot of trouble if he took Jiang Caier to the site for investigation and let Jiang Caier come up with a plan directly.
But Li Xiang felt that he couldn't just rely on his wife, he also had to show his strength. I can’t let Jiang Caier think that I’m a mentally retarded person with a strong body but a simple mind.
Therefore, he wrote the proposal very carefully.
How could it be possible to just rush into such a huge project as dredging the Yellow River without any preparation and start working right away? The rock formations in many places in the upper canyon section are broken and there are many hidden dangers of landslides. If we fail to handle them properly, we may end up making things worse.
Li Xiang spent two days writing it, and then called Jiang Caier over. Jiang Caier spent half a day helping Li Xiang revise it, and eventually formed a very efficient and perfect dredging plan.
It is difficult for ordinary people to write such a high-quality plan.
It is divided into five parts.
The first part is upstream management: adopting a cascade control system, including two major parts: "rock vein reshaping" and "cascade dam group".
"Rock vein reshaping" is divided into three steps. First, use the "ground vein perception ability" to scan the rock layer in the canyon section, locate the potential points of landslides and narrow parts of the river channel, and mark them one by one in the plan.
Secondly, the steep river bank is transformed into a stepped gentle slope (slope ≤ 15°) through “rock shaping”, and natural basalt revetment is embedded simultaneously to reduce the impact of water flow.
Secondly, a "pivot diversion column" is constructed under rapids such as the Hukou Waterfall to form a spiral energy dissipation structure through the directional release of soil energy, thereby reducing the turbulence of the water flow.
The “cascade dam group” is divided into two points. One is at key nodes such as Longyangxia and Liujiaxia, where the “ground vein siphon” technology is used to extract deep granite to cast a honeycomb-shaped permeable ecological dam body (which serves as both flood control and fish migration channels). Secondly, a spiritual power matrix is pre-buried inside the dam body, which can activate the "rock armor proliferation" to temporarily raise the dam body during the flood season, and shrink it to restore the navigable water level during the dry season.
The second part is the riverbed sedimentation project for the management of the middle and lower reaches of the hanging river: using the supernatural power of "Earth's Evolution Record", the silt from the downstream riverbed is collected into an extra-dimensional warehouse, and then it travels to the depths of the Pacific Ocean at a top speed of Mach 20 to shake the silt into the sea.
The riverbed silt contains a large amount of sand, but after being washed and deposited by the Yellow River, the surface of these sands is very smooth and the diameter is usually less than 0.3 mm. If used to mix concrete, there will be problems of insufficient cohesion and mortar thinning, and it cannot be used for house construction.
Moreover, the quantity was so large that even Li Xiang’s warehouse could not store it all, so it was simply thrown away.
According to Li Xiang's estimation, the 800-li hanging river, assuming an average height of five meters and a width of 0.8 kilometers, would require an excavated volume of 32 trillion cubic meters.
The volume of Li Xiang’s current warehouse is 549.76 billion cubic meters, and there are still a large amount of materials inside. Only about half of the space can be used to transport mud and sand. In order to prevent pollution, a relatively wide isolation zone should be left in the middle. If he transports 200 billion cubic meters at a time, 32 trillion will have to be transported 160 times.
This transport capacity is amazing. Of course, if he upgrades it again and expands the warehouse again during the process of dredging the Yellow River, the number of trips will be even less.
However, at a speed of Mach 20, it wouldn't take much time to travel to the deep Pacific Ocean.
During the dredging process, "gravity field reverse loading" was simultaneously implemented on the Kaifeng-Zhengzhou section, using a huge force of 350,000 kilograms and the special energy of the soil system to compress the soft soil layer at the bottom of the riverbed, causing the overall suspension river section to sink by 3-5 meters.
In addition, a parallel underground flood diversion channel was opened below Zhengzhou, and a fully enclosed basalt tunnel (with a designed inner diameter of 80 meters) was constructed using "vein shaping".
The main river channel is only for navigation (water depth ≥ 4 meters), and the flood diversion channel is linked by intelligent earth gates, which automatically open diversion during flood season to avoid the risk of overflowing the embankment.
The third, fourth and fifth parts respectively deal with the coordination of ecology and shipping, disaster preparedness and enhanced embankment protection measures, implementation plans and performance forecasts, etc., which will not be elaborated one by one.
But there are two points worth mentioning. First, Jiang Caier used a quantum computer to help Li Xiang design a hydrological model, which dynamically adjusted the curvature of the river channel through "geophysical resonance" to optimize the efficiency of ship passage.
Second, Jiang Caier suggested that Zhao Xueqing participate in this project.
Zhao Xueqing is proficient in plant-related supernatural powers. Her "spiritual plant synesthesia" can help quickly screen salt- and alkali-tolerant vegetation, implant root-fixing gene chains when reshaping river banks, and construct a 200-meter-wide ecological buffer zone.
At the same time, Li Xiang laid a "crystal vein filtration layer" at the bottom of the riverbed to absorb heavy metal pollution and release minerals, restoring the water's self-purification ability.
The crystal particle structure of the crystal vein filtration layer was also designed by Jiang Caier, and Li Xiang was responsible for its implementation using earth-based supernatural powers.
After dredging, the navigation capacity can enable 5,000-ton ships to reach the Bohai Sea directly from Zhengzhou (originally only 200-ton ships were allowed in some sections of the river), and the flood control standard has been raised from once in a hundred years to once in a thousand years.
This plan makes full use of Li Xiang's extremely fast movement, extra-dimensional warehouse, huge force control and earth-related fine shaping ability to compress the traditional super-project that takes decades into a monthly cycle. If it can be implemented, it will be enough to fight against the super flood before the end of the world.
"Let me make another PPT for you."
Jiang Caier is always willing to help others. She is an extraordinary person in terms of intelligence and scientific research, and she is also first-class at making PPTs. After entering the National Key Laboratory of Tsinghua University, she often writes PPTs, participates in group meetings, makes reports at group meetings, and speaks eloquently, which is deeply loved by everyone.
In particular, her English speaking ability has also improved rapidly. Sometimes, foreign scientific research teams would come over for academic exchanges, and Jiang Caier would explain the whole process in English, which made domestic and foreign experts frequently give her thumbs up and praise her.
She is just an eighteen-year-old girl, and she is only in the first semester of her freshman year. Foreign experts are surprised. Why does China always produce geniuses? As we all know, the reason why the United States' military has lagged behind in recent years is mainly because it expelled Chinese engineers and reused Indian engineers. The native white people and Jews in the United States are first-class in finance, but are not good at military and aerospace.
Even the Minuteman-3 was developed by a Chinese scientist, who is from the same school as the father of the Dongfeng missile.
Jiang Caier's amazing performance attracted the attention of some foreign experts. One big shot privately invited her to study at a prestigious American university and offered her a huge scholarship, but Jiang Caier naturally refused.
Li Xiang sent the Yellow River dredging plan and PPT to a mysterious email address, and then spent a day with Jiang Caier. At around eight o'clock the next evening, he made another mysterious phone call.
He had obtained permission to have one-on-one calls with this phone number since his first meeting with the man in the imperial capital, but he had never contacted him proactively. This was the first time.
As soon as the call was made, the usually steady voice of the person on the other end began to reveal a hint of excitement.
"It's Brother Xiang. How are you doing recently?" The man was as friendly as ever.
"Thank you for your concern. I'm fine." Li Xiang said.
Everyone's time is precious, so after a brief greeting, Li Xiang got straight to the point and explained his own plan for dredging the Yellow River.
The reason why it is divided into two sections is because the water conditions and geological conditions upstream and downstream are different.
The other party listened very carefully, asked questions from time to time, and discussed with Li Xiang.
Finally, he said six words: "I can trust you to do the job."
After hanging up the phone, the man was quite happy: "Brother Xiang has a sense of family and country, and he helped a lot."
After a while, he made another call, explained all the matters and asked the person to cooperate with Li Xiang's work.
Such a big move as dredging the Yellow River could not be hidden from the world, so Li Xiang needed someone to clean up the mess. This is also the reason why he reported the plan.
…
At the same time, in the third meeting room of the National Major Water Conservancy Project Command, the atmosphere was quite depressing.
Chief Engineer Zhou Zhengyang punched the smart conference table, causing ripples on the holographic sand table. The cuffs of his dark grey uniform were stained with coffee, and his knuckles were pale blue from prolonged use of the stylus. “This is the sixth version of the plan that was rejected by the central government!”
The people below were silent.
Zhou Zhengyang was furious: "It's been so long and the plan hasn't been finalized yet. What are you doing?"
Someone whispered, "It's not that we can't decide. We've already submitted several drafts."
"Can a plan that cannot solve the problem and is repeatedly rejected be called a plan? According to your previous plan, by the time you finish dredging, the flood will have passed for several years."
"There may not necessarily be a big flood." someone murmured.
"Not necessarily? People all over the world are preparing for war, and you're telling me it's not necessarily? If there really is a flood, can you take on the responsibility?"
"Do you know why it is called 'Xuanhe'? It is not a river hanging in the air, but a guillotine hanging over the heads of 300 million people in North China!"
Everyone was silent; you could hear a pin drop in the conference room.
After a while, a young engineer named Cheng Mo in a corner could not help but complain: "Engineer Zhou, for the Kaifeng section of the Hanging River Sedimentation Project, we can only clean up 50,000 cubic meters of silt every day. This is the limit. We can't do more. It's not that we don't want to do it."
"The limit?" Zhou Zhengyang grabbed the laser pen and pointed it at the big screen. The cross-section of the riverbed in Kaifeng was instantly magnified twenty times. "Do you know how much higher the riverbed of Xuanhe is than that of Zhengzhou city? Twenty-three meters! Do you know how thick the silt gel layer at the bottom of the river is?"
He grabbed the test report from the corner of the table and threw it over: "Forty-two meters! Forty-two meters!"
The document flew past Cheng Mo's ear and hit the explosion-proof glass and broke into snowflakes.
"Engineer Zhou, we have tried a new type of curing agent." Female senior engineer Lin Xue handed over a tablet and ran her fingertips over a group of collapsed slope protection videos, "But the water content of the silt exceeds 75%, and the solidified body can't survive more than three tides..."
Seeing that Zhou Zhengyang was about to lose his temper again, the old engineer Wang Zhenguo grabbed the thermos cup and took a sip of cold tea: "Old Zhou, calm down."
Zhou Zhengyang: "Let's not talk about that. Let's talk about the data from the Lankao section of the test field. What kind of bullshit is this? The survival rate of the newly transplanted reeds is less than 3%."
Zhou Zhengyang, who is usually gentle, has been swearing a lot recently.
At this moment, Zhou Zhengyang's phone rang. He picked it up and after a few words, a look of endless astonishment appeared on his face, and then it turned into endless surprise!
"Okay, okay, we will definitely cooperate with you fully." Zhou Zhengyang nodded repeatedly, smiling so hard that he couldn't close his mouth. This hot potato was finally taken over by someone else, and it turned out to be that person.
It's incredible.
After hanging up the phone, Zhou Zhengyang looked happy, and everyone in the conference room looked at each other, not knowing why.
Zhou Zhengyang: "Someone else has done what you can't do."
"What?"
The whole audience was shocked, and everyone's face was filled with disbelief.
"Mr. Zhou, what's going on? How did the other party do it?"
"Yeah, who is so amazing? If they can really do it, I will bow down to them."
"We were asked to help out and cooperate fully. However, everyone has to sign a confidentiality agreement, the highest level. Anyone who leaks it will bear the consequences."
Everyone: “…”
…
Three days later, Li Xiang started working. A one-man project.
No outsiders are allowed to approach where he is. We have personnel from relevant departments cooperating in the surrounding areas.
The upper reaches of the Yellow River, Longyang Gorge.
Li Xiang stepped on the suspended rock platform, and the ochre-yellow spiritual power spread from the soles of his feet to the cliff a thousand meters away like a spider web. The roaring sound of water flowing in the canyon was drowned out by a low hum - the supernatural power of "Earth's Evolution Record" enveloped the entire mountain.
“Crack!”
The steep rock wall suddenly softened like mud. Under the pull of Li Xiang's supernatural power, hundreds of thousands of tons of granite were like tofu carved by an invisible chisel. The stepped slope extended towards the river bank at a speed visible to the naked eye.
Lao Zhang, an engineer surveying the canyon, stumbled back, not even noticing his helmet falling off: "This... is this really something that human beings can do?"
Hukou Waterfall.
Below the misty waterfall, Li Xiang put his palms together and pressed down suddenly. Seven hundred-meter-high basalt pillars broke out of the water, and the spiral patterns glowed faintly blue under the turbulent water.
In the drone footage, the waterfall that originally fell vertically was cut into dozens of arc-shaped water curtains by the column, and there was even rainbow light flowing where the water splashed.
An old engineer watching on the shore trembled as he lit a cigarette and took a deep breath. This was his hometown, and he had devoted his entire life to the management of the Yellow River: "I can finally put my worries, which have been hanging in the balance for half my life, to rest..."
Three drones hovered, recording every scene from different perspectives.
Such a monumental project will naturally be followed throughout by reporters from CCTV, who will film a documentary that will be kept in the National Archives and also recorded in history books.
This was also done with Li Xiang's consent.
After all, who doesn't want to leave their name in history?
Throughout history, all those who have made contributions to the management of the Yellow River have been recorded in history.
The mysterious armored man has become famous overseas, and many foreigners have claimed that the mysterious armored man is Chinese. Originally, most people in China did not believe it, including some people who participated in the action this time, who thought it was pure nonsense and that foreigners were slandering them.
But when they saw Li Xiang showing his power, they naturally believed it.
However, everyone has signed a confidentiality agreement and is not allowed to disclose the information. It's not time to decrypt yet.
As for Li Xiang's global plundering of supplies, the targets were all foreigners, and those with whom he had bad relations. He never did anything rash in China.
Of course, there are also people who are too virtuous and think that Li Xiang was wrong. They shouted that it was blatant robbery and immoral.
However, what those people don’t know is that the United States has been using the dollar hegemony system to reap the benefits of the world for decades, causing economic collapse and even bankruptcy in many countries. The destructive power caused is much greater than that of Li Xiang. Perhaps because its financial means are more sophisticated, ordinary people cannot understand it, but the fact of the harvest is there. It’s just that Li Xiang was more direct, but the essence is the same.
Why can the beautiful country do it, but Li Xiang can’t? Besides, the United States also has many direct moments, such as "I Steal Oil for the Country" (a realist popular online song).
Moreover, Li Xiang's targets were all industries under the control of the chaebols, and the countries that were harvested by the United States experienced currency devaluation, stock and property market collapse, soaring prices of all kinds of goods, and even constant wars, making people's lives miserable, and ordinary people suffered greater harm.
Li Xiang did not buy the goods for free. He had his own plans. In the future, some of those supplies would be given back to survivors abroad in times of crisis to help them tide over the difficulties.
If we don't collect data in peacetime, given the nature of many foreign countries, they will be destroyed.
Li Xiang is not a saint, he just feels that if one is alone, the other will be in trouble. If there were more resistance around the world, there would be less pressure at home. When it comes to fighting against space monsters, we are all on the same front.
Kaifeng hanging river section.
Under the moonlight, in the mud of the riverbed, Li Xiang, wearing the Giant Whale Holy Armor, looked serious. The vortex of the other dimension tore open dark cracks in the riverbed, and the dark brown silt that had been deposited for hundreds of years poured into the void under the traction of the powerful earth-based supernatural power.
The riverbed was sinking at a rate of three centimeters per minute, and the red alarm lights on the monitoring instruments on the dam gradually turned green. Li Dahe, the old river worker who was on night watch, suddenly knelt down and cried bitterly - beneath his feet, the turbid Yellow River water was fading from its violent khaki color.
This old river worker, three generations of his family have been sticking to this post, working diligently for decades. In the future, although the Yellow River will be thoroughly managed, he still has to devote himself to maintenance work, so he is also included.
Although the Yellow River will freeze after the end of the world, it can withstand a super flood and extreme weather in the next few years, so this governance is quite worthwhile.
Zhengzhou flood diversion tunnel.
At three o'clock in the morning on the riverbank, Li Xiang flicked his fingers and an 80-meter-diameter basalt tunnel broke through the ground like a giant python. Construction team leader Zhao Gang swept his high-intensity flashlight across the inner wall of the tunnel, and the naturally formed anti-seepage crystal layer refracted star-like fragmented light. In the darkness, two night herons took off in surprise, and the Yellow River carp they had just caught in their claws fluttered into the main river channel, splashing water next to the fluorescent scale of "Navigation Depth 4.2 meters" on the water level gauge.
(End of this chapter)
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