I can upgrade the shelter

In what was once the forecourt of Lin City Railway Station, a drilling machine had been erected and was vigorously drilling downwards.

"Make sure to clean up the gravel and soil brought up by the drill, don't let them pile up around the borehole!" Cao Daren, full of energy, was standing next to the drill bit, wrapped up like a bear, directing several workers assisting by the drilling machine.

For Cao Daren, having the chance to return to his old trade was quite a rare opportunity, filling him with enthusiasm for the work.

These workers were found by Chen Xin. After the rescue team set up a medical station and started treating patients, some of the mild cases recovered their health after two days of rest and were able to work.

Most of them had been assigned by Lin City Hall to places urgently in need of manpower. Chen Xin, leveraging the influence of the rescue team and Lin City Hall's own desire to clear the train station, managed to pull ten workers from the staff to help him and Cao Daren with the task.

Since Cao Daren had promised to help, he wouldn't mess up. After Chen Xin found the workers, he brought his drilling machine to the train station plaza covered with more than ten meters of snow and started drilling without conducting any geological surveys.

This wasn't due to reckless behavior by Cao Daren; instead, it was because the entire city of Lin City was situated over geothermal fissures, where drilling anywhere would hit the geothermal belt.

This geothermal fissure is the largest in Xiang Province; it stretches across the entire province and reaches up into Hubei Province, where Chibi City, a place Chen Xin had visited, is also part of this geothermal belt.

The geothermal resources contained within this belt are quite abundant. The two hot springs within Xiang Province with water temperatures exceeding 100°C are manifestations of this geothermal belt.

However, while drilling with enthusiasm, Cao Daren was not without concerns.

"Writer, the snow here is so deep. If we drill into the geothermal layer and the heat causes the snow to melt, it could affect the stability of the drilling machine. Moreover, your aim is to evaporate the snow here, so you can't place the wellhead ten meters above the ground, right?" Cao Daren approached Chen Xin, who had just returned from gathering materials, expressing his worries.

Chen Xin had already considered this issue, and he reassured Cao Daren, saying, "Don't worry about this. I'll place support columns underneath the drilling machine to secure it. Even if the snow starts to melt, the support columns will keep the machine stable."

"Okay, as long as you've got it covered, I'm at ease." Cao Daren did not pursue the matter of where Chen Xin intended to place the wellhead; as long as the drilling machine remained stable, everything else was not a problem.

Seeing that Cao Daren had no more questions, Chen Xin carried his recently collected scrap metal to the electromagnetic metallurgy furnace set up nearby.

For ease of construction, Chen Xin had moved this electromagnetic metallurgy furnace here, and upgraded it a second time, fixing issues encountered previously to make it more efficient and convenient.

Placing the scrap metal onto the central tray of the machine, he switched it on. After a display of sparks and steam, a still-red-hot spherical metal ingot was smelted.

Turning off the machine, he allowed the metal ingot to cool quickly and fall back onto the tray. While using a mechanical arm to pick up the ingot, Chen Xin also made sure to clean the residue off the tray and toss it into a metal bin beside the machine.

This residue was waste material but couldn't be discarded haphazardly; it would be collected for centralized processing later.

Of course, the spherical metal ingot itself was not immediately usable; Chen Xin still needed to conduct secondary processing on it.

With the help of a mechanical arm, the once solid lump of metal was processed into various metal components, which were then set aside.

These parts appeared mostly as long metal strips and assorted rings, making it impossible to discern what they were until Chen Xin fully assembled them.

But Chen Xin paid no mind to this. These parts were being made according to blueprints stored in a microcomputer on the mechanical arm, each piece tagged with a corresponding number; he just needed to assemble them according to the blueprint later.

As for what the final assembled product would be, even if someone saw Chen Xin's design plans, they'd likely have to guess quite a bit to realize what it was.

After all, before Chen Xin completed this creation, nobody had ever constructed a large radiator over ten meters tall.

This device was designed by Chen Xin, modeled after the heating hub in "Frostpunk." The structure resembled the heating hubs in the game, but its principle of operation was entirely different, as it didn't use coal.

Its base would connect with the geothermal well drilled by Cao Daren, continuously extracting underground thermal energy through pipes and releasing it via radiator fins on the heating hub aboveground, thereby raising the temperature around the hub.

This was quite a crude and wasteful way of using energy, since it released heat directly into the air with no insulation around to contain it, requiring a lot of thermal energy to raise the temperature. Employing such energy elsewhere in electricity generation or home heating would be much more efficient.

However, for Chen Xin, who aimed to melt the snow surrounding the train station, such a method was indeed the most suitable.

Also, for someone with a system like his, Chen Xin could completely improve the design to make the heating hub operate more efficiently, truly establishing a stable heating field around it like in the game.

For Chen Xin, this was not difficult to achieve.

According to his plan, once the heating hub was built, he would continue upgrading it into a true Energy Tower, and extend the geothermal well at the tower's base into the dry rock layer to efficiently exploit deep geothermal energy.

Regarding concerns about waste due to rough usage, this was unnecessary. Compared to the geothermal resources Chen Xin was using, the geothermal resources beneath the layers could be considered inexhaustible.

Unless the core of the Blue Planet extinguished, geothermal resources would remain endless, as long as exploitation methods were appropriately managed, without causing geological damage or localized over-extraction, no issues would arise.

Using the electromagnetic metallurgy furnace, Chen Xin continuously smelted the collected scrap metal, already gathering most of the components. Once Cao Daren finished the well, Chen Xin could start constructing this heating hub.

Once the heating hub began operating, the continuously flowing thermal energy would melt the surrounding snow, fulfilling Chen Xin's goal of clearing away the snow.

However, thinking that all the snow would eventually melt, Chen Xin had to consider a problem: how to manage the drainage after the snow melts.