Age of Cosmic Exploration

Chapter 404: Message (2)
Chapter 404: Message (2)

Translator: EndlessFantasy TranslationEditor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Jay really wanted to scream out loud. This was all f*cking unrealistic!

Even though he had seen many things since he woke up, like the new the Hope, the startlingly fast transport shuttle, the so-called exoskeleton space armor, and many more things that were unscientific, the most unscientific thing of all was that he had just tricked space…

When the transport shuttle continued to move forward, Jay raised his two hands and looked at them with shock. After a long time, he said blankly, ”I just f*cking tricked a slice of space, what the f*ck just happened…”

Yao Yuan, who was at his side, added, ”You saw what happened yourself. Looks like your power is unusually strong, you better get used to it soon because I can see that we will need you for many instances in the future.”

Jay continued to blank out until he said suddenly, ”A chocolate rain will fall here!”

…and nothing happened.

”How about… It will rain gold coins!”

Still nothing happened…

”Beautiful girls will fall from the sky!”

There was still nothing…

”I will become God…”

”The only thing you’ve become is crazy,” Yao Yuan chided him.

ZERO laughed and said, ”Your power doesn’t work that way. To put it simply, for a lie to work, you must first be able to believe it yourself. This is the first condition. If you don’t buy it yourself, how are you going to convince others? The second condition is it has to be natural or at least logical in your mind. For example, the situation just now violates your sense of the logical world, it is an anomaly in a way, and thus in your mind, it was not supposed to happen. Therefore, you were able to use your power to correct that anomaly easily.”

”Is that so…” Jay thought about it seriously, and uttered in a deeper tone than before, ”I shall become God…”

”…You shall become God of the crazies indeed…”

The group got closer and closer to the light mist. When the shuttle finally reached the edge of the mist, they got a clearer picture. The mist was thick and it covered a space that was incredibly wide. It was impossible to tell how deep the mist was, because they could only look beyond about 2 meters of the edge before everything was swallowed up by the mist.

The weirdest thing was that there was not even one spaceship within the several thousand kilometers of this mist. All of the spaceships were placed far away from the mist.

”What now? Do we go into the mist just like that?” Jay lounged lazily in the chair and sighed half-heartedly. ”Will there be some kind of monster waiting to ambush us inside? This is too much like the plot of a scary movie after all… By the way, could this be an illusion as well? Yao Yuan, can you look past the mist?”

”No, I can’t. This is an actual mist.” Yao Yuan jumped out of the shuttle and managed to catch a glimpse of Jay laying sprawled in the chair. He sighed and said, ”Let’s stop for food first. We’ve been moving for more than 10 hours already; I’m sure everyone is hungry and tired, right? After all, time is flexible here. Let’s take a 2-hour rest, we will continue the exploration into the mist after that.”

”Finally, I’ve been waiting for you to say for so long…” Jay immediately leaped off the chair with a burst of energy. He took off his space helmet and laughed. ”Let me see how human cuisine has changed over the years!”

He might’ve been putting on a light-hearted front, but Yao Yuan could tell the heavy pressure Jay was under. After all, he was merely a normal civilian who had not been gone through years of military training… Asking him to put his life on the line and travel into an unknown space was a stressful enterprise, as it would be for anyone.

Two hours later, they finished their meal, and with Yao Yuan’s request, they double-checked each other’s ammo and equipment before they headed into the mist in the transport shuttle.

The group was silent as they looked at the mist before them… Granted, they could only see 2 meters before them, so they couldn’t really tell what was in there. At least the mist seemed to fluoresce, meaning they wouldn’t need to turn on the lights.

After an indeterminate amount of travel, as time seemed to lose its meaning inside the mist, Yao Yuan found himself standing amidst a state of nothingness. The mist that seemed to envelope him earlier disappeared and he was instead surrounded by space and stars. The space seemed to stretch to an infinity and he couldn’t spot the horizon.

Yao Yuan moved his limbs subconsciously and realized that there was nothing wrong with his body, he could move around just fine. However, there was a sense of weightlessness to his movements. According to the reading on his space armor, he was in actual space with real space radiation. He had found himself back in the real physical universe.

”What’s going on? Have I escaped from the illusory space? Then what about the Hope? What about humanity?” Yao Yuan started to panic. However, before he could figure out a plan, a voice spoke in his mind.

”This is where our race was born. If translated using the information stored in the user’s brain, it is called Galaxy XRZNA- 37310. We call it the land of birth.

”This is a small, insignificant solar system. The number of space civilizations birthed by this system is low, there was only us. It was a relatively peaceful space…

”If calculated using your race’s unit of time, our race left our home planet about 34,000,000 years ago. We evolved from a prehistoric race into a space race. We’ve been to upwards of several thousand solar systems and were in several space wars of varying sizes along the way. Finally, about 1,200,000 years ago, our race finally became a level 8 space civilization. At that time, a secret was revealed to us. If one intends to reach the peak of level 9 space civilization, one has to return to the solar system one’s race was born in. If the solar system had already been destroyed, then the race would never reach the peak of level 9 space civilization.

”Thankfully, this solar system was a peaceful place. There were no worthwhile minerals or places of interest. In the several million years we’ve spent back in our home planet, there was no space incident big enough to warrant the destruction of this place. Therefore, we believe our race will be able to reach the peak of level 9 space civilization without accident.

”However, we didn’t expect the coalition of more than 10 level 9 space civilizations who arrived to suppress us. They wished to destroy this land of birth. How could we allow that to happen? This was the key that would help us become a level 9 space civilization, the cradle of hope for our entire civilization, so naturally we rejected them.”

Just as the voice appeared in Yao Yuan’s mind, the space around him started to change. First, he was given a close-up of a glittering blue planet. Several spaceships departed from it as a neutron star fragment hurtled towards it. Just like the fast-forward in movies, Yao Yuan was given a glimpse of one of the spaceships’ history. After leaving the solar system, they were assaulted by a group of asteroids. Then, since this was the first time they had ventured beyond their solar system, they didn’t prepare enough supplies. Due to the lack of supplies or differences in governing policies, there was infighting.

However, this civilization was certainly lucky, because just as they were going to go extinct due to infighting, they stumbled across a fragment of a terrestrial planet. It seemed to be a giant fragment of a terrestrial planet that had left its original orbit during celestial movement.

This civilization managed to acquire the materials that they needed from the fragment, so the infighting ceased. With the unity of the whole civilization, they managed to build an incredibly huge space fort on this planet fragment and continued on their journey…

In the end, the civilization reached an unoccupied solar system. They attempted to cultivate one of the planets into a life-preserving planet, but unfortunately, their effort of several thousand years failed. By then, the last of their cosmic adapters had died from old age, and they stumbled across the real threat of any space civilization… racial senescence!

Thankfully, lady luck seemed to be smiling their way, because another level 2 space civilization had entered the solar system to harvest it. A war broke out between the two parties and, using their own technology that was also from the level 2 space civilization and the secret weapon that was hidden inside the space fort, this space civilization won the hard-fought war. However, after the war was concluded, they realized with a start that there was a batch of new cosmic adapters among their babies.

The whole universe was playing out the history of this space civilization.

Yao Yuan saw the history with his own two eyes, from their initial struggle to their later progress as they moved step by step up the space civilization levels. Even though there were many things that he wasn’t supposed to understand, there was a voice in his head that enabled him to understand everything instinctively.

The universe continued to move to show their history until this civilization returned to the solar system that birthed them. Suddenly, one particular spot of this solar system started to implode as if a sinkhole had opened up and the space was falling into it. It was then that Yao Yuan heard that music again…

It was the Song of Destruction!

”We managed to stop the Song of Destruction, but in the end, we failed. All traces of our existence waere wiped by the coalition of level 9 space civilizations, except for this…

”We didn’t dare to leave any one of our citizens or technology behind, because they would simply be hunted down by the coalition and destroyed, but we have this, this is our only hope…

”This is something our race once obtained in our long journey. We do not know what is it or who created it, we can barely tell whether it is naturally-occurring or man-created, but we do know that it is something even a level 9 space civilization hasn’t mastered!

”Chosen one, you have won the right to inherent this relic ruin, and we only have this thing left, an illusory universe! Take it, use it to grow, help us take our revenge and revive us, and we will be your most loyal servants…”

When the voice disappeared from Yao Yuan’s mind, the universe around him disappeared as if a veil had been lifted and he could see everything clearly again…