I hadn't expected them to feel the same way.
"Even if you return, those eyes will still be watching you," I said.
R5 poured me another cup of tea. "But there are things we have to do, aren't there? We can't just stand by and watch ourselves be destroyed. No, saying we'd be standing by is giving ourselves too much credit. If they wanted to destroy us, they might do it without us ever knowing. We wouldn't realize anything at all. In an instant, everything could be over. But are you willing to die without ever knowing why? Are you willing to let someone else hold your fate in their hands?"
He said he wasn't willing, and naturally, neither was I.
I believed no one was willing to have their life and death controlled by others.
"That was why the organization considered returning. After all, Earth is humanity's true home base. The Ancient Humans who once fled Earth for refuge on smaller planets were, in the end, only a minority. As far as we know, our world already has a relatively large population, but do you know our total population?"
I shook my head. I really didn't know that.
He said, "Less than five hundred thousand. The descendants of Ancient Humans on several other planets number fewer than one hundred thousand at the lowest. The only reason our civilization has progressed further than yours is because our civilization's development was never interrupted, while Earth's human civilization had to start over several times. So Earth's civilization has not actually progressed slowly. If Earth's humans had spent as much time exploring civilization as we had, your civilization would surpass ours completely. That was what surprised us. Later, after secretly investigating, we discovered that ancient powerful beings still existed on Earth, and these