"Forget it, turn it off. Just open the observation skylight for me." Yue Yuan paused at that, then turned and walked toward the slightly curved wall beside him.
It was not that he had Deep Space Claustrophobia. He simply felt that seeing it with his own eyes was more real than watching it on a screen, so he had changed his mind on the spur of the moment.
Deep Space Claustrophobia had been discovered in some duty personnel in recent years. After entering space and personally experiencing the vastness of the stars and their own insignificance, humans would psychologically feel boundless loneliness.
It was considered a psychological illness. Its incidence rate was not high, but Tianhe Light still issued a friendly reminder.
"Very well, sir, but I must still remind you."
"I know. No need to say more."
Yue Yuan interrupted Tianhe Light's friendly reminder. He knew what came next: looking with one's own eyes carried a higher risk of developing the condition than viewing it on a screen.
The skylight wall was made of a special optical material. Once the command to open it was transmitted, the white wall seemed to melt away, changing from opaque to one-way transparent.
One-way transparency meant that those inside could see outside, while those outside could not see in. The starlight permitted to pass through streamed through the skylight wall and into Yue Yuan's eyes.
As the Interstellar Dust gradually thinned, many highly luminous stars returned to people's field of vision. Moreover, the Hope was already in space, free from the atmospheric interference found on Earth, so the starry sky once again came into view.
However, because the observation point had changed, Yue Yuan stared for quite a while without recognizing which point of light corresponded to which star.
He tried hard to find the most recognizable Big Dipper, yet he still could not spot any similar stars.
"Maybe I'm facing the wrong direction," Yue Yuan told himself.
So he watched for a while longer. But even after the Hope completed one full rotation, and the stars returned to how they had looked before, he still had not found the Big Dipper.
In the end, he stopped looking. He merely watched the endlessly recurring starry sky in silence.
The Hope kept rotating, but from Yue Yuan's perspective, he only saw the stars emerge from the edge of the skylight above his head and sink beyond the edge beneath his feet. He felt no sensation of spinning himself.
Once he stopped focusing on finding the Big Dipper, the aura of deep space washed over him.
At that moment, Yue Yuan seemed to feel the breath of the universe.
The starry sky was deep and silent; the universe was black and cold.
The universe was far too vast. The Milky Way Galaxy alone had a diameter of one hundred thousand light-years, and that was only its star-dense Galactic Disk. If its sparse outer regions were included, its diameter would reach one hundred sixty thousand light-years, with as many as three hundred billion stars.
What an immense scale that was. Humanity had already exhausted every means at its disposal merely to cross a distance of less than ten light-years.
And in the universe, there were more than two hundred billion galaxies like the Milky Way Galaxy, according to current human estimates.
Whether humanity or the Hope, even the Sun itself, was truly too insignificant in the face of the entire universe. Comparing them to a grain of sand in an endless sea was already an exaggeration; even a water molecule in the ocean would not be small enough.
The universe was also far too ancient. Through Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation and a series of other observations, people had estimated that our universe was already 26.7 billion years old today. Although that had not been truly verified, it was used here. Its diameter was obviously far greater than that figure, because from the moment the universe was born, it had been accelerating in its expansion.
Yet the earliest humans had existed for only a few million years. Even counting from ancient apemen, it had only been fourteen million years. Even counting from the birth of the first single-celled organism, it had only been 3.5 billion years. If one spoke of recorded history worthy of being called "civilization," it had been merely six thousand years.
In a daze, an indescribable emotion suddenly arose in Yue Yuan's heart: loneliness, insignificance, cruelty, coldness. It came abruptly, sweeping into his soul in an instant.
In that moment, Yue Yuan felt as though he stood in a void. Brilliant stars surrounded him—beautiful and mysterious—yet the firmament behind them was incomparably deep and black. Suddenly, he felt darkness sweep toward him, as though his entire body were falling into boundless deep space.
Loneliness and solitude were like a colossal beast in deep space, madly devouring his soul.
At that moment, Yue Yuan slowly closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the confusion in his gaze had vanished completely.
"So this is Deep Space Claustrophobia!" He stared directly at the stars again and muttered, his eyes filled with determination.
It was not that Yue Yuan had remained unaffected. He had simply understood the source of that loneliness and solitude.
Humanity was too small, too young.
Yue Yuan remembered how he had felt the first time he gazed up at the stars. At first, he had longed for them. Then, the longer he looked, the more captivated he became. Next came the realization of the gap between that vastness and his own insignificance, followed by a wave of emptiness and loneliness rising within him.
Standing beneath the dark starry sky now felt as though that sensation had been magnified countless times over.
"Tianhe Light, close the skylight!" Yue Yuan instructed the Intelligent AI, then turned and left the control center.
The first batch of hibernating personnel had been awake for two months already. They should have adapted by now, and it was time for Yue Yuan to enter hibernation as well.
Before entering hibernation, Yue Yuan called Zhu Pete, who had awakened two months earlier to take his shift, and spoke with him for a while.
Yue Yuan was not worried that the New Government would encounter problems after he went into hibernation. Although his authority had grown to the point of dictatorship, he had not become a completely isolated ruler.
His discussion with Zhu Pete was mainly to explain certain precautions for duty shifts and matters concerning security.
Afterward, Yue Yuan went to his private room.
It was a separate hibernation chamber, containing only one Hibernation Pod. As the civilization's highest leader, Yue Yuan was entitled to such treatment.
Moreover, for safety reasons, anyone wishing to enter this room had to be the highest-ranking leader on duty and have sufficient cause. Otherwise, the Intelligent AI Tianhe Light would not even open the door. And if the door did open, that meant Tianhe Light had already awakened Yue Yuan.
Following the guidance of the Artificial Intelligence Tianhe Light, Yue Yuan, who possessed the sole T0 authority, changed into specially made hibernation clothing, swallowed the hibernation drug in one gulp, then lay inside the Hibernation Pod and quietly fell asleep.
The hibernation drug protected the human brain and other organs while also helping induce sleep.
Once he was sound asleep, the Hibernation Pod's system officially activated, taking him from normal sleep into deep cryogenic hibernation.
As Yue Yuan entered hibernation, humanity's thousand-year journey also entered its second phase—Inertial Navigation.
This was the longest phase of humanity's voyage. From the moment the three enormous thrusters shut down until they restarted, it would last roughly nine hundred years.
During that long span of time, the Hope would carry slumbering humanity across the boundless sea of stars, toward the far shore of hope.
Before you continue