Silver Mist

"You mean this Silver Mist is just something a civilization uses for mining?" Yue Yuan frowned, looking at the screen, his tone filled with disbelief.

Yu Nanfeng was also grim. He tried his best to remain calm, but the bitterness in his words betrayed him. "Yes, although we don't know its true nature, based on the behavior of this Silver Mist and the data analysis from previous undetected probes, I think there is no other explanation more reasonable than this one."

"How so?" Yue Yuan pressed.

"Chief, do you still remember those caves?"

Seeing Yue Yuan nod, Yu Nanfeng walked to the big screen and pointed to the Silver Mist lying on the metal mountain inside, "The cave is the mine, and these metal mountains are the metals that have been dug out of the mine and sorted. The miners are these Silver Mist."

Only if these Silver Mist are miners can it explain why the cave is so small, why the cave walls have so little support, and why there are so many metal mountains on the planet's surface.

"Wait, Dr. Yu, are you saying that those Silver Mist miners separated the ore directly during the mining process? And separated it into various elemental metals and piled them up there? How is that possible?!" An expert looked away from the big screen and then looked at Yu Nanfeng with a 'Are you kidding me?' expression.

"Besides this explanation, do you have a better one?" Yu Nanfeng pointed to the Silver Mist covering a metal mountain on the paused video. "If I remember correctly, this metal mountain should be iron, while this one is aluminum, this one is titanium, this one is silver, gold, and copper, and those others are some other trace elements. Professor Lei, you are not an expert in the Engineering Department, so it's understandable that you don't know. In fact, these components are the constituent elements of our transport ship's hull and internal circuitry and chips."

"Directly separating the alloy into elements... how is that possible? It was a cloud of Silver Mist, so small! How were they powered? I'm sorry, I can't imagine what kind of technology that is." Another expert shook his head, indicating that he couldn't understand it.

"Perhaps it's the breaking of chemical bonds in the substance. As for the functional system, maybe that Silver Mist isn't actually fog; it just looks like fog to us. In fact, it might be something else we don't know about, but..." A chemist said half a sentence, then couldn't continue, because he simply couldn't imagine how a fog could accomplish such a complex process.

"No matter what, we have to leave here!" Yue Yuan sighed, his words filled with helplessness and powerlessness. He couldn't even bring himself to say anything about revenge.

Intuition and evidence both told Yue Yuan that Yu Nanfeng was right; that large cloud of Silver Mist was something a certain civilization used for mining, and it was also the murderer that killed more than two hundred human landing personnel.

The demon was on the planet, but when Yue Yuan saw such an incomprehensible attack, he couldn't utter a single word of revenge.

As for why the Silver Mist was there before, why it didn't come out earlier, and why it only appeared after humans landed, Yue Yuan had no idea.

But he wasn't stupid. Although he didn't know the specific reason, he could guess the general idea based on the cause and effect of the event.

Of course, he couldn't guess where Silver Mist was before; all he could guess was what happened next.

Yue Yuan believes that the fact that humans landed before emerging from the Silver Mist suggests that their machinery or transport vessels triggered some mechanism within the Silver Mist, though the possibility of human life characteristics cannot be ruled out.

Although it's outrageous, if something as outrageous as mining with a huge cloud of Silver Mist has already happened, Yue Yuan felt that even more outrageous things couldn't be impossible.

As for Hope and those artificial satellites in orbit, Silver Mist should not have detected them, or rather, there was no mechanism to trigger Silver Mist to initiate mining.

Otherwise, the Silver Mist would have already appeared by the time the Hope arrived here.

Yue Yuan had already connected this to the question when Yu Nanfeng said that Silver Mist was a miner. This is why, upon seeing the ferocious Silver Mist, he did not immediately order the Hope to escape from the planet.

Regardless of the circumstances, we must leave this place.

There is such a terrifying existence on Ross 154-4 that it is completely impossible for humans to obtain any resources from it.

As for the idea of sending unmanned probes to the ground to gather intelligence or dispatching rescue teams to search for possible survivors, Yue Yuan not only didn't want to, but he didn't even dare to think about it.

He wouldn't risk the lives of all humanity to make a fool of himself.

Satellite images do not show whether all the landing crew members have perished, but even if some survived, Yue Yuan would not send anyone to rescue them.

Call him heartless or ruthless if you will.

Reason told him he shouldn't do that, and that he should leave this planet now, as far away as possible.

If the Hope hadn't lost its long-distance sailing capability, he would have even wanted to set off immediately for another interstellar voyage, just to get away from this terrifying planet.

Yes, terrifying.

Several transport ships were gone in an instant. If it were the Hope, how long could it hold out? No, not how long it could hold out, but certain death.

Yue Yuan couldn't imagine what weapons humans could use to destroy the Silver Mist.

Even if the 200-megaton hydrogen bomb currently under construction is completed, Yue Yuan will not use it to detonate it immediately. At least until humanity is fully capable of escaping this Star System, he would not dare to disturb that cloud of Silver Mist even if he had ten thousand lives.

Because at this stage, nothing is more important than allowing humanity to rest and recuperate.

"Let's go. Have all personnel outside return to the Hope within seven days. We're going to Ross 154-7." Yue Yuan slowly sat down in the captain's seat, his expression indifferent.

"Leave now?" Man Yuemei, the head of the Armed Forces Department who had been at the Hope Command Center, frowned and looked at Yue Yuan, asking, "Commander Yue, what about the Callisto Warship? What about the hydrogen bomb project? What about the Nuclear Fusion project?"

"Stop everything. Take away everything that can be reused, and start over on planet Ross 154-7." Yue Yuan glanced at Man Yuemei and answered resolutely.

He knew that such a decision would waste a lot of time for humanity, perhaps ten or twenty years, but he felt that the waste was worthwhile compared to continuing to build and carry out work here under the risk of unknown dangers.

Compared to the fate of humanity, this amount of time is nothing.

After all, although humanity currently believes that the Silver Mist has not detected the Hope spacecraft in planetary orbit, no one can guarantee that it will not be detected in the future.

In fact, the people at the previous landing site had already seen the true face of the Silver Mist, but because the signal could not be transmitted, the people on Hope could only judge it from the observation of optical satellites. So to this day, no one on Hope knows that the cloud of Silver Mist that blots out the sun is actually 'Silver Mist'.

However, even though he doesn't know his true identity, he doesn't mind Yue Yuan making judgments about the situation.