A group of builders whose minds held nothing but welding techniques passed down through generations, and a group of gatherers who had spent generation after generation toiling like oxen and horses in the depths of bottomless, shadowy mines—trying to survive in the cold, suffocating, dark, perilous, lifeless depths of space was simply an impossible task.
The unfinished spaceship was named the Hope by its passengers, who had no tickets.
But when the Hope set sail, not even the eyes of the base leader who had made the decision—the first captain—held the slightest shred of hope.
Driven only by the instinct to survive, they wanted to get as far away as possible from their blazing Homeworld system.
Just as the first fish to crawl ashore had possessed no grand ambitions and had no idea they were about to embark upon the road to conquering an entire planet.
They had merely been pitiful creatures defeated in the fierce competition of the ocean, forced to flee far away.
Sure enough, during its first hundred years, the unfinished, battered, stumbling Hope encountered dozens of catastrophic disasters. It lost more than half its population and resources, nearly becoming an iron coffin drifting through the frigid universe.
Even though they possessed the ability to leap instantaneously between star systems.
Every system they reached was either deathly still or fraught with danger at every step.
And activating the Transmigration Engine, which had yet to be fully repaired, consumed immense quantities of matter and energy.
Most of the time, the Hope's passengers could only shuttle back and forth among planets filled with storms and radiation, gathering fuel to keep their civilization moving forward at the cost of their lives.
The silver lining amid misfortune was that when the Turan Civilization's last hope was flickering like a candle in