It was now 8:30 in the morning in the Ruins World—of course, that time had been converted. People on this planet were not used to a twenty-four-hour system, but Older Sister and the others unanimously agreed that a thirty-hour day was simply too much of a headache, so we converted the local time into Earth standard time.
Under normal circumstances, daylight in the Ruins World began at six in the morning. Every dawn, the timekeeping center of the "Great City" broadcast the standard time across the entire Ruins World, and then the Sun Furnace maintenance workers restarted the fusion reactors above every planet. Those reactors, which had operated at low power all night, needed thirty minutes to fully recover their output. By six-thirty, bright "sunlight" would spread over the land, and a new day in the Ruins World would begin.
But that was under normal circumstances.
Today, the Ruins World had not welcomed dawn—though that was not entirely accurate. The suns elsewhere had started normally, even if they were a few minutes late. Strictly speaking, only the Northern Hemisphere of the ruined planet beneath our feet had yet to see daylight. Of course, "Northern Hemisphere" was also an artificial concept added for convenience. None of the celestial bodies in this space had orbital paths or stable magnetic fields, making it extremely difficult to divide them into east, south, west, and north. To make it easier to standardize the intelligence gathered by scouts from these ruined planets, we had adopted Qian Qian's "simple directional calibration method": throwing shoes. After losing three pairs in a row, Qian Qian decided that the place we were in was probably the Northern Hemisphere...
Everything remained shrouded in dense darkness. A dim red halo hung in the sky, like an underpowered tungsten lamp, just as I