Hollow

Hao Ren considered himself far-sighted—well, perhaps not particularly wise, but at least far-sighted.

The last time he left the Dream Plane, he had made some arrangements on a whim. He certainly hadn't expected those arrangements to one day be used to find people. At the time, he had been exploring the starry sky of the Dream Plane and preparing a star map for future operations, so he had ordered the Giant Turtle Rock Platform to release a batch of self-replicating probes. These probes could continuously duplicate themselves as needed and network their thoughts through faster-than-light antennas. They planned the optimal exploration routes on their own, advanced continually into the depths of space, charted every celestial body they encountered along the way, and built a small observation station at regular intervals to maintain this advanced unmanned-drone network.

The probes operated by first dispatching a batch of high-speed units to rapidly scan the starry sky, then sending out high-precision units to gradually fill in the blank areas within the scanned regions. This allowed Hao Ren to grasp the distribution of celestial bodies across vast areas of the Dream Plane in the shortest possible time.

Clearly, after the drone swarm had been operating for a while, the first feedback to arrive was a set of rough star maps. They only contained data on the distribution of major celestial bodies within a certain range. Determining whether those celestial bodies showed signs of life was far more difficult, requiring subsequent slow probes to conduct precise observations. So far, the drone swarm Hao Ren had released was still carrying out preliminary work such as sketching maps and had not yet reached the stage of detecting life. Moreover, it had only sent back its first star map a few days ago. He hadn't expected it to come