Lonely Ruler

Next.

The Yang Clan began vigorously developing a system of independent families.

The original Hunting Team was renamed the Guardian Army to protect the clan and prevent foreign enemies from invading.

The clan members began farming and hunting on their own.

Time truly seemed to fly by in the blink of an eye.

Year after year.

Thirty years passed silently, like grains of sand slipping through one's fingers.

The mountaintop.

Yang Yu stood atop the mountain, looking down at the plains below, where cooking smoke curled upward. The Yang Clan had already developed into a large village with a population of over a thousand.

In this era.

There were no unnecessary forms of entertainment, so many of the young people in the clan could only spend their nights having children.

That was the main reason the Yang Clan's population developed so rapidly.

"Is this what you wanted?"

Yang Yu looked at the Yang Clan below, filled with curling cooking smoke, laughter, and cheerful voices. Gritting his teeth, he said, "If I offended you somehow, you could have just told me. You could even have killed me, and I wouldn't have minded. But why do you have to torment me like this?"

He had watched his own wife die. He had watched Feng, Yun, Huo, Lie, and the others, who had hunted and trained alongside him, grow old and die. Now, even his only daughter had been buried by his own hands in that cold earth.

The clan had indeed grown stronger, but his relatives and friends had all been leaving him one by one.

It was a kind of pain that words could not describe.

"Host, you have not offended me."

"I have no intention of targeting you, either."

"If you want to become the leader of a civilization and lead it from weakness to the stars and the universe, then you must bear loneliness, learn to be lonely, adapt to loneliness, and finally become loneliness itself."

Xingchen slowly appeared before Yang Yu and said, "If you cannot even endure loneliness, how can you hope to nurture a civilization? The leaders of civilizations have always been lonely rulers. If you cannot endure it, you can kill yourself. I will not stop you. The starry sky has no need for the weak."

Yang Yu glared at Xingchen through gritted teeth, but after hearing her words, he fell silent.

Should he abandon the clan he had now?

He could not.

That was the fruit of his and Lin Er's efforts.

If he abandoned it, how could he face Lin Er?

"Will I ever be able to see her again?"

Yang Yu composed himself and asked the Xingchen system before him.

Speaking with the Xingchen system felt just like speaking with a living person.

"If your civilization reaches the stage where it can reverse spacetime, you will be able to pull her out of the river of history."

Xingchen immediately replied to Yang Yu.

She was genuinely afraid that he would be unable to endure it and commit suicide.

That would really be game over.

So she had to draw him a tempting promise first.

"Reverse spacetime?"

Yang Yu looked at her in confusion and said, "Can spacetime really be reversed? Can you do it?"

After all, reversing spacetime was far too distant for him.

Not to mention this era—even the twenty-second century had little understanding of spacetime, let alone the ability to travel through it.

"Spacetime is merely something that low-sequence lifeforms cannot understand."

"With our empire's technology, any ordinary citizen can reverse spacetime."

"But if you reverse spacetime, you must be prepared to receive a life sentence more terrifying than death."

Xingchen said.

"Even ordinary citizens can reverse spacetime?" Yang Yu stared at Xingchen in shock. "Wasn't Civilization Rise just a game made by those scoundrels who gathered the giants of the gaming industry? The Star Empire is fictional, too..."

As he spoke, Yang Yu slowly shut his mouth.

If the Star Empire was fictional, then the Xingchen system before him was fake as well.

"If you want to see your wife again, then work hard!"

"The industrial foundation required for the technology to reverse spacetime is extremely high."

With that.

Xingchen's figure gradually faded into the heavens and earth.

Yang Yu stared at the place where Xingchen had vanished and fell into deep thought.

If he wanted to see his wife and daughter again,

then he had no choice but to follow the Xingchen system's instructions and bring his civilization to the level required to reverse spacetime.

From then on.

Under Yang Yu's various policies, the Yang Clan began developing at a frantic pace.

One clan member after another began leaving the plains and heading deep into the mountains.

But very, very few of those who left ever returned.

Time flowed like sand, vanishing at an astonishing speed.

In the blink of an eye, a hundred years passed quietly.

Over those hundred years, the clan expanded at an extremely rapid rate. With their high quality of life, the average lifespan of its members finally rose to around fifty years, while the long-lived could reach sixty.

The clan's population, meanwhile, surpassed ten thousand.

Yang Yu still occupied the position of clan chief with his terrifying strength, and no one could challenge his authority.

Yang Yu had even formed a thousand-man army with an almost pathological determination. Using the territory they had possessed back then, he established a city-state and dispatched scouts to investigate the tribes surrounding his domain.

Every tribe he discovered was slaughtered by that terrifying army.

When a well-trained army armed with bronze rifles, spears, bows and arrows, and clad in bronze armor swept through primitive tribes wielding stone axes and stone spears,

could they possibly withstand it?

Obviously not.

Those tribes simply could not resist the Yang Clan's attacks.

Unable to resist, they had only two choices: destruction or submission.

As the Yang Clan waged frenzied wars against the primitive tribes, its population gradually swelled as well. Dozens or even hundreds of tribes were destroyed, and the Yang Clan had practically become the overlord of this land.

Within a thousand miles of the Yang Clan, there were no longer any other medium or large tribes capable of resisting it.

At Yang Yu's command, the Yang Clan began resting and recovering.

In the two-hundredth year since Yang Yu arrived in this world,

the Yang Clan's population surpassed fifty thousand, and Yang Yu began planning to establish a feudal dynasty.

"What do you think? What should I call the dynasty I establish?"

Yang Yu stood atop a mountain cliff with his hands behind his back, looking down at the realm he had conquered. Behind him stood more than a dozen of the clan's strongest warriors, clad in bronze armor and holding long spears. He spoke softly.

"Based on the current scan of this planet, as well as the deductions and changes concerning it, there is no doubt that this is Earth Star."

At that moment.

Xingchen's figure slowly appeared before Yang Yu, brazenly allowing the dozen or so clan warriors to see her as well. The warriors were so frightened that they dropped to one knee and lowered their heads.

Was that a god?

The clan chief was actually speaking with a god.

So the clan chief really was the son of a Heavenly God.

"Earth?" Upon hearing this, Yang Yu narrowed his eyes. A dignified air surrounded him as he said, "Then should I name the dynasty I establish Yu? Or should I call it Xia?"

Xingchen did not answer. She simply watched Yang Yu in silence, waiting for him to think it through.

"Why don't I call the dynasty I establish the Star Empire?" Yang Yu suddenly curled his lips into a smile and looked at Xingchen playfully as he spoke.

"How dare you."

Xingchen's expression changed almost imperceptibly when she heard that name.

The empire's name was not something he could use so casually.