First Arrival

Chapter 1: 1.01 Arrival

"Some people will always emphasize certain titles to strengthen the justification for their actions, thereby covering up their efforts to weaken our necessary rights."

The flames before him grew more intense, but the pain was gradually fading.

The urgent siren of the ladder truck outside the building seemed less loud. Of course, the resentment he held in this life seemed to have dissipated as well. Perhaps that was it.

This life, sigh, how did things go so wrong? Heh.

The last sounds he heard were the chimes of a distant city clock, and a time announcement—it was 10:00 PM Eastern 8th Time Zone.

It was over, 201~

"Chirrr, chirrr..."

Wei Keng, only five years old, had just gained the ability to organize memories from his previous life.

Now, like a small ball of fluff, he squatted on the ground, using chopsticks to pick up a jet-black cicada. He extended his little finger, touching the cicada's vibrating tymbal, and fiercely grumbled, "It's been hundreds of years, and you're still chirping so annoyingly."

Youngsters know not of sorrow. Wei Keng was a reborn individual. He had experienced unpleasant things in his past life and was reborn six hundred years later, hoping to start anew in this life.

To Wei Keng, everything was new.

In the garden of this public hospital, hovering drones were spraying mist onto every flower and plant, clearing dust from their leaves. The mist, catching the sunlight, created a rainbow.

At Wei Keng's call, the drone flew down, accepted the cicada placed on it by Wei Keng's small hand, and then the drone gently placed the cicada back in the shade of a tree.

A few minutes later, hearing the cicada's chirping resume from that spot, five-year-old Wei Keng wiped his nose with his sleeve and let out a sigh, "Back to normal."

Looking back at history, five hundred years ago, an Eastern unmanned spacecraft returned with a cup of soil from the moon. This era is now known as the Near Ancient Period.

On this Azure Planet, at the End of the Second Millennium, the first Industrial Hot War paved the way for the revolution of the Internal Combustion Engine. The Second opened the prelude to the Nuclear Age, followed by one hundred and fifty years of peace. The demands of technology catalyzed the maturity of Artificial Organic Synthesis and Fusion Space Travel, further changing the habits of humans living in Surface Cities.

By the Second Century of the Second Millennium, the world continued to experience various super changes that would have been unimaginable to people of earlier eras. Technologies matured during wartime were repurposed for competition between civilizations in peacetime. Drone systems began constructing human settlements on various planets in the Solar System, and in the field of medical technology, Immortality was theoretically achieved.

[Theoretically, that is. The human brain needs to regenerate nerve cells. During this process, the adjustment of various emotional hormones makes memory and thought extremely unstable, requiring immense willpower to maintain past memories and thoughts. During such surgery, if the recipient is not careful, they might forget themselves.]

Even so, conflicts and contradictions in human production and communication still existed. New technologies would discover new fields, and these newly discovered fields represented the wealth of civilizational competition.

Thus, human conflict erupted.

This conflict occurred in 2400 and lasted for 223 days. With the Five Continents of the Human Mother Planet as the main battlefield, and the Moon, Mars, and Venus as secondary battlefields, this super war resulted in the deaths of 93.3 million human lives.

The most devastating incident occurred on August 6, 2400.

To achieve strategic destruction of the enemy's war potential on the other side, the Eye Alliance initiated a planetary-scale surface destruction plan in the West Pacific War Zone. This plan targeted the fragile plates of the Northeast Asian Island Nation. The delicate balance between the Pacific Plate and the Mongolian-Asian Plate in this region was shattered. Although the entire United Alliance had already relocated the elderly and weak populations in such forward areas and maintained various damage-resistant facilities in this old industrial zone, six million people still died or went missing.

Unlike the outcome of "previous human conflicts, where wartime applied technologies advanced rapidly, bringing development dividends to all of humanity." There were no dividends this time.

The root cause behind all conflicts and contradictions is economic issues. Whoever can use technological advancements brought by war to solve civilian economic problems will usher in the next era. However, this time, the reason was the disconnect between the actual consumption habits of various industrial nations worldwide and cutting-edge high technology.

So, after the dust settled from the Solar System's war, the world remained the same.

The most advanced quantum technology and aerospace technology, while still having room for improvement, were still some time away from practical civilian application in this era! Ordinary people's houses, the rice they ate, the mobile phone industries they used, had no connection to space drone systems.

Let alone an era of interstellar colonization! In the second millennium, the spaceship life depicted in even the hardest sci-fi had shadows of the 18th-century Great Voyage era: cramped cabins, stale air, and suspicious crew relationships! Ordinary people on Earth supported technological development for a better life, not to reminisce about hardship.

It was evident that the gap between technology and economy in this era was widening, leading to unequal distribution and marginalization of many populations, causing structural instability. Contradictions arose, and it seemed the only way to break through was through explosive conflict to save the survival of their respective ethnic groups and belief clusters, thereby rising again to promote civil convergence and further elevate technology. But on the eve of this darkness, the crisis was suddenly resolved.

Because fundamental physics had broken through!

In 2533, scientists discovered a strange response through a Neutrino Signal Emitter that penetrated the Earth's core. After five years of research, they found that within the Gravity Core Region at Earth's Core, wormhole effects could be generated through High-Energy Physics.

And even earlier, the Life Science field happened to have relevant technological reserves.

In 2455, a large team in the Medical Field identified the microscopic physical phenomena linked to the Human Consciousness Phenomenon in the human brain.

In 2478, using a specific Physics Test Field, terminally ill voluntary test subjects had their consciousness temporarily preserved within three minutes of their brain ceasing to function and were implanted into a Carbon-based Chip, maintaining their thought processes for five months.

Therefore, in 2545, the entire human scientific community focused its efforts and successfully reconstructed self-awareness in a Newborn Brain using preserved human consciousness in a Physical Field and a chip.

From then on, the foundation for Plane Travel was completed, allowing humans to explore possible physical worlds on the other side of microscopic wormholes in an Information State.

In 2587, human Spaceships mapped the cores of the Moon, Mars, Venus, and even Jupiter and Saturn, confirming that this technology could be widely applied to all celestial bodies.

The Eternal Night had ended.

From the first century of the second millennium to the sixth century, after experiencing contradictions and conflicts, humanity of this generation suddenly discovered that the future might not be the sea of stars, but a journey of exploration through the Multiverse. At the same time, people found that the civilization of the Main World was not so lonely; across numerous Parallel Universes, like reflections, there existed various signs of human activity.

Wei Keng was born in 2590.

Time: 2608 Location: Pu Hai Area 4.

After the Solar System war, high-rise buildings had been rebuilt here, but between the high-rise buildings were blue seawater channels—much like Venice of old.

Due to the seismic shock to the main Sea-Land Plates of the Solar System war, a large amount of Submarine Methane was released into the atmosphere, causing rapid global warming and the melting of the Antarctic Glacier. Once prosperous metropolises had now become Waterlogged Lands with an average water depth of two meters. However, it didn't matter; the rise in Sea Level did not mean marine life could run rampant here. Humanity's Engineering Infrastructure capabilities had turned the tables.

Humans built numerous Dam Bodies, dividing these continental shelf areas into sections. On these Freshwater Areas, they constructed Boating Cities resembling Suzhou Water Town.

This construction did not reduce humanity's range of activity. The Grid System that emerged on the land extended the Freshwater Areas to the former continental shelves. The new metropolises that emerged in the former Yellow Sea Area after the 25th century were cities bordering the ocean, while the current Pu Hai was considered inland.

Private boats weave through the city's small canals, while ten-thousand-ton ships navigate the larger ones, all guided by navigation signals from stations within the city—unmanned? Oh, that's nothing special these days, just like how videophones are no big deal in the era of smartphones, WeChat, QQ, and video calls.

Amidst this prosperity, there's naturally a large number of operating industrial zones.

After the Industrial Revolution, factories became completely automated and intelligent with the aid of information technology.

The entire factory is like how old steam locomotives with manual control levers have transformed into smart screen-based cockpit cars. Factories that once required vast office spaces are now compact integrated production parks controlled by electronic modules.

During the Second Industrial Revolution, an industrial zone would occupy hundreds of hectares, including roads, parks, and water and electricity facilities. Now, on three hectares of land, extending four hundred meters upwards and six hundred meters downwards, a dense skyscraper is packed with all sorts of machinery. Mechanical centipedes with cameras remotely control robots that climb through pipes, acting as substitutes for workers during inspections.

Alright, there's also a batch of floating little bee robots, entering and exiting this factory. These are full-sensor mechanical substitutes controlled by interns.

As a small drone zipped into the factory.

The perspective shifted to a school residential area about fifteen kilometers away.

"Welcome to Tenglong No. 12 Factory. The industrial projects here are responsible for producing internal combustion engine equipment from No. 1 to No. 123, and industrial foundation of Class 234. Software engineers, please press 1. Professional workers, please press 2..."

"6, 6, 6, I am 6..."

Several kilometers away, Wei Keng, in a skyscraper apartment, lay in his cockpit, frantically tapping the screen.

As an engineering postgraduate, Wei Keng's studies were very reclusive.

This process of logging into the factory for study was personally led and explained by his mentor ten days ago. However, since they could log in remotely anytime, most students skipped it, thinking "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow."

On the last day, Wei Keng finally woke up from his deep slumber and went online to frantically review, preparing for the qualifying exam.

"Welcome, student Wei Keng. Your mentor has left you a message."

Wei Keng tapped the screen, and his mentor's newspaper face appeared: "You are among the last batch of students to log into the review system. I apologize, but I will pay close attention to your grade. If you score below 80 on the exam, you will fail this course."

Wei Keng: "Damn it, why didn't you say so earlier? You just had to set a trap at the last minute."

While muttering, he swept the scraps of paper on his desk aside.

Regardless of his previous life, Wei Keng was quite satisfied with this one. His only regret was not communicating much with his parents before becoming an orphan.

Wei Keng's parents were among the last group of personnel voluntarily conscripted by the Zhonglian Government's Space-time exploration department to explore sub-dimensions.

In the space fantasy of the 21st Century, it was common to talk about alien life on some planet. But in reality, most planets in the universe that might harbor life are home to weaklings that haven't even evolved multicellular life.

However, in the sub-dimensions, there exist various situations that seem to be reflections of the Main World's civilization—these planets with life, intelligence, and even civilization are extremely dangerous.

Just as early space exploration conscripted military pilots, Wei Keng's father was a specially selected consciousness activator responsible for exploring dangerous planes. Wei Keng's mother was the accompanying monitoring pod supervisor, responsible for determining the stability of physical phenomena at the traversal node.

Three years ago, for some unknown reason, they lost contact in space. It was said that his father was ambushed by natives of the target plane who possessed advanced intelligent technology, and his mother, along with the relay monitoring information pod, also perished.

Of course, the Main World was not to be trifled with. Upon confirming that the plane posed a threat to the Main World's civilizational exploration, the spacetime traversal department quickly dispatched a large number of personnel to conduct a sweep of the plane.

This was also considered a form of closure for the family members.

As a family member of a fallen one from an official exploration team, Wei Keng naturally received preferential educational rights and was admitted into the ranks of contemporary engineering graduate students.

In this peaceful prosperous age, the average compulsory education reached 18 years (university student), and pursuing a master's degree was also very common, like a four-legged toad.

Although modern high technology could be operated by very few people, and the rest could live on welfare, simply living on welfare would lead to a lack of knowledge among the youth, causing intellectual decline. For example, chasing idols in fan circles or engaging in endless online arguments was detrimental to the competition between civilization groups, so everyone was brought back to school.

To complete eighteen years of compulsory education, constantly staring at scores left no time for shouting on the communication platform, nor for posting brainless remarks about "living dolls" manufactured by idol factories.

As someone with past life wisdom, Wei Keng possessed intelligence in his youth, but as time passed, he gradually became of mediocre talent.

Wei Keng: "I don't have much ambition. This is fine, just like this."

Wei Keng's fingers tapped on the holographic projection of the exam questions, and he began memorizing them.

He still needed to accumulate academic credits.