Earth Orbit.
Hiss... A passage opened in the belly of the Sea Wolf. A small shuttle gradually emerged from stealth and slowly entered the ship. The passage then closed, and the Sea Wolf vanished into the void once more.
Nie Yun stepped out of the shuttle and floated back to the Captain's Quarters. Just as he settled into the captain's chair, the devouring of the two alien probes happened to be nearing completion, so he immediately devoted all his attention to digesting them.
As expected, the central control cores and data storage devices of both probes had escaped that one-in-a-million chance of being destroyed by the atomic-scale cutting lines!
Analysis revealed that the probes held little data. Their owners clearly weren't foolish enough to put any classified information in two ordinary probes.
With vast computing power working on the analysis, Nie Yun soon obtained his first reward-the "Earth Civilization observation journal"!
This Earth observation journal covered quite a lot, including thirteen years of footage documenting the development and changes of Earth's major urban areas, energy release levels, major geological changes, intercepted radio communications, spacecraft trajectory records, and other intelligence.
None of this surprised Nie Yun much. It was mostly the information necessary to assess Earth Civilization's stage of development and the threat it posed.
What he hadn't expected was that, beyond this information, most of the material the probes had collected had nothing to do with Earth's technology. Instead, it concerned social sciences, humanities, art, philosophy, and... films and television?!
"Holy crap! Have these aliens been spying on Earth all this time just to watch alien soap operas?" Nie Yun was dumbfounded.
What was this? An artistic pursuit that transcended civilizations?
Then Nie Yun found a file that seemed to explain this phenomenon. Its name was-"Earth Civilization sample collection data