It was so enormous that the Sun beside it looked like an orange cue ball forgotten in the corner of a billiards table.
Its surface was an absolutely smooth plane, yet it reflected nothing, and not a single seam could be seen.
Such a colossal celestial body had no effect whatsoever on the surrounding space-time.
Even more astonishingly, at the center of this planet, a star just as enormous was imprisoned.
That star's energy was perfectly contained within, powering this massive planet.
Without a doubt, this was a Dyson sphere—
A construct that existed only in humanity's imagination—
The next moment, an undetectable scanning wave rippled out from the Dyson sphere's surface. Like ripples raised by a stone tossed into a pond, it swept across the entire Solar System in an instant.
It passed through Neptune's frigid methane atmosphere, brushed over Saturn's magnificent rings, and did not linger for even a moment upon Jupiter's Great Red Spot.
At last, it penetrated Earth's thin ionosphere.
On Earth, neither people nor monitoring devices detected anything unusual.
Humanity knew nothing of it.
Yet in that single instant, every piece of information about Earth was captured by the Dyson sphere.
Then, a voice rang out in Zhang Qi's consciousness.
It came neither through sound waves nor electromagnetic waves, but through a more direct transmission of information at the level of fundamental particles.
"Greetings, unknown lifeform."
At first, the voice was chaotic, like hundreds of millions of broadcasts on different frequencies sounding at once—English, Chinese, Latin, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, even the rhythm of Neanderthals striking stones—
Every language and every medium of information that had ever existed on Earth played simultaneously in that instant, before collapsing within the next Planck moment into a single, emotionless frequency.
"I am Zeroer."
So that was it—
Hearing the