What Lu Zhou had not expected was that the Valentine's Day gift he had put so much thought into, something so romantic and meaningful, would actually be copied by those investment banks on Wall Street.
And in just a few days, the star systems around the Solar System had practically all been reserved.
The most absurd part was that all sixty-eight K-type main-sequence stars within twenty light-years had already been claimed. Some investment banks had even set their sights on red dwarfs and blue giants.
In a sense, that was not entirely impossible.
As long as one could endure the raging solar winds and radiation tens of thousands of times stronger than that of the Solar System, red dwarfs and blue giants could theoretically still be inhabited.
It was just that life there probably would not be very comfortable.
Besides that, some people with a flair for entertainment treated obtaining citizenship certificates and land on alien planets as a kind of postmodern "fashion." Though none of it was legally recognized, ten US Dollars was no more than the price of a pack of cigarettes to many people.
What surprised Lu Zhou, however, was that some people had actually taken it seriously. One person had even spent a million US Dollars on land on a potentially habitable planet near Proxima Centauri that might not even exist.
When Lu Zhou heard about it from Xiao Tong, his mouth hung open in shock for quite a while.
"And then?"
Setting down his chopsticks, Lu Zhou could not help asking, "He just... paid money to add a string of zeroes to a piece of scrap paper?"
"Not exactly."
Sitting across from him, Xiao Tong teased, "Given the enormous investment amount, the general manager and deputy general manager of the Proxima Centauri Colonization Foundation personally