(Thanks to Son of the Round Clam, Pete Griffin, for the reward bonus chapter, 36/50)
By this time, Terra's oceans had dried up. Every mountain on the surface had been flattened, every valley filled in. Only one type of terrain was allowed to exist: plains.
Across these endless great plains, the Imperium of Man had built Hive Cities thousands of meters into the sky and excavated Lower Hives thousands of meters underground.
Looking down from high above, no one would have recognized this as Earth. Layer upon layer of Hive Cities completely covered the surface, without even a crack left exposed.
Having run into setbacks, Li Qinwu planned to visit his home before leaving Terra. It was the old Chinese attachment to one's homeland.
Li Qinwu felt fortunate. When he had first learned to use a smartphone, he had used Amap to locate his home's exact coordinates.
Back then, he had memorized that string of coordinate data. That string belonged to his home.
Now, he followed those coordinates to search for it. Though everything had changed beyond recognition, and who knew what his home had become, if he followed the latitude and longitude lines until they overlapped with his home's coordinates on the map, it could barely count as going home.
Flying from the Himalayas to the Asian Plains, it took more than an hour to reach the location of Li Qinwu's home. After all, it was over two thousand kilometers away.
The grav-car was extremely fast as well. It covered more than two thousand kilometers in under an hour, and this was only a civilian vehicle. A military version would have been even faster.
Yet within humanity's armed forces, this kind of gravity engine seemed rarely used in weapons. Perhaps it was difficult to manufacture.
Otherwise, if human fighter