Earth, Liu Zhipeng's office.
Centuries had passed, yet the furnishings in this office remained unchanged. Liu Zhipeng, seated in the executive chair, still looked like a young man in his twenties. For someone who had mastered the underlying laws of the universe, maintaining an immortal body was as natural as breathing.
Liu Zhipeng sat behind the broad desk, his fingertips tapping out a gentle rhythm on its surface. The office was silent save for the faint white noise of the air circulation system. On the holographic screen before him, a long stream of one-way encrypted data from thousands of light-years away scrolled past.
It was Jian Ya's regular report. To eliminate any chance of being tracked by Earth's all-pervasive Super AIs, this method of communication was exceedingly primitive and strictly one-way. Much like the messages in bottles ancient people had cast into the sea, it carried news of the distant colony to Liu Zhipeng across vast stretches of time and the cold ocean of stars.
"Boss, if you can see this report, that means we haven't been eaten by some weird thing out in the universe yet." Jian Ya's words flickered across the screen, tinged with irreverence and barely concealed pride.
Had the figures in the report been shown to an executive from any of Earth's megacorporations, they would probably have been ridiculed mercilessly. The colony was developing at a snail's pace.
Liu Zhipeng had issued an absolute order: the colony's Master Control AIs were to be confined strictly to an "assistance" role, never permitted to make decisions independently.
Yet as Liu Zhipeng watched those slowly rising industrial indices, a genuine smile curled his lips.
Behind the cold data, he saw the hot blood that human civilization had lacked for so long. Jian Ya complained in his report about