[Earth].
"Professor, the Planetary Mining Project has been completed successfully."
An electronic synthesized voice rang out in the laboratory, interrupting Lü Yongchang as he bent over his notes.
"It's finished already..." Lü Yongchang raised his head and glanced at the holographic clock on the wall, a faint trace of bewilderment in his eyes. "That was pretty fast."
"What about Kepler-452c? Has it been blown up?"
"Yes. There are currently only five planets left in the Kepler-452 Stellar System," Zero promptly replied, displaying footage of Kepler-452c's explosion on the holographic projection.
"How is the Gravity Compensation Ship performing?" Lü Yongchang asked Zero as he walked toward the nearby porthole.
As a member of the stellar system, Kepler-452c's abrupt disappearance would inevitably affect the motion of the other celestial bodies within it.
When that happened, even humanity's home, Kepler-452b, might run into considerable "trouble."
For human civilization at its current stage, completely eliminating that influence was almost impossible.
But minimizing those negative effects was within its capabilities.
The Gravity Compensation Ship had been built for precisely that purpose.
With several large Gravitational Field Generators, it could produce a gravitational field comparable in strength to Kepler-452c's.
It only needed to take Kepler-452c's place on its original orbit to reduce or even eliminate most of the negative effects caused by gravitational disturbances.
"It is operating normally," Zero replied from behind him. "No anomalies in the motion of celestial bodies within the stellar system have been detected so far."
Lü Yongchang nodded gently, braced both hands on the edge of the porthole, and looked toward where Kepler-452c had once been.
Scattered points of red and purple light flickered in the darkness of space.
They were the mingled glow of molten iron and high-energy lasers.
This was the final declaration to the universe of a planet