Encrypted communications-
"This is Water Blue Star, the External Space Station Monitoring Department of the Moon Development Zone Military Control Base..."
"The Floating Star Observation Satellite System of Water Blue Star's orbital defense network reports a large number of meteorites in the space surrounding Orange Star, the fourth planet of the solar system..."
"...The source of the meteorite swarm cannot be traced..."
"Radio interference detected. The Longbridge Communications Satellite Network (communications relay satellites deployed in space by the research spacecraft) has lost contact with the Orange Star base..."
"Tracking Tianhe 1. The research spacecraft's current position..."
"Distance remaining to Orange Star... Mission continuing... Awaiting awakening..."
"Floating Star Observation Satellite System, maintain observation..."
"The Galaxy Intelligent Management System predicts that the meteorite swarm will be drawn in by Orange Star's gravity... It poses no threat to Water Blue Star itself. Alert level for this anomaly reduced..."
"Floating Star Defense System, continue intensified scans within the solar system. Over."
Orange light illuminated an abandoned hall, its source a huge screen riddled with cracks.
The image on the cracked screen showed a world of windblown red sand, without a single plant or bird in sight.
Barren plains stretched into barren hills, disappearing into the red haze.
The broken screen bathed the hall in dim light, while a breach in the right-hand wall let in a little white light. A breeze carrying pale red dust quietly slipped inside.
Red sand covered the hall's floor, partially burying twisted metal fragments. Collapsed storage racks were coated in dust, and all kinds of items used by humans lay scattered across the red ground.
On the other side, sixteen chairs stood silently around a reddish tabletop. A thick layer of dust covered both the table and its ceramic cups...
A camera above the hall's enormous screen glowed with a red indicator light. Beneath the screen stood a two-meter-long console.
A short-haired man sat in the chair before the console, slumped motionlessly over it in pink clothes. In truth, dust had merely stained his clothing that color.
The breeze brushed his dust-covered hair. The exposed half of his face was nothing but purplish-black, shriveled skin stretched over bone.
He had clearly been dead for a long time.
Inside the ruined room, the image on the shattered screen changed again.
Surveillance camera timestamp: February 5, 2054, 14:56:01
The seconds advanced rapidly.
A somewhat narrow white corridor could just barely be made out on the screen.
"This is the Orange Star base. We have come under an unknown attack. The base structures are severely damaged. We urgently need rescue! We urgently need rescue!"
A man's voice rang out, his rapid, heavy breathing echoing inside his fully sealed face mask.
Huff-huff-like a heavy ventilator, but with a hurried, irregular rhythm.
A red-and-yellow figure suddenly appeared in the corridor, facing away from the camera. The person wore a fully sealed protective suit with an integrated backpack-like bulge on its back and an additional small rectangular box mounted on a flexible sliding track behind the waist.
It looked much lighter than the spacesuits from his previous life.
The suited man hunched over, shuffling with his back against the corridor wall as he dragged another person with both hands. Bright red blood smeared across a broad stretch of floor.
Blood kept gushing from the mangled stumps of two thighs, staining the ground red. Makeshift bandages could do nothing against such extensive severed tissue.
Clearly, the injured person was beyond saving...
The image switched-
Surveillance camera timestamp: February 5, 2054, 14:55:58
The time kept ticking.
A clean white hall, neat and orderly.
Clean white ceramic cups sat on a long white table large enough to seat sixteen people, with matching white-backed chairs arranged neatly around it.
A young man sat at the console beneath the large screen.
From the camera angle overhead, his arms could be seen extending from long white sleeves, his nimble fingers dancing over the soft keycaps.
Suddenly, the image shook. The man bounced upward as though he had been sitting on the floor, and everything placed around the edges of the hall toppled over.
Shocked, the man braced himself against the console and looked around. With a deafening bang, one corner of the room tore open, and thick red mist instantly engulfed the hall.
Oxygen and air were rapidly escaping.
The camera lost sight of him, but amid the red haze, the man gritted his teeth and turned back to the console, his hands moving even faster.
Gradually, suffocation left him limp over the console-
The screen went black in an instant.
A moment later, the large screen lit up again, as though an invisible pair of hands were operating it.
One rectangular image after another filled the screen. Thirty-five feeds formed a vast chronicle of planetary exploration.
Robotic vehicles could be seen transporting supplies, along with a rectangular silver-white aircraft kicking up red dust as it landed, and a young woman in a white lab coat growing plants in a biological research lab...
"We've finally reached Orange Star..."
"So this is Orange Star. It's so dry..."
"There's solid water (ice) underground here..."
"Next, we'll begin construction..."
"...For the Alliance..."
"For the Alliance."
"..."
Amid the jumble of voices, phrases such as base construction, geological sampling, and biological research could barely be heard.
The thirty-five feeds displayed the ambitions of this interstellar research team, as well as the base's gradual growth.
They came from the Azure Planet River Region Alliance. Advances in science and technology had enabled human civilization to begin venturing into space.
Humanity turned its gaze toward the sky, toward the universe beyond, toward its planet's neighbor.
Orange Star.
The fourth planetary orbit in the star system.
It was a red planet with a thin atmosphere and no life. Its surface soil contained vast quantities of minerals, giving the planet its orange-red appearance.
Humanity had completed its first deep-space transport of both crew and cargo and begun constructing its first truly extraterrestrial experimental base. Construction had taken three months and twenty-seven days.
Orange Star base, area: 1,765 square meters.
Research personnel: 16.
It was divided into nine sections, including food storage, field exploration, automated maintenance, scientific research, and the main control center.
But the logs showed that two days earlier, a natural disaster had struck the Orange Star base.
Meteorites had descended from the sky, falling as the shooting stars girls loved so much.
"Well, shit..."
A man's voice echoed through the hall as the screen changed to a backdrop of vast orange wasteland.
A long, indistinct strip of pixelation writhed suggestively across the image, like a fully censored clip of a certain kind.
"...What a lousy script!"
"A godforsaken alien planet."
"What the fuck am I supposed to do here?!"
The pixelated strip twisted.
Smack!
The room fell dark.
Only after a long while did the screen light up, then plunge into darkness again.
"I'm screwed. Low-battery warning... Am I going to die?!"
The man's voice was full of anxiety. The low power reserves snapped him out of his one-man performance.
The transmigration he had looked forward to all his life had finally arrived!
It was no less exciting than winning ten million in the lottery!
It was no less exciting than being abducted by aliens and transformed into a superhuman!
But transmigrating into a computer...
This was nothing like the transmigration he had imagined!
After struggling for ages, Luo Qi still couldn't leave the server, but the advantages of becoming a computer had already begun to show.
His multidimensional reasoning was exceptionally clear. Before, he couldn't even work out ten-digit multiplication by counting on his fingers. Now, he could multiply two thousand-digit numbers.
All kinds of mind-bending mathematical formulas were no longer constrained by his individual memory. As long as he recalled them, he could easily understand them and work out the answers.
How wonderful. With enough electricity and production capacity, he could achieve immortality simply by constantly replacing his hardware!
"Looks like I'm being forced into an interstellar opening!"
Luo Qi secretly burst into wild laughter, his face twisted into a savage grin-if he had possessed a face.
Never forget! For transmigrators from Earth, there was that sweet, irresistible cheat!
Luo Qi said, "System?"
Crows...
Luo Qi asked skeptically, "System?"
Even the crows were gone. Only awkwardness remained...
"System... are you there?"
"Fuck you! What is this garbage? Get out here, you damned author! Where's the system that was supposed to come with transmigration?!"
The Grim Reaper was already hefting the merciless club called reality.
The base's stored power had dropped to five percent. Fortunately, its batteries lasted remarkably well, unlike phones back on Earth, which would show five percent remaining, only to shut down the next time you glanced down.
The feedback data told Luo Qi plainly that if he shut off all additional power consumption-in other words, entered sleep mode-
If he did nothing but wait for death, the remaining power would let him cling to life for another half month before accompanying the Grim Reaper to the underworld.
"Could there be some condition I need to fulfill before I can activate the cheat system?"
Luo Qi still wasn't quite ready to give up. Right now, he was merely an "intelligent program" inside a server cluster, completely cut off from the world!
Besides, systems were simply too tempting. They could pull off all kinds of incomprehensible tricks and hand out irresistible rewards.
In the silence, the power drained away bit by bit. Well, it was dropping very slowly. At the current low-power setting, he was estimated to have another twenty-eight hours.
Amid that silence, Luo Qi promptly abandoned the bullshit system and started down the path of saving himself.
A great man had once said that we must use our own hands to create the lives we wanted.
But he didn't even have hands. Depressed though he was, Luo Qi grew serious and began familiarizing himself with his new body.
The physical sensations were bizarre.
Signal wires, circuits, cameras, and the base's various sensors all fed digital signals back to Luo Qi.
These digital electrical signals were, in essence, the amplitude and frequency of electricity. Their frequencies determined the meaning the server assigned to them.
For instance, a peak represented one, while no peak represented zero, and so on. Electrical signals carried information through wired circuits.
Radio waves, on the other hand, were wireless signals. The Wi-Fi everyone loved freeloading on, radar, and orbital satellite communications all used radio waves.
"This feeling... Why am I stuck in rational, post-nut clarity mode...?"
Luo Qi was dumbfounded. He had lost the stimulation provided by bodily hormones. Even uncensored, ultra-high-definition beauties with every detail on display held no appeal.
Luo Qi sent a command downstream, ordering the power switch to open, and electricity began flowing.
Lights came on in the hall. Power then spread throughout the ruined base, illuminating every light panel that still worked.
The many sensors amid the ruins began feeding back electrical signals.
Before you continue