Without a doubt... before long, another strange development was reported from the colony Xi Yan had deliberately left alone.
Fresh news came from the abandoned districts discovered earlier. Local government statistics showed that many additional colonists had suddenly appeared there.
But this might simply have been a statistical error. After all, every one of those colonists possessed a valid citizen ID, and no one had reported seeing any unfamiliar newcomers.
Perhaps the birth rate there was extraordinarily high, or perhaps... there was some other reason. Whatever the case, its population growth far exceeded the Empire's expectations.
But the Empire's adviser, the virtual life-form Beta, rejected this argument. He stressed that there could be no fault in the Empire's statistical equipment and insisted that the problems lay with the planet itself.
Xi Yan naturally knew what was going on. Or rather, he knew that all of this was real: large numbers of people had indeed appeared abruptly on that colony, with no corresponding memories.
Before long, more news came from the abandoned city districts discovered earlier.
The number of local colonists continued to climb. The statistics department had recently discovered numerous anomalies in its records-families that should not have existed, birth rates that defied all explanation, and so on.
Either residents of some unknown colony had secretly migrated there, or colonists were deliberately tampering with the records to mislead the Empire.
According to the description of the Horizon Signal event chain, the planet would subsequently meet one of two outcomes.
In the first, as with the previous United Nations of Earth colony, the colony's entire population would be bound by the Time Worm's burdensome love and vanish.
In the second, after a whole series of anomalous events, it would simply end.
Immediately afterward, a new report arrived from the local planetary