Chapter 1437 — Suddenly, All at Once

In the Thorin command hall, Beiyila watched the holographic projection before her with a face utterly devoid of expression, while her mind spread throughout the entire facility—nothing that happened here, not a single message flowing through the communication channels, could escape her sight.

On the face of this mimetic avatar, almost no discernible expression could be seen. Yet Beiyila knew her own mood at this moment was anything but calm—conversing with a civilization utterly alien, one that even dwelled upon another planet, was an experience without precedent. The very thought of what historical processes this conversation across the sea of stars was setting in motion made her feel every one of her leaves trembling faintly upon the treetops.

Those watching the situation unfold here through the remote network must surely feel the same.

"New text compiled, transcoding complete, transmitting to Antawen." "Antawen confirms receipt, text sent, awaiting their response."

Reports came from the command seat in the hall, while Beiyila still stood quietly in her place, watching the holographic projection before her with the serene gaze of a plant. She saw a line of faintly glowing text emerge upon the projection:

Star Decoder: "If our cooperation should fail to proceed smoothly, what would you do? Do you have some kind of... contingency plan to resolve this observation point problem four light-years away? This question is purely out of curiosity."

After this came a blank static far longer than the previous waiting period, as though the "Nuoyi" were deliberating how to answer—across the vast starry sea of at least four light-years, she could not see what was happening "on the other side," but she could not help imagining, imagining in what manner those "aliens" were conducting this conversation before her very eyes...

Had they, too, gathered many expert teams like the Thorin command center? Would they also debate fiercely and try to guess at and interpret this people on the other side of the starry sea who called themselves the "Star Covenant League"? Would they, too, feel joy and tension like the mortals of this planet?

Was Nuoyi society... being stirred into waves by this suddenly established communication? Were their leaders also watching this conversation across time and space?

Beiyila slowly raised her head, yet her "gaze" pierced through the scores of meters of roof above, the wooden structures, and the layer upon layer of leaves. From the perspective of a giant tree, the boundless sky hung low like a vast curtain over her perception—yet even this seemingly boundless sky was in truth nothing more than an inconsequential atmospheric layer upon the surface of this planet. Beyond this atmosphere lay a starry expanse so vast it exceeded the imaginative capacity of ordinary people—

Four light-years—a scale that made all the world's strife, gain and loss, life and death, parting and sorrow seem instantly insignificant. As early as the Gondor era, the mages had already grasped the concept of the speed of light, yet even until Gondor's destruction, the "light-year" remained confined to a "conceptual unit of measurement"—it was so despairing that the people of that time could not even imagine what manner of travel might allow a journey to unfold upon such a scale. And so this thing beyond comprehension was ultimately relegated, like other such matters, to "the power of gods alone"...

Thinking about it now, the wretched mental state of the gods upon this planet today was probably not a little influenced by these things so haphazardly categorized as "miracles"... Once, ignorant mortals knew only to press forward with heads bowed, yet when they encountered problems truly beyond explanation, they always irresponsibly dumped them upon the gods. But what could the gods do? They did not understand either—so they could only go mad...

Were it not for the Theocratic Council, were it not for the increasing revelations in recent years regarding the mechanisms of divine operation, this blindness would sooner or later have brought about an apocalypse no less terrible than the magic tide.

A faint humming sound suddenly interrupted Beiyila's somewhat scattered thoughts. She immediately looked toward the central holographic projection and saw a line of text, being continuously translated into the common tongue, slowly emerging upon the screen—

Nuoyi: "Yes, we have a contingency plan—or rather, your response is what constitutes an unexpected development for us. From the very beginning, we formulated our self-rescue plan on the premise that 'no other intelligent civilization within the anticipated range could provide assistance.'

"Many, many years ago, we dispatched 'Observers' outward. The Observers were to travel to the nearest measurement point meeting the criteria to our planet and transmit the magic tide readings there back to our homeworld...

"To this day, the Observer has been trekking through space for one hundred and twenty-six years, yet this long journey of four light-years has still not reached its destination... It has already entered its deceleration procedure, but remains some distance from the designated observation point."

The text upon the holographic projection ceased its flickering, and the entire hall had suddenly fallen into an eerie silence. Beiyila realized a certain fact revealed behind these words, and it made her eyes widen involuntarily.

The next second, she heard Gao Song's voice suddenly come through the communication device: "They are capable of spaceflight—this civilization has already passed its 'coming of age.' Begin questioning immediately."

Far away in the Southern Regions, Gao Yang had by now risen from his chair. Even Amber beside him was staring wide-eyed at the magic-net terminal on the desk. When the "Nuoyi" spoke of their "original plan" that had been in execution for one hundred and twenty-six years before today's communication was even established, what struck Gao Yang most profoundly was the very fact that they could undertake interstellar travel!

To step forth from one's planet and enter the cosmos—upon the planet where the Loren Continent lay, this act signified a mortal civilization's complete casting off of the gods' shackles and its advance into adulthood. And according to the Theocratic Council's research into the laws of divine operation and its understanding of every season of intelligent species that had existed in this planet's history, this process was clearly no special case.

So long as other planets also followed the same cosmic laws as Loren, so long as the thought processes of other intelligent peoples were not so deviant as to be utterly incomprehensible to the races of Loren, then even in alien lands several light-years or hundreds of light-years away, the "aliens" would surely undergo this same process of "primitive worship—birth of gods—two-way shackles—advance into adulthood," and at the final stage of this process would face the binary choice between "failed defiance" and "civilizational survival."

This was no simple process. The dragons of Tarrond had already proven to the world, through their grim present circumstances, the price to be paid for a single misstep along this path. But the Theocratic Council's experts believed that paths of lower cost and greater ease existed—so long as one took the correct road early in the struggle to break free of the shackles, then crossing the coming-of-age rite at a relatively low cost was not difficult to imagine. Only, upon this planet, no such instance seemed ever to have occurred, and the nations of the Alliance could only grope their way forward along this road.