Rebirth of the Super Battleship

Chapter 457: Deathly Silent World

“Perhaps the Guardian Civilization’s fleet has already learned the news that the capture squad was completely wiped out. I have wasted three hours here. The fleet sent to capture me may already be on the way.” As Xiao Yu fled, he pondered in secret. “I do not know what principle lies behind that detection instrument within the Guardian Civilization that can, to a certain extent, ignore the effects of a neutron star colliding with a white dwarf. What is its effective detection range?”

“However, if you want to catch me, you surely have many troublesome limitations as well.” Xiao Yu thought silently. “This kind of small starship does not have the ability to withstand such a powerful energy outburst. City-Class and Province-Class starships will also be affected to a certain extent. Presumably, this capture fleet hid in the small universe before the powerful outburst reached them, and only emerged after the burst had passed. In other words, if they want to dispatch forces to seize me now, they must repeat this process once again, and this process will inevitably consume no short amount of time.”

“I hope the three hours I wasted will not bring me misfortune.” Xiao Yu sighed slightly and continued advancing at light speed.

Xiao Yu understood very clearly how critical those three hours wasted here were. At such a time, three hours could be the interval between life and death. However, the starships of the Guardian Civilization were simply too tempting. Xiao Yu’s hope of breaking through to a Level 6 Civilization in the future and obtaining Level 6 Civilization technology rested upon these starships.

Xiao Yu had not yet fully taken control of these starships. He had only run their energy dry so that they could no longer take action. That is to say, for the moment they had lost the ability to navigate. It did not matter. Most of these starships were small, so Xiao Yu loaded them onto several Province-Class starships and fled with them together.

It seemed that heaven was secretly blessing Xiao Yu, or that the containment actions of the Taihao Civilization were effective enough. Xiao Yu fled for a full day and did not see any Guardian Civilization fleet come to pursue him. This basically allowed him to confirm his safety.

Xiao Yu could finally breathe a sigh of relief, but only that. Danger could still arise at any time. It was just that the level of safety was now somewhat higher than before.

Two Spheres of Death remained. These would be Xiao Yu’s ultimate life-saving weapons. He kept the Spheres of Death in a trigger-ready state at all times, prepared to use them immediately upon discovering a Guardian Civilization fleet. Because the Spheres of Death would also affect his own intelligent beings, Xiao Yu still kept all intelligent beings in deep cryostasis and did not awaken them.

The once bustling Home starship had now fallen into complete silence. In the vast Home starship, all vegetation had withered, and all animals, aside from intelligent beings, were dead. Without the aid of the internal ecological circulation system, the environment aboard the Home was no longer suitable for life.

Within the immense Home starship, only some robots were frequently moving back and forth, monitoring the status of every deep cryostasis gathering point. With a population numbering as many as several tens of billions, it was not really possible to assign a dedicated deep-freeze device to every person. To address this situation, Xiao Yu specially developed a drug. After each intelligent being took it, they were frozen collectively. Because of the rush, the success rate of this deep cryostasis was not very high. Basically, one out of every one hundred people would die due to cryofreeze failure. This in turn meant the deaths of several hundred million intelligent beings. There was no help for it. Losing several hundred million was still better than total extinction.Scientists of extremely high value to Xiao Yu, as well as outstanding students with the potential to become scientists, naturally received special treatment. Each of them had a dedicated deep-freeze device, so during the freezing process not a single one died due to cryofreeze failure.

Inside the vast Home starship, the light emitted by the virtual sun hanging in the sky was a dim, ghastly white, because the excessively low temperature had affected its internal components. Across the ground of the Home starship, everything was that same ghastly white. The surface was covered by a thick layer of ice and snow whose composition was not entirely water but also various other gases that had been frozen into solids or liquids, such as oxygen, nitrogen, methane, hydrogen, ethane, and so on.

The space within the Home starship had become almost a vacuum, because most gases had frozen. In this bitter cold, the once-prosperous shopping malls were buried under snow, the plazas that had once been packed with people had turned into excellent skating rinks, some construction materials that could not withstand the low temperatures had been frozen into powder, artificial rockeries had toppled, high-rises had fallen, and a sense of ruin pervaded the Home starship everywhere.

This was the price Xiao Yu paid to protect those intelligent beings and to leave himself the seed of a civilization.

Xiao Yu followed the raging energy traveling at light speed for a full ten years, covering a distance of ten light-years. During those ten years, everything proceeded as usual. Through tachyon detection, Xiao Yu watched with his own eyes as the radiation emitted by that black hole gradually dimmed, which meant the process of the black hole devouring the white dwarf had reached its end. The white dwarf now probably had only some fragments left.

The duration of a gamma-ray burst is extremely short, usually only a few seconds to a few tens of seconds, but a gamma-ray burst does not end with a single outburst. Behind it come X-ray afterglows and visible-light afterglows. This is caused by the lowering of the energy level. In other words, after the gamma rays cease, X-rays and visible light are still emitted. The X-ray outburst can last for several weeks, and the visible-light outburst generally can last for more than a year.

Xiao Yu saw just such a scene. After the intensity of radiation in the other bands diminished, the radiation in the visible band began to increase dramatically. At the center of that star system, at the place that had already become a black hole, it was as if there existed a star of incomparable ferocity, wantonly scattering its light and heat.

During this period, Xiao Yu kept advancing while following the unleashed violent energy. At present he had already fled a distance of ten light-years.

This was a region of the Milky Way relatively close to the Galactic Center, where the stellar density was comparatively high. At a spot seven light-years from where the collision occurred, there was a star with a rocky planet orbiting it. This rocky planet had its own atmosphere, but life likely did not exist on it. Xiao Yu personally witnessed how a gamma-ray burst ravages a planet.

Gamma rays have very high energy levels and carry enormous energy, especially the gamma-ray bursts unleashed by such cosmic-scale catastrophes. Under the irradiation of a gamma-ray burst, in just a few seconds the structure of this planet’s atmosphere was completely altered. Gamma rays have extremely strong penetrating power. Back then it was precisely because of this penetrating power that, even when hiding behind a planet, Xiao Yu’s starships still failed to come away unscathed and instead suffered huge losses. Now the power of gamma-ray penetration was once again on display.

Because of that extreme penetrating power, they can affect not only the planet’s surface but also its interior. Some elements inside the planet, under the irradiation of an ultra-high-energy gamma-ray burst, will undergo certain peculiar reactions. Xiao Yu was still in curvature flight and could not conduct detailed observations of this planet, so he could not determine its internal composition, nor did he know what reactions its interior underwent under the influence of the gamma-ray burst. He only saw that this gamma-ray burst, which lasted only a few seconds, seemed to fill the planet with energy in an instant, and it immediately became active.

Extremely intense volcanic eruptions and large-scale earthquakes completely transformed this planet’s geomorphology. Brilliant auroras formed at its poles, like silver serpents waving across the sky, displaying their forms in the night. Under the glow of the auroras, the surface beneath was being turned upside down. It is imaginable that if Earth were here, all life on Earth would have perished in that instant.

What would cause Earth’s life to die would not be geological changes like volcanoes and earthquakes, but the fact that a gamma-ray burst would directly damage an organisms’ genes. Under the irradiation of a gamma-ray burst of this energy level, Earth’s life would all die of cancer and various other diseases.

This gamma-ray burst also seemed to affect that star. Xiao Yu observed that, in that instant, the star’s radiation intensity increased by 5,000 percent. He carefully collected all of these observational data, awaiting future study.

“Ten light-years is still too close. At this distance I could still be exposed. Keep following this wave of energy forward. I must flee at least one hundred light-years to be somewhat safer. If I make it one hundred light-years and the Guardian Civilization still has not caught up, I will thaw the intelligent beings, begin parsing the complete Level 5 Civilization technology tree obtained from the Molian Civilization, and at the same time begin analyzing these several hundred Guardian Civilization starships to see what mysteries are contained within a Level 6 Civilization. Let us see what the Guardian Civilization meant when they said, ‘The barrier for a Level 5 Civilization to break through into Level 6 is rules. Very simple rules, whatever you gain, you must pay for; whatever you damage, you must make whole’… just what does this mean…”

The powerful energy unleashed by the collision of celestial bodies was still faithfully serving as the vanguard, clearing away every obstacle before Xiao Yu’s advance, while the energy that continued to erupt afterward was still serving as his logistics, wiping away every trace left by Xiao Yu’s curvature flight…