Epoch of Twilight

On July 3, 2020, a stream of pulses suddenly spouted from the spaceship in the solar system. The pulses streaked across the sky for tens of kilometers, brightening the dark sky.

Soon, the heavy body of the spacecraft started to move slowly. After about 10 minutes, it managed to free itself from the gravitational pull of the sun and left its orbit, leaving the solar system.

...

On one of the mornings of the Earth.

The frozen metal board on the snowy ground shook a little and a loud thud was heard. After a short while, a human shadow emerged carefully from the ground, drilling through and emerging on the ground with force. He shivered when the cold winds blew.

It had been five years since the extinction of the aliens. The sky was a lot brighter and there was a substantial increase in temperature despite it still being about -30 degree Celsius.

He rubbed his hands together, sneaking out from the cave. A piece of beast’s skin covered his body. He stank and his face was so dirty and oily to the extent that his features could hardly be seen. It seemed as if he had not showered for years.

However, he had black eyes that looked different, indicating that he was not an ordinary person.

He lifted his head, looking at the cloudy sky. At this moment, his black eyes became even darker. The darkness was indescribable, seeming like even a single beam of light could not escape from his eyes.

After looking for a while, he was stunned, like something ridiculous had happened. He rubbed his eyes, staring at it for another few minutes. He was getting more and more excited and his body began to shake.

He quickly ran towards the cave.

"It has finally gone!" He shouted while he was running, uttering a loud cry as of excitement like a madman.

"What? Has it gone? Are you sure?"

"Is it really gone?"

"That’s good, we are finally safe!"

It was unexpected that there were quite a number of people in the cave. The small cave was so crowded. They were all exclaiming with excitement as they heard that.

"Please stay calm guys. Xiao Hu, drink some water first. Tell us slowly what happened!" One of the muscular men said. He then patted his shoulder and asked, "What did you see?"

He was tall and muscular and he had a thick chest. He seemed to be strong and powerful. Compared to the rest of them who were so noisy and dirty, he was rather quiet and clean. The cave was silent as soon as he started speaking.

If Luo Yuan was here, he could definitely recognize that he was Ling Zhong-an who was the vice minister of the Firearms Bureau.

He was lucky, though. He was staying at the outskirts of the Firearms Bureau when the Glassians launched their plan to destroy the humans. Consequently, his body had instantly collapsed during the explosion of the antimatter bomb.

Thanks to his special evolved ability, he could quickly disintegrate his body into particles. He had become immortal to some extent. The moment his body collapsed, it would begin forming itself again at the same time. In addition to that, he was quite far away from where the explosion took place. He was able to survive but he was seriously injured. He had been in a coma for more than one year but later managed to regain his consciousness in the ice layer.

Unfortunately, the humans had left the Earth. He could no longer find any traces of human activities. He wandered around the snowy ground for half a year. He then accidentally found human footprints as well as the hideout where the wanderers stayed.

The man called Xiao Hu then drank a mouthful of water, calming himself down and said, "Bro, the spaceship has gone. It has really gone."

The crowd became excited again, crying with joy. They had been hiding all these years. They carried out activities at night, which was the coldest time of the day as they were afraid that the Glassians would discover them. Many people were found frozen to death because of this.

"We have to be careful. Perhaps it was hiding somewhere on the planet. We have waited for five years. We shouldn’t mind waiting for another one year. The weather is getting better and we’ve got a growing food supply. As long as we are not discovered by the Glassians, we’ll be able to survive."

......

The solar system was extremely large. It was a circular region with a diameter of about one light-year and was at the edge of the Kuiper Belt. This region was significantly affected by the gravitational pull of the sun. The matter and gases were relatively dense and it was an extremely dangerous region for space voyage.

Despite traveling at the slowest speed, the flight would not be as stable as they expected. Every few hours, the spacecraft would tremble a little.

The spacecraft frequently collided with specks of dust in space, causing a faint glow to come out from the body of the spacecraft during the flight.

They were worried about it in the beginning, whenever the spaceship trembled. However, they were now used to it.

Fortunately, the further they were from the sun, the less likely they were to feel trembles on the spaceship. They would feel it occasionally, probably once every three years but after they left the solar system, it never happened again.

As time passed, the spaceship had been traveling in space for almost 10 years.

The virtual reality world was no longer as small as it was back then. Within these 10 years, the computer system that they were initially using had been replaced by a quantum computer. Its computation ability was at least 10 thousand times better. The virtual reality world had expanded, making it a little more real.

The island in outer space had become a big island with an area of about 10,000 square kilometers.

The island was not only fully occupied by factories, even outer space had become an industrial area.

At this moment, a new spaceship construction project had launched in one of the large factories.

There were two super huge gantries at both sides. With the help of machines, they supported two gigantic arc-shaped pieces of armor that weighed billions of tons by using the gantries. The arc-shaped armor was gradually assembled.

Luo Yuan and the top executives were in a small spacecraft, looking at the armor being slowly assembled. Although they were watching from afar, they were all startled nonetheless.

The length of the two gantries was more than 10,000 meters with a height of about 5,000 meters. It had a total mass of 1.5 billion tons. If such machines were to be placed on Earth, even the metalwork done by the Glassians could not compare to it. Gravity alone could crash it. In order to move the gantries, 10 million watts of electricity was consumed per second. The energy used was on par with that of the mothership.

The spaceship to be built would of course, not be small as such large gantries were being used to support its structure. Compared to that, the mini spacecraft that Luo Yuan was in resembled as a fly beside an elephant. It was not worth mentioning at all.

The structure of the spaceship would still be in the shape of a circular plate. However, it would be terribly large in diameter, about 9,000 kilometers. It was six times larger than the Glassian mothership and it will take at least two hours for one to walk from one end to another. It was at least billions of tons in mass.

The spaceship was not built according to the Glassian mothership’s design. It was not solely an expansion of the spaceship but it was a newly designed interstellar warship instead. The reason why it was still in the shape of a circular plate was not that humans were incapable of building a spaceship of different shapes. It was because there were not many choices of shapes available to be used as an interstellar spaceship’s frame even though it seemed like the spaceship could be in any shape, seeing as it would be in outer space. not many shapes were available to build a spaceship even though it seemed like any structure could be used as the spaceship was located in the outer space. Chances are, the spaceship would not get too close to planets and it would be less likely to be influenced by the gravitational pull.

However, this was true only when the spaceship was not moving. A spaceship would have to accelerate or decelerate, or even stop suddenly during an emergency. Therefore, they had higher stability requirements for the structure of the spaceship.

It had to be symmetric to maintain its balance. Therefore, other shapes could not be used. At the same time, during the flight, the smaller the contact area, the faster it would be, lowering the chances of them colliding with a meteorite.

Aside from being bigger in size, the technology adopted was beyond the technology used in the Glassian mothership. There was a drastic improvement in the development of human technology all these years. Many new technologies had been developed, emerging as fast as the speed of an explosion.