Chapter 37: Thirty-Seventh Day of Being a Salted Fish

Lu Yuan watched and nodded.

The content of this “memory” indeed aligned with the deductions they had made. No wonder Geshu Qing believed it represented the current state of the Desolate Planet.

However…

Lu Yuan looked up, his gaze piercing through the roof toward the distant sky. His Mental Power spread out in that direction.

A starship was hovering in the air. The position where it lingered was exactly where Lu Yuan had burned the previous Garbage Ship.

The personnel on this starship still followed the five-man squad configuration. However, it was clearly a higher-level setup than the one on the Garbage Ship Lu Yuan had shot down before—there was an Awakener here.

Lu Yuan knew very well that there was primarily only one reason for such a person to appear here: if they could find the Black Box of the previous Garbage Ship, he could use Mental Power to retrieve the information within.

Of course, if this person’s Mental Power was strong enough, and if the superiors in charge of these starships cared enough about the previous ship’s whereabouts or the bombing status of this sector, he might also be responsible for external communications.

Just as Lu Yuan could connect to the StarNet. Although most communication methods on the Desolate Planet were unusable, if one were determined, there were always ways.

It simply required some specialized, hard-to-obtain communication equipment and sufficiently strong Mental Power.

The Black Box from the previous Garbage Ship had already been recovered. The moment the Awakener on the starship used his Mental Power to investigate, Lu Yuan determined that the man’s strength was insufficient for external communication.

This was normal. After all, powerful Awakeners were rare and expensive to hire. Similarly, equipment capable of external communication from a place like the Desolate Planet was extremely costly due to its complex manufacturing process. Even Lu Yuan hadn’t bothered to build one himself, merely repairing the one on his Command Ship for use.

The Awakener had already picked up the Black Box.

His Mental Power wasn’t strong enough to probe the contents from a distance like Lu Yuan could, let alone tamper with them at will. He pressed his palm against the front of the Black Box, where a palm-print icon was located. As his Mental Power entered the box through his palm, he saw the recorded information.

The Black Box consisted of two parts: the internal video logs of the starship and the flight data records.

“Hmm…” The Awakener checked the flight data first, murmuring, “No signs of an attack. Instead, it suddenly… decomposed from the inside out.”

“Decomposed?”

“Yes. All of a sudden, the entire starship broke into numerous fragments. Then, the people inside failed to perform any emergency procedures, simply letting the ship fall. After that, the fuel chamber exploded and burned.”

“…” The captain of this starship frowned and shook his head. “Let’s look at the video logs.”

“Alright.”

The information recorded in the video was more comprehensive, allowing the Awakener to see the “cause and effect.”

The starship hovered in the air. Captain Yu Cheng opened the receiver for the surveillance footage—the cube. The cube projected many screens; Yu Cheng selected and watched these images, discussing them with the other members of the crew.

Ultimately, they decided they should deploy the explosives.

The starship’s hatch opened, and the explosives were dropped. As if suddenly realizing something, the captain was jolted by a shock. He let out a sharp cry and quickly tried to start the starship’s engines.

However, it was too late. Ten seconds later, an invisible shockwave hit the starship. Every piece of organic matter on the vessel turned to dust and scattered, including the five members, the captain among them.

Then came the starship’s fall, and the screen faded to black.

“…” The Awakener fell silent for a long while before sighing. “An Organic Matter Decomposition Bomb… these things are too terrifying. Honestly, this kind of military-controlled explosive really shouldn’t be allowed for civilian use.”

“…Did they make a mistake while using the explosives?” The others on the starship already had their suspicions. Still, one of them asked tentatively, clinging to a nearly hopeless expectation.

“Yes.” The Awakener described the scene he had witnessed and sighed. “They were using 50129. The starships you use are too slow, while the diffusion speed of 50129 is incredibly fast. To use it, you must be traveling at full speed, dropping it behind you as you fly. Only then can you barely guarantee your own safety.”

“What a waste.”

“…” The group fell into silence. Although they didn’t know the people on the previous starship, hearing of their deaths still brought a sense of shared mortality¹.

After a long while, someone in the starship finally spoke. “Let’s just drop the cargo and leave.”

“Can’t we just go? We saw it just now; there’s no sign of life for hundreds of kilometers around. We might as well just dump it at the next location. It might even improve the lives of the people there—I heard life on the Desolate Planet is miserable, and they can only survive on this trash,” the Awakener said.

A normal Garbage Ship crew wouldn’t include an Awakener, so this was his first time coming to the Desolate Planet. Everything he knew about the place was limited to hearsay.

The starship’s captain said, “The regulations are clear. Regardless of whether there are people, the items must be dropped. No more, no less.”

“How strange. Isn’t that a huge waste?”

“It’s fine,” the captain replied. “It’s just trash anyway; it doesn’t matter where it’s thrown. Perhaps it’s also to ensure that people in other areas don’t live too well. Otherwise, wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of the punishment?”

“Then let’s drop it quickly.”

“No.” The captain shook his head. “It has to be dropped at that specific garbage dump. The video of the dumping has to be checked when we return.”

“…”

Lu Yuan listened and let out a sigh.

So, even without Geshu Qing’s arrival, seeing this Garbage Ship would have likely made him realize that its function was unusual—or rather, that the things dropped by the Garbage Ship had a specific significance.

There were two most obvious pieces of evidence:

First, the previous Garbage Ship had gone to the trouble of bringing an Organic Matter Decomposition Bomb 50129 from the First Legion. If they just wanted to destroy a place, ordinary explosives would have sufficed. Using a typical military-grade explosive like 50129 here was not only overkill but also extremely dangerous.

In fact, at the very beginning, he hadn’t even intended to shoot down the Garbage Ship—because he hadn’t expected them to bring a high-intensity explosive like 50129.

He had thought the Garbage Ship might bring ordinary bombs. In that case, he would have only needed to use his Mental Power to intercept them in mid-air, create an illusion that the area had been bombed, and incidentally use his Mental Power to destroy all the cameras.

However, once 50129 was deployed, there was no time to intercept it. He could only temporarily bring the starship down and dispose of the 50129.

After that, he didn’t dare let the people inside leave.

This was primarily to avoid more trouble for himself, and secondarily to prevent these five people from being implicated because they couldn’t explain their return or lie effectively.

Second, having already confirmed there was “no sign of life,” they still insisted on dropping the trash and doing so at a fixed location. No matter how one looked at it, it was very strange.

In short, the memory of the Desolate Planet provided by Geshu Qing was somewhat useful, but it wasn’t actually Lu Yuan’s main concern, nor did it provide much extra information.

The reason Lu Yuan was here looking at the content Geshu Qing had organized was partly out of boredom, but also because he felt that by looking through this memory, he might be able to find an answer to another question.

Who had saved him?

Regarding this question, Lu Yuan actually had a suspicion in his heart.

Or rather, a hope.

Ever since he learned that the Desolate Planet was a “living” thing, he had been hoping to find evidence that the “person” who saved him was the planet itself.

If that were the case…

A planet probably wouldn’t ask him to do something like “repel the Zerg and defend the Empire,” right?

There was absolutely no possibility of that, right?

Moreover, Lu Yuan felt this was a very reasonable hypothesis.

Because when he woke up, he was still inside his own Command Ship. He recognized his ship.

In ordinary interstellar travel, there was such a thing as “towing”—where a disabled starship was forcibly dragged to a nearby location for repairs. But no one could tow a starship through a Warp.

The battlefield at the time was too far from the Desolate Planet. Unless someone could mobilize a Mothership, carry his Command Ship all the way through Warps to the Desolate Planet, and then dump him out, there was simply no other way for him and the Command Ship to fall onto the Desolate Planet together. That was something beyond human capability.

And he had retrieved the deployment and flight information for the Motherships of every military district. Logically, such a massive Mothership crossing the entire universe couldn’t possibly leave no trace. Yet, he could find no record of any Mothership flight from the battlefield to the Desolate Planet.

It certainly couldn’t be ruled out that someone had sent him to this Desolate Planet and then wiped all records of the event…

But compared to that theory, Lu Yuan was more inclined to believe that the Desolate Planet itself, through some power beyond human imagination, had brought him here.

Unfortunately, he had yet to find any evidence to support that idea.

Translator’s Notes