Chapter 38: Thirty-Eighth Day of Being a Salted Fish

Taking advantage of the gap while the Garbage Ship went to dump a new load of refuse, Lu Yuan lowered his head and continued reading the device in his hand.

The memories of the Desolate Planet that Geshu Qing had obtained were vast and chaotic.

In five months, he had organized enough content to fill five million words. Lu Yuan had been reading all morning and had only finished a small fraction of it.

Of course, for Lu Yuan, if he wanted to quickly read through all the content…

With his Mental Power, it would only take an instant.

However, he wasn’t in that much of a hurry; he could take his time reading it. It happened to be a good way to kill some time.

Siming and Zhu Rong were leaving soon, and he likely wouldn’t have anyone to play games with for a while. Without games to play, he had to find new forms of entertainment.

Looking at it now, reading these records was quite interesting.

He could try to see if he could find information related to his own rescue, and at the same time…

He could broaden his horizons.

The material was rich in content. Although most of it was fragmentary and incomplete, there were still many fascinating things inside.

Furthermore, the earlier sections were generally stream-of-consciousness and very abstract. Like the previous sphere, black dots, and transparent lines – if he hadn’t already known a little about such things, he probably wouldn’t have understood what they were at all.

But the further he read, the more concrete the content became. The things described turned into snippets of dialogue, a stretch of starry sky, a cloud, a mountain… even a city.

Moreover, the things within often exceeded one’s expectations.

For example, the page Lu Yuan was currently looking at:

“It seems to be a memory of a city.

A white city on the water. There are almost no streets; the buildings are all pure white, separated by flowing water. The city has no walls and its shape is irregular, nestled among mountains and forests, surrounded by lush vegetation.

The river splits into two very wide branches on the east side, one flowing south and one north, both heading west. The city is located between these two branches. As the two rivers flow, they split into many more tributaries, intricate and complex, forming the internal waterways of the city.

There are boats on the waterways, aircraft in the sky, and many creatures walking on the ground. The boats, aircraft, and creatures on the ground are not just humans, but also many animals of various forms. Some are particularly massive, some are very small, and their ways of walking differ; some have many legs, and some can fly.

These creatures communicate with each other and with humans. As the image zooms in, a street can be seen. The buildings on both sides are shops, with open doors and windows made into display cases. The ‘owners’ of the shops and the ‘people’ buying things are not entirely human. In fact, humans only make up a small portion of them.

They even communicate during the process of buying things. They use a special tool to understand each other’s languages; it might be a type of translator.”

• How miraculous.

Lu Yuan had never imagined he would see such content.

How should he put it…

Geshu Qing was born and raised on the Desolate Planet; perhaps he didn’t realize how outrageous the content he was writing down was. But for Lu Yuan, this kind of scene theoretically only appeared in highly imaginative films and television shows.

In fact, such scenes were more common in restored old dramas from the Mother Planet¹ Era.

In reality, at least for the past five thousand years, no one had witnessed such a scene with their own eyes.

5,479 years ago, which was Year One of the Star Calendar, with the actual realization of Warp technology, humanity finally had the chance to step into interstellar space, and the Mother Planet Era came to an end.

They excitedly explored the universe, searching for Habitable Planets within the entire Milky Way. While expanding their territory, they also tried to find traces of other life.

They did indeed find many Habitable Planets and many strange and exotic creatures. But among them, there was not a single one that could be called a “sentient” life form. They were all like other life on the Mother Planet – possessing certain thoughts and emotions, and a degree of sociality, but no writing and no civilization.

Later, human footprints gradually spread across the entire Milky Way, and humans even made contact with other galaxies outside of it.

It was then that humanity discovered to its shock that in all these places, these galaxies, or every corner of the universe that humans could perceive, the only ones who could truly be called “sentient” life were still only humans.

At most, there were differences in skin color, hair color, and eye color.

There wasn’t even any reproductive isolation² between them.

This was actually very illogical.

Back in the Mother Planet Era, humans already knew that different environments would breed different life forms, and long-term geographical isolation would cause reproductive isolation.

Therefore, in the artistic works of the Mother Planet Era, humans did their best to imagine what “aliens” would look like. Humans designed different appearances, different abilities, different ways of thinking… even different genetic codes for them.

No one would have thought that in this vast universe, in a distant other civilization, the “people” there would look exactly like themselves and have a similar twenty-three pairs of forty-six chromosomes.

But the truth was just that bizarre.

All organisms in the universe shared a single set of genetic codes, and the only creature in the universe capable of creating civilization was humanity.

The former might be barely explainable – deoxyribonucleic acid was the best-known substance for carrying genetic information. But the latter…

For over five thousand years, countless scientists in the Interstellar Alliance had tried to solve this mystery, but none had succeeded.

It was considered one of the ultimate questions of the universe. Many “Humanists” used this as a basis to claim that humans were the greatest life forms in the universe, and that human existence was far superior to other species…

In short.

After seeing this content, Lu Yuan almost suspected that what Geshu Qing had obtained wasn’t the memories of the Desolate Planet at all.

Or perhaps, these were indeed the memories of the Desolate Planet, but some globally popular movie had been released there in the past, and it just happened to be recorded by the planet.

…If this was real, the secrets hidden within the Desolate Planet were likely much more complex and bizarre than they had previously imagined.

Perhaps it could even help humanity solve an unsolved mystery of five thousand years.

However, the Desolate Planet being used to exile prisoners was something that had only happened in the last few hundred years, right? Before that, it seemed to have been just an ordinary planet… there were no records indicating that this planet was anything special.

Lu Yuan shook his head and flipped to the next page.

“The screen of the translator did not display anything resembling text, but rather a kind of wavy line. Of course, perhaps that was their writing. The shape of these wavy lines seemed very random; the amplitude of the fluctuations was sometimes strong and sometimes weak, and the widths of the peaks and troughs also varied. Through these wavy lines, they could understand each other.

In fact, many of them could also communicate directly. Some used their mouths to make sounds; others used other methods to create vibrations for sound – for example, by vibrating their arms, if those could be called arms. I also saw two animals staring at each other for a long time, seemingly understanding each other’s meaning.

The following is a specific introduction to some of the creatures here.

Category One: Humanoid creatures…

…

Category Two: Avian-like creatures…

…

…

…

Category Ten: Insectoid Creatures.

These are creatures with appearances similar to insects, usually having six legs, some with wings. Their bodies are far larger than humans, each about two or three humans tall.

They live on the northeast side of the city, where there is a massive building floating in the air. It is a twisted and complex polyhedron, golden in color, with a surface composed of a hexagonal grid. Each grid can allow these creatures to enter and exit…

“

“…”

Crap.

With a look of utter misery, Lu Yuan closed the reader and leaned back against the sofa in a tactical retreat.

Why the hell are there bugs here?!

“Huh, why is your expression so strange?” Just then, Goudan walked in from outside and immediately saw Lu Yuan’s mask of pain.

Lu Yuan: “…It’s nothing.”

Goudan gave him a suspicious look but didn’t press further, only saying, “I came back to cook first. Siming will be back in a bit. He said he wants to check the Mecha one more time. They plan to leave tomorrow.”

Translator’s Notes