Chapter 1 Farewell

Dou Dou sat on the silly cat's head, waving her little arms to say goodbye to her father. The little one now understood why Hao Ren and the other adults in the family often had to travel far away. With her rapidly developing mind, she was no longer as capricious and clingy as she used to be. When necessary, she knew how to stay at home obediently. As long as someone could keep an eye on her and prevent her from doing anything reckless, Hao Ren could rest assured leaving the little tyke at home.

The cat girl carefully nudged her fish master with her head, smacked her lips as she recalled the taste of late May, and meowed at Hao Ren and the others as they stepped into the teleportation beam, as a farewell.

As the teleportation light flashed, Hao Ren was already standing in the heart of the Dark Snowfield with the others.

A large, pale purple spatial rift stood in the air, surrounded by several glowing, silver-white devices. Around these devices was a ring of light beam generators and alarm systems illuminating the surrounding snow.

Nothing else.

"I think instead of considering building a Frost Town somewhere else in the snowfield, you might as well renovate around this spatial rift. If not building a fortress, at least put up a shed to keep out the wind and snow," Vivian stomped her foot to shake off the snowflakes that had just stuck to her boots. "Alamanda on the other side is almost developing into a capital airport, and the portal on this side looks like a bicycle shed."

The eerie cold unique to the Dark Snowfield surged from all directions, and the three sirens, including the Siren Queen, shivered instantly. Unlike Nangong Wuyue, they were not accustomed to human form. They had come as sea snakes, and now a thin layer of ice covered their snake tails, crackling with every slight movement. Shakira hugged her shoulders and looked around, "What is this place? I feel that the water element here... is very strange, difficult to control, and the cold it carries is colder than ordinary ice and snow."

"This is the entrance to the Dream Plane," Hao Ren pointed to the spatial rift, "and this is a buffer zone between the real world and the Dream Plane. Everything here has been twisted by the alien atmosphere, so of course it's a bit strange."

The Siren Queen bent her tail into a question mark: "Passing through this rift will take us to our homeland?"

"No, we still need to calculate coordinates, explore, navigate, and check for hidden dangers—this is an expedition. Although it's your old home, I don't believe it's very safe," Hao Ren shrugged and took the lead in stepping across the spatial rift, "Let's go broaden our horizons."

Everyone followed Hao Ren through the gate, and a scene completely different from the Dark Snowfield appeared before their eyes.

It was a brand new silver hall.

The spatial rift was located in the center of the hall, its pale purple light illuminating the surrounding area for a dozen meters. Around the edge of the hall was a ring of naturally formed silver-white metal walls. The walls were more than ten meters high and gradually arched inwards at the top, where a layer of translucent, light blue energy barrier could be seen, through which one could see the clear sky outside. The hall had a magnificent golden floor, the only original structure preserved in this teleportation station—the plaza floor of the city of Alamanda.

Some newly installed advanced equipment was distributed on one side of the hall, and several autonomous machines were flying around debugging the equipment. One of the autonomous machines sensed its master's return and emitted a series of whirring sounds as it came over to report the progress of its work. Hao Ren casually tapped the outer shell of this mechanical squid, "Good progress on the project. Looks like the teleportation station is complete… Oh, the nearby broadcast tower is also complete?"

The Siren Queen retreated several meters upon seeing the thing, her face full of vigilance: "What is that thing?!"

"My worker... Katrina, you don't have to be so nervous," Hao Ren couldn't help but laugh at the Siren Queen's reaction, "They are very friendly guys, just working here. This teleportation station was a ruin before. If they hadn't been busy for so long, you wouldn't even be able to breathe Earth's air here today."

The Siren Queen regained her composure, but still maintained a wary distance: "I just have a psychological shadow regarding tentacles... especially the kind that swing back and forth under a big head."

Lily was puzzled: "Didn't you have a psychological shadow when you transformed into a giant squid?"

The Siren Queen was stunned, and a wave of frustration suddenly washed over her: "Oh my god, my life has forever lost a possibility..."

Vivian was stunned: "Looks like this psychological shadow is pretty serious."

Hao Ren looked around, feeling like he had forgotten something. After thinking for a long time, he suddenly realized: "I forgot to notify Becky! Wait a moment—"

Hao Ren quickly turned on the communicator. To keep abreast of the situation in Holletta, he had Becky carry a communicator with her, so after only a few calls, he heard Becky's lazy voice: "Ah? Landlord?"

"What are you doing over there?"

"Me? I'm participating in an activity over here. I'm currently doing a first-person bragging session. Landlord, do you need something?"

"Important business," Hao Ren said quickly, "Have you guys caught the brain monster yet?"

"Not yet," Becky's voice suddenly became serious, "What's wrong?"

Hao Ren breathed a sigh of relief: "Notify Ofra, don't startle it after discovering a clue, and don't lead people to catch it yourself! The main body of that thing has an overwhelming mental power against mortals, and it can only be sealed with special means. Notify me immediately after confirming the location of the brain monster, understand?"

Becky quickly agreed: "Received, received—by the way, Landlord, what are you doing now?"

Hao Ren sighed: "About to blow up something."

Becky's voice suddenly became happy: "Blow up something?! Hey, I like this! Meatballs or cutlets? Can you send me some when they're fried?"

Hao Ren almost coughed up blood: "Fourth tone!"

Becky: "...Landlord, your life is still so magnificent?"

After hanging up the communication, Hao Ren curled his lips: "That Becky... Let's go, our time is precious."

He released the Giant Tortoise Rock Terrace from his portable space, led everyone onto the spaceship, and then directly passed through the transparent barrier above the Alamanda teleportation station and ascended into the sky. The golden ruins below were fully visible as the spaceship ascended. From the pictures transmitted by the external monitors, one could see busy construction scenes everywhere in the city. Outside the towering city walls, several silver-white spire devices had already begun to operate. The project plans Hao Ren had left behind were being executed efficiently. Autonomous machines and construction equipment were working day and night, and the planet was now developing into a true stronghold fortress.

The Siren Queen and her two followers watched everything in the bridge with astonishment. They realized from the holographic projection that they were in the ruins of another civilization, and that this ruin was being converted into a large fortress. Shakira couldn't help but look at Hao Ren: "What is this place?"

"Tanagrus, another destroyed civilization. They were even more unlucky than you—they failed to launch exile ships when the disaster struck, and the self-help technology they chose also failed, so they went extinct. Only empty echoes remain on this planet. Those spires are eliminating these echoes, but that has little to do with you."

Shakira poked the spaceship seat in front of her with the tip of her tail: "Do you know what happened to this universe?"

"I know."

"Then... what do you do?" Shakira finally couldn't help but ask, "Of course, you don't have to answer, I'm just too curious to control myself. The actions of you people have completely exceeded any human or alien."

The spaceship gradually left the atmosphere, and the mixed pale golden and gray-green planetary surface of Tanagrus gradually receded in the external monitors. The glow of the Crystal Core Research Station was rising from the other side of the horizon, like a mercury moon. Hao Ren looked at the magnificent scenery in space and casually pulled up the star chart: "It's a long story, we'll talk slowly on the way. Terminal, start calculating the star chart."

Although the star charts stored in the Nassaton database were reliable, they did not conform to the standards of cosmic interstellar navigation. The sirens did not reach the technical level of freely navigating to any point in the universe, so their star charts could only mark the range they could explore as much as possible—compared to the entire space, it was just a boat in the blue sea.

Marking the position of a star in the universe is a complex science. You can use several supernovae to form a connection to indicate the position of a star, or you can detect enough stars to establish a complex three-dimensional coordinate system. But no matter what, you are faced with a problem: the universe is too vast and is changing every moment. Stars are constantly moving, appearing, disappearing, and dying. Over time, any star chart coordinates will become less and less accurate. The Xiling God System scans snapshots of the entire universe through things like the Sovereign Hub, so they don't have to worry about this, but ordinary races can't. They must find ways to offset this "star chart drift," and one way is to draw the largest possible range of the sky: enough celestial bodies and a large enough star chart span can give them more spare connections to determine the position of a star.

However, the siren's star chart is a primary star chart, which may not have been so accurate at first. After ten thousand years, its accuracy has been greatly reduced, so the data terminal needs to recalibrate the starlight, overlapping the current real universe with what is recorded on the star chart to determine the position of Ai'ou.