Age of Cosmic Exploration

Chapter 297: Strategy Preparation

Translator: EndlessFantasy Translation Editor: EndlessFantasy Translation

Silent Journey was the strategy used by the Hope to approach the Noah One. Its biggest mission was to completely cut off the Hope’s connection to the external world, be it from the angle of materials or signal. This would lower the possibility of being discovered greatly.

However, the possibility wasn’t zero. After all, according to Murphy’s law, anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Therefore, to prevent such accidents, when Silent Journey was drafted, Ren Tao, Xiao Niao, and Yao Yuan came up with a contingency plan that took several months to plan…

This plan was the ruin deception strategy!

What did the current the Hope look like?

Like a chopstick-shaped space rock if seen from afar. If one looked closer, it would appear like an abandoned spaceship.

The Hope had completely isolated itself through the use of the creator’s particle, so no signal was going to be transmitted. Furthermore, with physical shielding, no light source would be seen from the outside either. The Hope looked like an actual dead object. Even if seen, aliens wouldn’t be able to scan the information within, so the biggest possibility was them assuming that the Hope was an empty, abandoned spaceship. In other words, when aliens spotted the Hope, there would be a big chance they viewed it as the space ruins of a dead civilization!

This was the key to the ruin deception strategy, it played into this psychology!

From the information given by the space merchants, there were many documents detailing such dead civilizations’ ruins. According to the technological level, the ruins were divided into low-level ruins, medium-level ruins, and high-level ruins. Similarly, the danger scale of each of the ruins was different according to the technological level as well. For example, the junkyard civilization that the Hope stumbled across earlier was a low-level ruin and could be counted as the lowest among the lows, as its greatest source of danger came from automated defences.

Compared to low-level space ruins, medium-level ruins were a lot more dangerous. For example, the information from the space merchants detailed such a tale. A ruin-hopping civilization found a mid-sized spaceship, and the spaceship looked broken from the outside. This race was already experienced at exploring ruins, with at least 1,000 years of experience behind them, so of course they wouldn’t be reckless enough to send their people in without some preparation. Therefore, they spent a decade analysing and observing this spaceship. They even collected some spaceship pieces to conduct analysis on to ascertain that this spaceship’s technology might be beyond their expectations. Therefore, they contacted about 10 space civilizations that had trade history with this dead civilization, planning to enter the ruins together.

In the end, only one of these civilizations, which was caught up in their own troubles and couldn't come, escaped the fate of extinction. The rest of the civilizations were destroyed in this normal-looking spaceship… This was a high-level space ruin. After the many space civilizations entered the spaceship, its self-destruct mechanism was triggered. Eventually, it exploded in the form of a small blackhole which not only swallowed all the civilizations but had changed the constellation of the area…

Therefore, spotting a space ruin might not always be a good thing. If the salvage was successful, the civilization would benefit from the technology left behind, but if the salvage failed, the best situation was the civilization escaping with a huge loss of resources, the worst would be a total extinction.

Therefore, since Silent Journey was already prepping the Hope to look like a space ruin, the plan was to continue that deception. More actions would be carried out to give the Hope the appearance of a space ruin, and hopefully this would give the Hope more time. After all, it needed only another three months before it could warp, and if it was really impossible, then they could still warp away (This was before they knew this option was impossible); therefore, there was no need to really fool the aliens, as the main point of the plan was to buy time.

After Yao Yuan decided to go along with the ruin deception strategy, the Hope started to get busy again. Thankfully, this strategy was planned earlier, so all the pieces were already designed. They only needed to set them up now.

Two days after the decision was made, Eva left the hospital. She sat in captain’s room playing her palm computer. Sitting around her were Yao Yuan, Ren Tao, Xiao Niao, Guang Zhen, and Bo Li. Yao Yuan in the captain’s chair stole a look at his electronic watch.

"Five more minutes to the initiation of the ruin deception strategy. Eva, what kind of future do you see?" Yao Yuan looked at his watch again after asking Eva.

Eva was completely focused on her game. She shrugged. "In any case, if there’s a new vision, I will definitely tell you. I can’t create something out of nothing, so you can stop with the harassing questions. Uncle Yao Yuan, that’s very long-winded of you, don’t you think?"

Yao Yuan ignored her. He took another look at his watch and told Ren Tao and Xiao Niao, "If the future doesn’t change, then the aliens will start arrive on that fated date. This means that they still haven’t discovered us and are not observing the Hope; perhaps they haven’t even arrived at this solar system yet. This is the perfect time to set the ruin deception plan."

Ren Tao held the same bored expression. Xiao Niao, who was beside him, noticed his reticence and sighed. "That’s true, and when you think about Eva’s vision, she said only ten aliens entered the Hope and they didn’t fire any powerful, long-ranged weapons at the Hope. This means that they didn’t know about the Hope’s internal situation. This small unit of aliens is probably the so-called exploration team; they assumed the Hope was an abandoned spaceship."

"…Fifth revolution," Yao Yuan sighed, "A technological level that high but still unable to bypass the limitation of the creator’s particle, so naturally they cannot see into the Hope, but… this strategy is really our last resort. If this fails, then this will probably not end well for us."

When Yao Yuan said this, Xiao Niao’s face blushed with shame. This was because this was his responsibility. He was the only person that could communicate with ZERO, and it was because of his carelessness that the Hope was stuck in this tough spot. He forgot to ask ZERO about the details of controlled space warp, specifically whether it would preclude normal space warp after it was initiated.

Right then, Yao Yuan’s watch started to beep. Yao Yuan silenced the room and pressed a green button on the table. At the same time, Eva’s body shook. She put down the palm computer and her face split into a big smile. "No more, the aliens are no more… Yes, the date is still the same, but I can’t see the aliens anymore. In the captain’s room, there’s Uncle Yao Yuan and everyone else… the time is 12:00 AM, the day is over, and nothing happens!"

Eva was still a little girl, especially considering human beings’ lifespan had reached 180 years. She showed her happiness purely on her face, and she couldn’t stop smiling. In fact, they expected her to start dancing any time now. To be fair, she was the one under the most pressure over the past few days. Her constitution was weaker than Yao Yuan's and the rest, but she had been exposed to visions of massacres by the aliens every day. The lightning flash was strong enough to melt space armor, and even though there were only 10 aliens, that was enough to wash the Hope with blood.

Therefore, after the decision to commit to ruin deception strategy had been made, she kept herself busy playing her palm computer. She fell asleep naturally daily after she was utterly tired from gaming. She didn’t dare to allow herself to relax lest the visions came back to her and she would be dropped into despair again and again. She didn’t think she could handle it…

Right then, she finally relaxed. In the future date, where the aliens were supposed to enter the Hope, nothing happened. This meant that the ruin deception plan was a success, and maybe… this meant that the despairing future wouldn’t appear again!

In fact, everyone sighed in relief. They too were afraid that the strategy was completely useless and a war was inevitable…

Yao Yuan stood up and said, "Then we shall go according to plan. Ren Tao, Eva, you two should continue monitoring the changes in the future, and pay special attention to the time the aliens were supposed to enter the Hope. Remember, we only created three ‘baits’, and each requires one month to build and they consume a lot of resources. We need the time to set the explosives to be as precise as possible.

"We only have three ruin baits with space warp engines installed!"

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