Chapter 991: 'Ghost'

Chapter 991: "Ghost"

The air was dead silent. The crowd, which had been whispering and staring like monkeys at a zoo, fell completely mute.

Wu Xinghuan stood frozen as if his brain had short-circuited. Xiao Yong, arms crossed, furrowed his brow slightly, while Luo Yi sank into deep thought.

As for Koala, he was scratching his head just like before, his bewildered little bean eyes looking more and more like a real koala's.

Your graves...

After a long pause, he broke the silence.

"So... we're already dead?"

"Yes," Yè Shí replied with his eyes closed.

"Then how did we die?" Koala pressed on, unwilling to give up. "There has to be a reason, right?"

"How would I know how you died?" Yè Shí looked at him as if it were obvious. "I haven't even entered your graves yet."

"Ah... right," Koala seemed convinced, scratching the back of his head and muttering to himself, "You haven't gone in yet."

At a loss for words regarding the recruitment standards of the Human Union Aerospace Force, Yè Shí let out a deep sigh, his eyes rolling up to the ceiling.

His mind was a mess, like a tangled ball of yarn with no end in sight.

If he had to blame something, it was that this game was too realistic—no menu interface, no logout function. Without the VM and the logout feature, he couldn't tell if he was still in the game or had truly crossed over.

He certainly hoped it was the former.

After all, even if he had to cross over, no one would want to end up in a grave.

Not to mention he was perfectly content with his current life and had no desire to start over in a strange environment.

But if he was still in the game, he couldn't understand why he couldn't log out, and he was even more worried about his real-world body.

Hours had passed since his first blackout—maybe even a dozen.

Jiu Jiu still hadn't broken down the door to wake him up, which could only mean something unexpected had happened, preventing him from waking up in reality.

Thinking about all this, Yè Shí felt his head start to ache again.

The only good news was that just before he woke up, he had heard that voice calling his name again.

And that adorable "Achoo."

Without a doubt, it was Jiang Xuezhou's voice.

What a complicated feeling—the person he wanted to save had become his only comfort.

At least she was still nearby...

"I think he's gone mad," Xiao Yong said from the doorway, uncrossing his arms, shaking his head, and walking away.

Luo Yi didn't leave. He stood there, still lost in thought, staring at Yè Shí as if recalling something.

Lin Youyou, standing beside the treatment bed, gently placed her hand on Yè Shí's forehead, her face etched with concern.

"Your heart rate is unstable, and your metabolism is very low. You'd better lie down and rest..."

"I don't need rest," Yè Shí muttered, uncomfortable with such meticulous care, and shifted away. "...And I don't need you to worry about me. You should worry about yourselves."

He couldn't help but wonder if these people were just too thick-skinned. Learning of their own deaths and staying so calm.

Of course, it was also possible they were just treating him as a joke, the way players sometimes found an NPC's absurd predicament amusing.

At first, he worried they might not be able to handle the harsh truth of their deaths, but it seemed he had overthought it.

Watching this sulky young man, Lin Youyou just smiled gently and withdrew her hand.

"We'll take care of ourselves, and we'll take care of you too. After all, you're the patient."

"I'm not sick."

Yè Shí replied weakly.

He was tired of repeating himself.

Especially since she seemed to treat him like a child who hadn't grown up, which made him feel awkward no matter what.

Just then, Dr. Wu, who had been crouching by the treatment bed, suddenly lifted his head.

"I think I'm sick..."

As if finally coming back to his senses, he muttered something under his breath and stood up from beside the bed.

Lin Youyou raised an eyebrow at this odd fellow, her expression strange.

"Maybe you should lie down here for a while too?"

"No..."

Leaving those words and a bewildered Yè Shí behind, Dr. Wu pushed through the crowd and hurried away.

Lin Youyou sighed, pressed her index finger to her brow, and addressed the people still gathered at the medical room door.

"My patient needs rest. If you're not here for treatment, please disperse."

It was clear that the citizens of the Prosperity Era were generally well-mannered.

Though the onlookers clearly hadn't had their fill and were curious about what would happen next, most heeded the doctor's words and didn't crowd the doorway any longer, quickly scattering until only Luo Yi remained.

Lin Youyou fixed her eyes on him.

"What about you? What's your problem?"

Luo Yi pointed to his arm, which had just undergone surgery, and looked at the attending doctor.

"I'm here for treatment, and I'd like to have a word with the patient... Don't worry, I won't disturb his rest."

Lin Youyou said nothing, only glanced inquiringly at the patient lying on the treatment bed.

But he didn't look at her. Instead, he stared intently at the doorway and stubbornly repeated what he had said before.

"I'll say it again: I'm not sick."

"That's not for you or me to decide. The doctor will have the final say."

Luo Yi shrugged, taking that as permission to talk, and walked into the medical room.

He pulled up a chair, sat down beside the treatment bed, and fixed his gaze on the young man lying there.

"You seem to know me... Or let me put it another way: you know the future me?"

"Yeah," Yè Shí nodded, staring unblinkingly at Luo Yi. Though his eyes were still wary, he no longer looked ready to attack.

In fact, thinking calmly, no matter which situation he was facing, one thing was certain:

This was definitely not the "Orion" cruiser he had encountered in the Wasteland Era of 215.

Even if he killed this man, it would be useless. Worse, he might trigger some messy temporal paradox and never find his way back.

That possibility wasn't zero.

Just like his theory of having "crossed over."

What mattered now was staying calm.

And gathering as much information as possible to understand his current situation.

At this moment, Luo Yi had no idea what the child before him, said to be from the future, was thinking. He simply gazed into his eyes and suddenly spoke.

"Your skills are impressive."

Ye Shi smiled faintly.

"You flatter me."

Luo Yi chuckled.

"Not at all. When I was your age, I was still figuring out which school to apply to. I had no skill in killing—hadn't even touched a gun, let alone seen one."

Not minding the idle chat, Ye Shi said casually.

"So you applied to military academy?"

Luo Yi shook his head.

"No, I ended up choosing environmental re-engineering. Joining the military came later."

Ye Shi: "...What's environmental re-engineering?"

"A pile of crap."

Luo Yi grinned and continued.

"Back then, relations with the colonies weren't so tense. We were still thinking about how to terraform Gaia into Earth, and maybe use the tech the colonies were researching to turn other planets in the solar system into Earth-like worlds... Turns out, that major was a total dead end."

Ye Shi nodded in realization.

Got it.

In short, a twenty-second-century biologist.

Luo Yi looked at him and asked.

"What about you?"

Ye Shi confessed.

"Twenty-fourth century... roughly? By our calendar, it's Year 215 of the Wasteland Era."

Luo Yi smiled.

"Didn't expect the apocalypse to last so many years."

Ye Shi thought for a moment and said.

"Over two hundred years, but it's almost over."

Luo Yi pressed on with curiosity.

"Ended by that... Alliance?"

Ye Shi replied.

"Sort of. Actually, it wasn't just the Alliance—a lot of people put in a lot of effort... But then again, the Alliance is the union of all survivors. Arguing over who exactly ended the Wasteland seems pointless."

Luo Yi nodded, then suddenly spoke with emotion.

"Honestly, when I first heard you'd been mired in the Wasteland for over two hundred years, my heart sank—my family's still on Earth, and they'll never live to see a time of peace. But then I thought, those two hundred years are already past, and the future is full of promising young men like you, and I felt a bit comforted... Maybe the future isn't as bleak as I imagined."

He paused and said sincerely.

"It's good, really... it's good."

His words came from the heart, with no trace of politeness.

Their civilization hadn't been destroyed; instead, tempered by the apocalypse, it had grown younger and more united.

That was the meaning.

If, before embarking on the journey home, he'd harbored any doubt about the outcome of the Three-Year War, fearing he'd see nothing but ruin, now he had no more worries or fears about the future.

Though the path had been tortuous, the future for all of them was bright.

Ye Shi smiled.

"Right? I think it's pretty good too... It was pretty good."

Luo Yi raised an eyebrow and asked half-jokingly.

"Until you ran into us?"

"More precisely, until I ran into you," Ye Shi said, looking him in the eye without mincing words. "You single-handedly wiped out an Academy squad, even if it was with your teammates' help."

Luo Yi smiled sheepishly.

"Didn't know I had it in me... So what happened next? You chased after me, the two-hundred-year-old me, all the way into space?"

"That sounds crazy enough..."

Lin Youyou pressed her temples, her face full of disbelief.

She still leaned toward common sense—that this guy had frozen his brain by not following strict cryo-sleep procedures.

Time travel?

That was too absurd.

But Ye Shi, lying on the treatment bed, nodded and said bluntly.

"That's right... Actually, this wasn't really our jurisdiction, but you took an Academy research ship straight through the space debris into geosynchronous orbit, then returned to this already-destroyed missile cruiser. We got intel that this cruiser held a hundred thousand neutron torpedoes—or close to it. You know? We'd just finished the final war, ready to celebrate our civilization entering a new era, and then this happened."

Luo Yi stared at him, his expression gradually turning serious.

"Did I ever say what I was going to do?"

Ye Shi snorted.

"Do I need to? You joined an organization called the Celestials—a bunch of lunatics and terrorists hiding in a Lagrange point station. Like the Enlightened Society, they only ever think about blowing everything on the surface to hell and starting over."

"As for you, you didn't waste words with us, and we could guess with our toes what you were up to—just carrying on the orbital bombardment mission you didn't finish two hundred years ago, giving the slime mother nests and the wastelanders a thorough cleansing, then rebuilding your imagined homeland."

Luo Yi's face went pale.

"Orbital bombardment? I've never heard of that."

Lin Youyou gave him a strange look, then turned to Ye Shi.

"I can vouch for that—the fleet's work schedules are all public. Something like that couldn't be hidden from us."

"Maybe you just didn't know?" Ye Shi sniffed. "Even our Administrators don't tell us everything."

Luo Yi placed a hand on his chest and looked at him earnestly.

"I swear on my honor—even if, by some stretch, what you say is true, and we were carrying out a mission we knew nothing about, even if we'd already committed unforgivable crimes without knowing it... I would never continue to be an accomplice after learning the truth."

Ye Shi gave a dry laugh.

"Who knows what you'll think two hundred years from now."

Luo Yi was silent for a moment, then said quietly.

"...You have a point. People change, but I don't believe I'd become that."

"I'm just telling you what I saw. Believe it or not," Ye Shi said, staring at the ceiling. "Of course, I actually do believe you. After talking with you this long, I don't think you're the kind of person who'd do that. Maybe there's some misunderstanding."

"Thank you for trusting me," Luo Yi nodded. "But honestly, I understand your anger. In your shoes, if I traveled to the past and saw a future war criminal right in front of me, I might hesitate over whether to strangle him first... even if he hadn't done anything yet."

Ye Shi glanced at him with interest.

“By the way, aren’t you afraid?”

Luo Yi asked.

“Afraid of what.”

Ye Shi looked at him and reminded.

“I made it very clear just now—you’re already dead. The clearer the line you draw between yourself and the ‘Luo Yi’ I mentioned, the lower the probability that you’re still alive. Either that guy is your clone, or he’s an android.”

“Two centuries have passed; it’s normal to be dead, right?” Luo Yi shrugged and continued, “Besides, you only saw the wreckage of the Orion. That doesn’t prove anything. Maybe that happened many years later? We haven’t been serving on this ship the whole time, let alone the fact that we still don’t understand what’s going on with you.”

Ye Shi looked at him in surprise.

“You guys are pretty optimistic.”

Lin Youyou placed her hand on his shoulder and said in a teasing tone.

“After all, we’re not dead yet. We can’t just scare ourselves because of some young man’s words.”

“I agree with Dr. Lin.”

Luo Yi nodded, looking at the teenager lying on the medical bed, and continued.

“My last question: what made you get into the hibernation pod? Or… what did you encounter before you lost consciousness?”

Whether Dr. Wu’s speculation was correct or not, his intuition told him this was crucial to whether they could escape the current predicament.

A flicker of confusion appeared in Ye Shi’s eyes.

“I… to be honest, I’m not quite sure.”

Luo Yi was stunned. He exchanged a glance with Lin Youyou, then looked back at him and asked.

“What do you mean by ‘not quite sure’?”

“Just not quite sure. I must have passed out at the time.”

Ye Shi patted his head, his expression pained.

“I don’t remember how I ended up in the hibernation pod. We got hit by a neutron torpedo, and the shield energy had just run out. I don’t even know if I held on, and then we crashed into the Orion’s wreckage, slightly below the belly.”

“By the way, there was another person in the cockpit—a girl about my age, named Jiang Xuezhou… Did you see her on that research ship?”

Though he knew the chances were slim, Ye Shi still looked at them with hopeful eyes.

But their reactions made his heart sink instantly.

“If we’re talking about the same ship, then you were the only one on it,” Luo Yi said seriously, looking at him. “There was only one hibernation pod inside, and you were the one lying in it.”

“But that is indeed strange. If you were unconscious, how did you get into the hibernation pod?”

Lin Youyou pinched her chin between her thumb and forefinger, thinking carefully.

“Either your brain suffered a memory gap from the impact, and you don’t remember crawling in yourself. Or, as you said, there was actually another person on the ship, but we just can’t see them.”

The medical bay fell silent.

Ye Shi suddenly felt a chill in the air around him, as if a ghost were present.

There wasn’t any supernatural element in this game, was there?

But he couldn’t explain what was happening with common sense, let alone why he couldn’t log out.

“Anyway, we’ve got two important clues now. First, you were hit by a neutron torpedo, then you crashed into our ship… our future ship.”

Noting down these two clues, Luo Yi stood up from the chair.

Seeing Luo Yi about to leave, Lin Youyou raised an eyebrow.

“You’re not going to finish your checkup?”

“It’s done.”

He had two things to do now.

One was to take another look at the explosion site, and the other was to check the torpedo bay.

Also, he needed to bring these two clues to that guy surnamed Wu.

Though that guy had never been reliable, he was the only physicist on board whose specialty matched.

If even he couldn’t figure it out, Luo Yi couldn’t think of anyone else who could.

He couldn’t exactly rely on himself, a grunt with a background in “environmental remodeling engineering,” could he?

Lying on the treatment bed, Ye Shi closed his eyes tightly, his face slightly pale.

The voice came again.

And it was still those four lines—

“Ye Shi…”

“It’s so cold here…”

“Ah-choo!”

“I…”

…

In the security office on the lower deck.

Several senior officers from the First Division stood before the monitors, staring intently at the scene in the medical bay.

Among them were Captain Zhao Tianhe, second-in-command Wu Mengke, the navigator, and others.

Out of respect for the doctor’s opinion, they hadn’t agitated the patient but instead used a more tactful approach—sending Luo Yi from the Third Division’s Space Combat Team to ask what they urgently needed to know.

The two had talked for a long time, from the future all the way to the present.

What they said might have been unintentional, but it sent chills down the listeners’ spines.

The Orion had indeed not carried out a ground orbital bombardment plan, but the ship’s command had indeed received a support request from the Lagrange Point space station.

Intelligence indicated that most of the surface had been covered by the mutant slime mold hive. If a more thorough purification operation wasn’t executed, the slime mold’s range would spread to near the Antarctic and Arctic circles within ten years at most.

Under such circumstances, rebuilding civilization was nearly impossible; human civilization might not even have the chance to rebuild before being wiped out by Gaia’s children.

Now that the space elevator had been destroyed, and the Zhiyuan colonial ship had abandoned the plan to colonize another star system out of disregard for the bigger picture, human civilization was on the brink of extinction.

The Lagrange Point space station’s message was clear: since the Ark project had already been initiated, and the necessary nuclear weapons had long been used, the survivors on the surface likely wouldn’t make it. Might as well go all the way and step on the accelerator.

From the perspective of civilization, this was about preserving as many sparks as possible for its continuation.

But the contradiction was that this very act had already shaken the foundation of civilization.

That was why opinions within the Human Union and the high command of the Aerospace Force were not unified on whether to go this far; in fact, there were serious disagreements.

This disagreement hadn’t just appeared today; it had existed for a long time.

Including, but not limited to, the core disagreement of the entire war.

Some believed the enemy in this war was the rebels, while others thought Gaia was the true enemy.

Disagreement was inevitable.

When two people stand together, one will inevitably be to the left or right of the other, let alone a crowd.

The final war was indeed provoked by the radicals, but only by the most extreme among them.

And as the colonies seceded, internal contradictions turned into external ones, and within the conservative faction that held an overwhelming advantage in the Human Union’s high command, new divisions naturally emerged based on the existing agenda—for instance, those on the right side of the spectrum became the new conservatives, while those on the left became the new radicals.

From the latter’s standpoint, the war was already over; the rebels had been eliminated, and now the focus should be on aftermath and establishing a new order.

This order could include the mutant slime mold, after all, completely eradicating such a thing was indeed impractical.

Yet from the former’s standpoint, driving every last bit of surface slime mold away at any cost was the urgent task at hand, and sacrificing however many lives was worth it.

Zhao Tianhe was not really interested in political matters.

He had a clear sense of his own identity: he was a professional soldier, and his loyalty should be to the law… even if the mainstream of the entire Aerospace Force leaned toward siding with the former.

However, even if he wanted to avoid taking sides, when the tide of history swept over, he and his men were forced into it, compelled to make a choice.

After all, when he received the order from the Lagrange Point command center, the only starships left in the entire Aerospace Force—and indeed the Human Union—capable of interstellar navigation were just two.

One was the Orion, the other the Gemini.

He alone had the most remaining ammunition; in comparison, the Gemini’s neutron torpedoes should have been nearly exhausted during the earlier orbital bombardment of Gaia.

In other words, only they were capable of executing the Doomsday Plan.

There was no one else…

And as for his choice, there was nothing much to say.

He would rather turn his gun on himself, or on his own comrades, than ever aim it at the civilians he had sworn to protect with his life.

If he actually did that, then these three years of war would have been fought for nothing, damn it.

Standing before the surveillance terminal screen, Wu Mengke looked with a worried expression at Captain Zhao Tianhe beside her.

“That kid knows about the Lagrange Point space station’s message. I don’t think it’s a coincidence—he might really be from the future.”

Zhao Tianhe stared at the screen with a grave expression and slowly nodded.

“Mm.”

Wu Mengke shifted her gaze away, her expression complicated, and unconsciously gripped the armrests of her chair.

“Then we…”

Knowing what she wanted to say, Zhao Tianhe shook his head, keeping his eyes fixed on the screen.

“Hard to say.”

“No matter what, you and I are still alive—that’s beyond doubt—and our opponents have absolutely no chance of turning things around.”

“I actually lean more toward thinking that he’s not from our future.”

“But from the future of ‘another timeline.’”