Translator: Exodus Tales Editor: Exodus Tales

Chapter 323 – Attacking the Three-body System (2)

Hiss—

As soon as Chen Yu activated the FTL engine, the spacecraft started quaking violently, and strange sounds of air currents spread throughout the cabin.

Everyone aboard the spacecraft could also clearly feel their bodies rotating.

“The spacecraft is currently adjusting its direction,” Chen Yu explained. “It is directing the left sphere, which contains dark matter toward Alpha Centauri, and the right sphere, which is used to release dark energy for space expansion, away from Alpha Centauri. The spacecraft will remain stationary during the actual flight process, so there shouldn’t be any more vibrations afterward.”

Sure enough, after the tremors continued for a short moment, the spacecraft regained its calm.

The bright sun.

The pitch-black space.

The bright galaxy…

Everything was as still as a picture.

“W-When will the spacecraft exceed the speed of light?” a young man from the bullet comment group asked tentatively.

“We’ve already exceeded it,” Chen Yu said, raising an eyebrow.

“Already?!”

Upon hearing Chen Yu’s words, aside from some of the donation group’s experts, the other event participants revealed surprised expressions on their faces.

The slightly chubby man with the ID Leading Pillar even laid on the floor and widened his eyes to carefully observe the starry sky underneath him. “Why isn’t there any movement outside?”

Snap.

Raising his hand, Chen Yu skillfully snapped his fingers. Immediately, a virtual screen appeared inside the cabin.

Meanwhile, displayed on the screen were a few strings of numbers.

Speed of Light x1.2

365,371km

/s

Distance from destination: 9,457.7 billion kilometers.

Estimated travel time: 1,355 days.

“The speed of light is the fastest moving speed we currently know of. In a vacuum, light can travel close to 300,000 kilometers per second. It can circle around Earth eight times in one second, go from Earth to the moon in two minutes, and go from Earth to the sun in eight minutes. Indeed, such a speed is already very fast and almost inconceivable in the eyes of humans. However, on the scale of the universe, the speed of light is no different than the speed of a crawling snail.”

After saying so, Chen Yu pointed at the sun in the distance and said, “We are like snails, and the sun is like a big mountain. Despite having reached 1.2 times the speed of light, it will still take us nearly a year just to pass through the Oort cloud and fly out of the solar system. Hence, from our perspective, it will look as if nothing is moving at all. The speed of light is genuinely too slow.

“Even the speed of light looks so humble in the universe. Trying to traverse the universe underneath the speed of light is simply impossible. Perhaps, only when a civilization truly masters dark matter technology will the universe open up to it…”

Scary.

If you don’t experience it yourself, you will never learn just how empty the universe is.

We can’t even be considered a virus to the universe, right?

Humans are so weak.

If you can’t master dark matter, you can’t fly around the universe. If you can’t fly around the universe, you can’t get enough dark matter. Isn’t this an endless loop?

It seems that despite having become the ruling species on Earth, we are still considered newbies who haven’t left the beginner’s village in the game Universe Online?

We probably just finished creating our accounts…

Where did the female assistant go?

Clap!

Clapping his hands, Chen Yu attracted everyone’s attention back to himself. He then raised two fingers and said, “Now, let us continue accelerating. Two times the speed of light.”

Speed of Light x2

598,731 km

/s

The deep space “wallpaper” still remained unchanged. However, if one looked closely, one would find that all the stars behind the spacecraft were starting to turn blue.

This was an intense blueshift that resulted from the spacecraft moving at the speed of light.

Conversely, the stars in front of the spacecraft were starting to turn red.

Meanwhile, the change in the stars’ colors could also be used as a reference to prove that the spacecraft had indeed surpassed the speed of light.

Raising five fingers, Chen Yu said calmly, “Five times.”

Speed of Light x5

1,487,462km

/s

Buzz!

The instant the spacecraft started moving at five times the speed of light, the starry sky around the spacecraft became slightly distorted for some unknown reason.

“This is a spatial lens,” Chen Yu explained with due diligence. “At five times the speed of light, the independent space that wraps the spacecraft will inevitably experience the Kerry diffusion effect due to the contrast between the space at the front and rear. You can think of it as a kind of deformation. Therefore, from our perspective, it looks as if the surrounding space is glass that is being bent by a force that’s coming from all 360-degrees, which, in turn, produces a lens effect.”

“Oh~”

The bullet comment group members nodded in a daze.

The donation group’s astronauts promptly took out their toolboxes, set up their equipment, arranged their sensors, and began capturing footage and conducting analyses.

“Let’s continue.” Stretching out both hands and spreading his fingers, Chen Yu said, “Ten times!”

Speed of Light x10

2,975,611km

/s

When the spacecraft “moved” at ten times the speed of light, the distortion of the surrounding space became even more evident. The blueshift at the front and redshift at the rear had also thoroughly concealed the stars’ original colors.

Whoosh!

At this time, a shadow suddenly moved past the spacecraft’s exterior, giving everyone a scare.

“What the?”

“What was that?”

“I thought I was seeing things…”

“It’s Jupiter,” one of the Red Coast Observatory participants said casually after adjusting the scale of his equipment.

“That’s right.” Nodding, Chen Yu said, “We just flew past Jupiter. However, as the spacecraft is too fast, our dynamic vision isn’t enough to capture Jupiter when we passed it. Now, 20 times!”

Speed of Light x20

6,046,227km

/s

“Fifty times!”

Speed of Light x50

0.1 AU

/s

“One astronomical unit represents the distance between the Earth and the sun. In other words, at our current speed, it only takes seven seconds to go from Earth to the sun.”

Gradually getting excited, Chen Yu said, “Fifty times the speed of light is just a low-speed state for this spacecraft. Now, 100 times!”

Speed of Light x100

0.2 AU

/s

After reaching 100 times the speed of light, the blueshift and redshift became even more intense. However, all stars, including the sun, still remained motionless…

The terror of the universe was thoroughly displayed in the bloodshot eyes of the livestream’s 170 million viewers.

“How ludicrous.” Leaning against the cabin’s transparent wall, Jack Ma earnestly observed the everlasting space outside, his thoughts, spirit, and consciousness suffering a heavy blow. “Human beings are actually small to such an extent…”

Suddenly, he realized that solely from the solar system’s perspective, the business empire he had worked so hard to create was nothing but a grain of rice held up by a certain ant in an ant colony.

While it might look great to him, it was, in fact, an insignificant existence.

If humanity indeed went extinct one day, then there wouldn’t even be a trace of his business empire left in the universe. It would merely blend into the silence and emptiness of the universe, fading out of existence completely…

Meanwhile, including the astronauts, everyone else also felt complicated emotions in this situation.

Several of the youngsters among the bullet comment group even felt a faint urge to commit suicide when faced with the vastness of the universe.

Humans only had a few decades to live in their humble lives. What meaning was there for them to struggle from young to old and experiencing studies, life, creation, work, exhaustion, and hardships?

“…”

As an “astronaut” who had set foot into the universe many times before, although Chen Yu wasn’t exactly indifferent to the universe’s vastness, he didn’t react as sentimentally as everyone else, either.

The next moment, Chen Yu raised his hand and stretched out five fingers. He then said calmly, “We’ll continue accelerating. Five hundred times.”

Speed of Light x500

1.0 AU

/s

Under the crazy speed of 150 million kilometers per second, the spacecraft finally conquered the initially arrogant and indifferent starry sky, and the stars began shifting at speed visible to the naked eye…

Meanwhile, inside the spacecraft, a frightening and drastic change had also taken place.