Chapter 654 385: Interstellar Crossing

But before the fleet and the base could dispatch a contact team, Zhao Rui had already vanished into thin air before their very eyes.

'A vast and endless journey through the stars!'

Zhao Rui's heart was filled with a sense of confusion and desolation.

The Ancestral Star was no longer what it once was, and Blue Star was nowhere to be found.

In this vast Star Realm, he was the only one, walking in solitude.

In his past life, he had often fantasized about suddenly gaining transcendent power or owning a super-spaceship capable of traversing the cosmos.

He imagined he could then witness the vastness of the universe, the mysteries of the starry sky, and the grandeur of creation.

But now that he truly possessed such power, he realized the loneliness was a kind that seeped into his very heart.

It pierced straight through his Divine Soul.

'Even if I'm peerless, the only one of my kind in the universe, what is the meaning of it all?'

'I would be nothing more than a self-executing piece of code, existing in a boring, unconscious state.'

The very thing that makes a person human is the capacity for joy and sorrow, for complex emotions and desires, for the deceptions and betrayals of their own kind, and for the pursuit of the highest ideals.

And that pursuit definitely did not include a loneliness as cold as snow.

Zhao Rui's profound gaze pierced through the Milky Way Star Disk, projecting directly onto the vast region of the central black hole.

As the home galaxy of the Ancestral Star, the Milky Way Galaxy had been given many romantic names: the Galaxy, the River of Heaven, the Starry Han, the Cloud Stream…

In reality, however, the Milky Way seen by humans was merely a cross-section of the entire galaxy.

The place where humanity lived was located in a remote corner of one of the Milky Way Galaxy's spiral arms.

They were far from being part of the galaxy's mainstream life-forms.

'As for whether other life-forms existed?'

In the past, Zhao Rui hadn't known for certain, but at this moment, he was absolutely sure.

Not only did they exist, but there were many—far more than humanity could ever imagine.

However, eighty to ninety percent of them were primitive life-forms.

Their level of existence was similar to that of the multicellular organisms or dinosaurs on the ancient Ancestral Star.

Some had not even evolved into complete biological forms, existing instead as single-celled organisms or other simple life-forms.

These constituted the majority of life in the Milky Way Galaxy.

The remainder were true "intelligent life."

Some had developed civilizations, while others had reached an interstellar level of development.

But after surveying all the planets, he found none that possessed technology surpassing that of humanity on the Ancestral Star.

In other words, the Ancestral Star's technological development was already far ahead of every other race in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Following their current trajectory, even with several thousand more years of development, the humans of the Ancestral Star would still struggle to achieve an interstellar civilization.

And by "interstellar civilization," he didn't just mean flying out from the Ancestral Star to roam the Solar System.

It meant being able to traverse other star systems in a short amount of time.

This was no small feat. The closest star to the Ancestral Star, Proxima Centauri, was a full four light-years away.

That meant it would take light itself four years of straight-line travel to arrive. But for a life-form like a human, weighing well over a hundred pounds, the Energy required to accelerate them to near the speed of light was so immense as to be completely unrealistic.

And that was just for a single human, to say nothing of a spacecraft weighing tens, hundreds, or even thousands of tons.

As for so-called wormholes, that technology was even more difficult to acquire.

First, wormholes are directional, meaning a single wormhole has a specific entry and exit point.

The universe is vast. Even if you had access to a wormhole, you would first have to travel to its location.

The time that journey alone would take is something a carbon-based life-form like a human could not endure.

Furthermore, such technology would require a mastery of spatial manipulation and materials capable of withstanding the stresses of spatial distortion.

Materials science and energy science were the fundamental bottlenecks limiting spacecraft development.

'Without breakthroughs in these areas, how could humanity ever achieve interstellar travel?'

Zhao Rui felt a wave of uncertainty.