16: Echoes of Tigaden

In the deep space 10.5 light-years from the Solar System, a war concerning the survival of civilizations erupted in absolute silence and ended in absolute silence.

There were no deafening explosions, no heroic roars, no mournful wails of metal.

There was only the dance of light and shadow, and the cruel reality of physical laws being ruthlessly rewritten.

This fleet battle—or rather, unilateral slaughter—that occurred beyond the perception of Human Civilization, a spectacle that could be called a miracle, was broadcast in real-time, frame by frame, to the only special spectator on Earth through a small, glowing window.

Lei Wen.

He sat in his unremarkable gaming chair, his hands cold, his body stiff from maintaining the same posture for too long.

His eyes were locked onto the game interface of "stellar universe".

He was not playing a game.

He was watching a real execution.

On the screen, more than half of the two thousand green dots representing the Tigaden people's fleet had vanished within a mere hour.

They were not destroyed; they did not explode into brilliant pixelated fireworks.

They simply vanished. After being swept by the black line representing the "Void Beam" emitted from the sifidia cruiser, they were cleanly wiped from the Star Map, as if they had never existed.

Lei Wen hovered his mouse over the silver-white icon representing the sifidia.

A concise data box popped up.

【 Far-star Cruiser sifidia 】

【 Combat Power: 50.3k 】

Then, he used a selection box to select all the surviving green dots representing the Tigaden people's fleet on the screen.

【 Tigaden Exile Fleet 】

【 Combat Power: 500 】

50k versus 500.

In "stellar universe", this was a numerical gap sufficient to make any player feel despair.

It meant that one side could annihilate the other without taking a single scratch, without even a ripple on its shields.

But Lei Wen knew that these cold numbers could not even begin to describe the suffocating, true technological gap in the real universe.

The combat power in the game was merely an abstract value calculated based on parameters like weapon damage, shield values, and fire rate.

In reality, this gap was exponential.

The 【Reversal Force Field】 used by the sifidia might just be a module with some stat bonuses or penalties in the game.

But in reality, it was a god-tier technology capable of locally editing physical laws, turning the enemy's kinetic weapons to its own use.

That 【Void Beam】 might just be a main bow cannon with high damage numbers in the game.

But in reality, it was a linear, controllable, directional singularity stretching technology, an ultimate weapon capable of decomposing matter directly into atoms and devouring everything.

"This is not war..." Lei Wen muttered to himself, "This is a dimensional strike."

He did not doubt for a second that even if the number of ships belonging to the Tigaden people were multiplied by a hundred, reaching two hundred thousand, the outcome would not change in the slightest.

They would only last a few seconds longer before that elegant and lethal black beam, and then be completely erased from the universe in the same meaningless fashion.

Numbers had lost all meaning in the face of absolute technological qualitative change.

When the Tigaden people's fleet's weak signal of surrender appeared in the game log as text, Lei Wen seemed to wake from a long movie.

He closed the battle log and pulled his perspective back to the macro Star Map.

The ten blue dots representing the Faleim Far Star Fleet were surrounding the hundreds of remaining green dots of the Tigaden people's fleet.

And at the other end of the Star Map, a tiny star system marked as the Solar System rotated quietly.

A fact flooded Lei Wen's cognition like a cold tide.

This universe was much more crowded than he had imagined.

What shocked him the most was not the power of the Faleim People, but the very existence of the Tigaden civilization.

A civilization capable of rudimentary interstellar travel, possessing over two thousand starships, lived just 10.5 light-years away from the Solar System.

10.5 light-years.

On the scale of the universe, this was "next door".

It was the distance where you could see the lights in your neighbor's window from your own balcony.

Yet Human Civilization knew nothing about it.

Our "Sky Eye", our "James Webb", all the deep-space detection equipment we prided ourselves on had failed to discover this massive fleet that had been sailing in the dark for decades.

We were like a primitive tribe living on an isolated island, satisfied with the patch of sky we could see, never realizing that on the other side of the sea, a more powerful civilization had long since built giant ships capable of long voyages.

For the first time, Lei Wen felt the insignificance and ignorance of Human Civilization so clearly.

He began to re-evaluate the gap in strength between the three civilizations.

The Faleim Civilization was the "god" standing at the very top of the food chain.

They possessed weapons that could modify physical laws, had the capability for faster-than-light travel, and thinking back to the game's descriptions of disaster technologies and ascension technologies... their technology had already touched the essence of the universe.

And the Tigaden civilization, although as fragile as a newborn baby in front of the Faleim People, if compared to Human Civilization...

…then they were the undisputed giants.

Lei Wen clicked on the scanned information about the Tigaden civilization in the game; these were data collected by the sensors of the Far Star Fleet before and after the battle.

He saw a logic-driven, highly centralized social structure that had evolved to adapt to universal interstellar navigation. There was no endless internal friction or strife; all resources and manpower served the single highest goal: "survival".

He saw the massive colony ships named "Generation Arks". Although these ships were clumsy and backward, they could travel continuously in the universe for hundreds of years without structural damage, which meant their materials science and engineering levels far exceeded those of Earth.

He saw giant ecological circulation systems capable of sustaining hundreds of thousands of people living in completely closed environments for decades or centuries. This meant they had completely mastered the technology of controllable ecosystems, and this technology... Earth's scientists couldn't even build a small model in a laboratory that could run stably for more than a year.

He also saw technical data on life-support stasis pods. Although it was only a basic introduction to the principles, it was enough to prove that they had mastered the method of reducing a living organism's metabolism to a minimum to survive long interstellar journeys.

And what about Human Civilization?

As late as 2025, our top aerospace agencies were still struggling with how to safely send a few astronauts to neighboring Mars and have them survive there for a few months.

The gap between the two sides was no longer in the same dimension.

Lei Wen couldn't help but begin a thought experiment.

If the Faleim Civilization had not appeared, if everything had developed along its original trajectory...

The Tigaden fleet, this massive exile fleet, traveling at 8% of the speed of light over a distance of 10.5 light-years, would take about 130 years.

One hundred and thirty years later, when their fleet appeared at the edge of the Solar System, what would Earth look like?

Perhaps technology would have made great strides, perhaps humans would have established a Mars base.

But would that be enough?

Lei Wen held the most pessimistic attitude towards this.

He could not imagine a divided, factionalized Human Civilization, constantly fighting over limited resources, having any chance of winning against a united, massive alien fleet with overwhelming space technology.

What kind of contact would that be?

Peace? Perhaps.

But when a starving civilization that had been in exile for hundreds of years saw a paradise that was rich in resources, vibrant, and almost undefended, could they really suppress their most primitive desires?

War? That would be a slaughter without suspense. Earth's nuclear weapons might not even be able to penetrate the enemy fleet's defensive fire net.

And the opponent would only need to throw the ore collected from all their mining ships into Earth's gravity well to easily smash Human Civilization back to the Stone Age.

The best result might be that humans are kept in captivity or colonized.

The worst result would be complete purification and replacement.

Cold sweat seeped from Lei Wen's back.

He had always viewed the arrival of the Faleim People as an imminent doomsday crisis.

But now he realized that even earlier, at a time he didn't know about, another bullet aimed at Earth had already been fired.

And no one knew how many "bullets" were currently in flight or aimed at Earth.

Lei Wen patted his forehead, hiding all the horrifying thoughts in his mind deep down.

He continued to look at the screen.

After the Tigaden civilization was defeated, the interrogation of the Tigaden people by the Far Star Fleet commander Talon appeared on Lei Wen's computer screen in the form of an event pop-up in the game.

In "stellar universe", when a player's fleet completed exploration, archaeology, or special interactions with other civilizations, the results would be fed back to the player in this form.

Lei Wen read the event content carefully.

The Tigaden civilization originated from Tigaden B, the second planet of the star "Tigaden". According to its geological records, for four billion years, this planet had been a habitable planet with a mild climate and vibrant life, its environment highly similar to Earth.

In the billions of years of evolutionary epic on this planet, two species finally reached the stars through their intelligence.

One was the Tigaden people, an insectoid race that evolved from arthropods, possessing sturdy exoskeletons and a highly socialized collective consciousness.

The other intelligent species was called the Mole people by them; according to the Tigaden people's description, it was a mammalian race that evolved from animals similar to Earth's rodents, possessing immense individual creativity and a desire for expansion.

The two species evolved into two vastly different forms of civilization.

The Tigaden people established the "Sacred Hive", which was hierarchical like a beehive, focused on the collective, and valued order.

The Mole people developed the "Tribal Alliance", which was chaotic yet vibrant, with individual freedom and technological explosion as its core.

In the tens of thousands of years of recorded history, these two civilization forms were like light and shadow, fighting endlessly in every corner of the planet.

They fought for resources, for living space, and even more, for the right to define the future evolutionary path of this planet.

Three hundred years ago, a global nuclear war that the Tigaden people called the "Final Fire" put an end to this struggle that had lasted for tens of thousands of years.

Both sides launched all the nuclear weapons they could fire at each other's cities and industrial centers.

The global nuclear winter and the subsequent radioactive dust extinguished over 90% of the life on Tigaden B, including the Mole civilization, which was more sensitive to radiation; they disappeared from the planet completely and cleanly.

The Tigaden people, who possessed sturdy exoskeletons and stronger resistance to harsh environments, survived by relying on the massive network of nests hidden deep underground.

When they crawled out from the underground and stepped onto the surface of their home planet again, they were greeted by a dead, radiation-filled wasteland world that had been thoroughly plowed by nuclear weapons.

The harsh natural environment and the bone-deep fear of the "Final Fire" completely changed the evolutionary trajectory of the Tigaden people's civilization.

They turned their gaze to the starry sky.

However, fate did not give this long-suffering civilization a chance to catch its breath.

About 150 years ago, their sun "Tigaden"—an unstable red dwarf—entered an active phase.

Solar flares became more and more frequent and concentrated.

The violent stellar wind, mixed with high-energy particles, was like an invisible giant hand in the universe, beginning to constantly strip away the planetary atmosphere of Tigaden B, which had already become fragile from the nuclear war.

The home planet was dying. This time not because of war, but because of the universe itself.

This "death sentence" from the star instead became the final catalyst for the Tigaden people's escape plan.

They turned their entire civilization into a giant machine with a near-paranoid fanaticism.

They built massive launch sites on the wasteland, smelted alloys in the radioactive dust, and designed "Generation Arks" in the underground nests.

Finally, 10 years ago, the last batch of starships struggled to launch before a super solar flare that could be called doomsday, sailed into the dark universe, and formed the exile fleet that Lei Wen saw today.

According to the description of "Vorlag", the atmosphere of Tigaden B had completely disappeared, the surface was thoroughly exposed to cosmic radiation, and it had become a true dead planet.

But not all Tigaden people had left.

Beneath the surface of that dead planet, in the underground city clusters they had spent hundreds of years building, resembling giant anthills, there were still tens of millions of Tigaden people who had not received a "ticket", stubbornly surviving by relying on geothermal energy and the last ecological circulation systems.

They were the abandoned kin, and also the last grave keepers of the civilization.

"This is a civilization with tenacious vitality, but technologically extremely backward, and full of trauma and stress responses. Their social structure has become extremely xenophobic and bellicose due to long-term suffering. They view all unknown external contact as a potential, lethal threat, which explains why they would engage in such irrational aggressive behavior."

"Recommendation: Execute 「Protocol No. 7 for Primitive Civilizations」: Without affecting the main mission, observe and control the remaining forces of this civilization. Their flagship and leaders will be detained by us to obtain more intelligence about this universe. The remaining exile ships will be disarmed and sail to Faleimland under our surveillance. The surviving Tigaden people will serve as indentured slaves to contribute to the construction of the Faleim Civilization."

This was the evaluation of the Tigaden civilization by the military council of the Falaim Scientific Integration Nation and the Far Star Fleet commander Talon.

【 Event Ended 】

Lei Wen read the entire event report word by word.

His heart was filled with mixed feelings.

He saw the magnificent, tragic epic of a civilization filled with blood and fire.

A ten-thousand-year war between two intelligent species, a world-destroying nuclear winter, a dying home planet, and a grand interstellar escape that gambled the fate of the entire race...

Any fragment of this story would be enough to become a grand science fiction masterpiece.

But now, it was just presented in his game pop-up in cold, objective text.

And all the remaining people of this civilization would be enslaved by another civilization.