Chapter 45
In addition to the invention of quantum computers, another indispensable condition for the Milky Way to enter the era of the Grand Alliance is the breakthrough technological progress of space jump points.
The universe is like a dark and vast ocean, and the stars are the small pearls scattered in it. From a distance, the stars are bright and lively, but when you get closer, you will find that the distance between the stars is so far that it makes you despair. Humans are just invisible microorganisms living on the pearls. They entertain themselves and live comfortably on their own pearls, but if they suddenly want to climb onto another pearl, they often cannot do it even if they spend their entire lives.
Therefore, a stable space jump point, that is, a wormhole, is needed.
The Milky Way has almost the same number of black holes as its stars. Some of these black holes connect two spaces that are far apart. When an object enters a wormhole from one end, it will be ejected from the other end. There is almost no time interval. This is a wormhole. But most wormholes are very small. They may suddenly disappear and then appear from a very far place, with almost no regularity. Even if the wormhole is large enough and stable, it is extremely dangerous to travel through it. A long time ago, many people who were accidentally sucked into a wormhole were either instantly scorched by ultra-high frequency rays, or pulled into long strips thinner than pasta by strong gravity, or decomposed into elementary particles the moment they were ejected. Only a very few lucky people can survive after the space-time displacement.
Needless to say, the Interstellar Alliance has devoted a lot of effort to the study of wormholes. After spending unimaginable time, money and countless sacrifices, they finally found a way to expand, stabilize and reduce the risk of traversal of wormholes, and then established a huge network of interstellar routes. The Interstellar Alliance was established on this interstellar route constructed by countless wormholes. Its radiation covers only about one-tenth of the Milky Way. Therefore, only this one-tenth of the Milky Way has been explored by the Alliance, and the habitable stars in this area have basically joined the Interstellar Alliance. There are naturally many habitable stars in the remaining nine-tenths of the star field, and a large part of them may have developed brilliant civilizations (such as Rong Yuan’s hometown Earth), but because they are too far away from the wormhole route, it is difficult to be detected, communicate and establish a solid and close connection, so they have not been included in the Interstellar Alliance.
In the current interstellar alliance, "discovering new wormholes" is still a mission that will never be cancelled. Not only will many countries send professionals and troops to explore, but many free mercenaries, pirates, businessmen, etc. will also pay attention to this information. In case a stable wormhole can be discovered, the resulting world-renowned fame and astronomical profits will be enough to benefit people for a lifetime.
However, it is disappointing that although the Interstellar Alliance has many wormholes, these wormholes can only be used for space jumps. There is no trace of the legendary space-time wormhole, only some specious legends. Moreover, all these wormholes only connect two spaces in the Milky Way, and none of them lead to the extragalactic galaxy.
The Milky Way spans 160,000 light years, and the nearest extragalactic galaxy to the Milky Way is a full 2.54 million light years away!
Let alone more than two million light years, even if it was only ten light years, if you only rely on spaceships, even the fastest spaceship in the Interstellar Alliance would take most of a person's life to reach it. Two million and five hundred thousand light years, that is simply an insurmountable chasm!
Therefore, in order to reach the extragalactic galaxy, we must first discover the wormhole leading to the extragalactic galaxy!
People have given this imaginary wormhole a name, which is "Star Bridge".
In the vast Milky Way, there is only one place where everyone is sure that there must be a Star Bridge, and that is the Pillars of Creation.
Nebulae are not only the cradles of stars, but also contain countless treasures - strange creatures, rare minerals, stellar cores that have not yet grown, etc. Therefore, although the vicinity of nebulae is dangerous, many gold diggers linger around all year round. Then someone discovered that near the Pillars of Creation, you can occasionally pick up some strange items that are not in the Milky Way and can show traces of civilization.
For example, Rong Yuan once got a secret box, which looked like a black marble on the surface, but had a vast and independent space inside. Even a starship could be contained in it without any change in mass, and one could even use thoughts as the key to open it. This thing was completely different from the pure technological civilization of the Milky Way , and it was no wonder that everyone who had come into contact with it believed that it must have come from an extragalactic galaxy, and some even believed that it might have come from another dimension.
At that time, Rong Yuan's Feiyan Team was one of the best among the free mercenaries. Not many people had seen them, but their legend was widely spread in the alliance. As the Feiyan Team became more and more famous and powerful, the tasks they were given became simpler and simpler. Escorting Serinda was a rare and dangerous mission, but that was because they were fighting against national forces and regular troops, the most elite in the galaxy, and in the end they succeeded! The Feiyan Team was bored with this lack of challenge. They were not interested in the star fields that the alliance had already explored and could easily find a lot of information on the star network. The star fields that had not been explored lacked wormholes and were too far away, so they were unwilling to spend the rest of their lives on the road. So everyone set their sights on the Pillars of Creation.
They are all homeless and helpless people. Even if they end up in an extragalactic galaxy and cannot return to their hometown for the rest of their lives, it would not be a pity.
Although the members of the Feiyan team were all arrogant and thought that nothing could stump them, no one thought that exploring the Star Bridge could be successful in one try. In fact, if you don't fail eight or ten times, you'd be embarrassed to say that you've entered the Pillar of Creation. Therefore, when the first two explorations were terminated due to accidents, everyone was not discouraged and quickly regrouped to start the third exploration. Except for Amirida and Pari, who went to a nearby habitable planet to repair the small spaceship used for landing because it was severely damaged, the others drove the main spaceship into the Pillar of Creation from the periphery.
In the initial section of the journey, they followed the route that had been explored the previous two times. The atmosphere in the team was relatively relaxed and cheerful. In the communication channel, Feng Yin was chatting about interesting things he saw on the star network, Tata and Reina were arguing jokingly, Dunke was worried about whether Yisli could successfully catch the princess, and Balabi wanted Rong Yuan and others to catch a small creature in the nebula to see how it tasted.
Then, there was the accident.
The supernova explosion was quite close to their location at the time from the perspective of the macroscopic distance of the universe, but it was actually very far away from the human distance scale. The exploding star was hidden deep in the Eagle Nebula, and the dense clouds and dust blocked all sight. When the explosion occurred, neither Rong Yuan and others nor the various organizations in the Interstellar Alliance noticed it at all.
Until the blazing white light and jets pierced the darkness and tore through the nebula at an astonishing speed and appeared before them.
The energy ejected in those few seconds of a supernova explosion even exceeds the total energy released by a star like the sun in its lifetime!
"grass!"
"Captain, help—"
"What?"
"No--"
The crowd only had time to let out a brief cry of surprise, and most people hadn't even reacted at all. As the white light shone in their eyes, the terrifying jet had already swallowed them up.
Perhaps it was because he was on the verge of death, at that moment, Rong Yuan felt that time seemed to be stretched , and everything happened extremely quickly, and yet seemed very slow.
He saw that the powerful energy and shock waves even tore apart the space. Black holes of varying sizes were like bubbles floating on the rising tide. Before the jet arrived, half of the spaceship had been swallowed up by the black hole. The hull broke into several pieces, and an unsuspecting figure was thrown out from the crack. Before he could figure out who he was, he had been beaten into a sieve by the neutrino flow, and not even a drop of blood could be seen.
Although the spaceship was destroyed in the blink of an eye, the ship's built-in stress defense system was fortunately still intact. The broken defense shield deployed instantly, buying them less than a second.
In such a short time, they could neither escape nor fight back. Rong Yuan did not even have the time to take out the "Book of Merits". Under the destructive power of nature, the string force he controlled was like a candle in the wind, which would be blown away at the slightest blow. The only outcome seemed to be death.
However, the plot did not develop in this way.
In that less than one second, the six mechas that were originally flying in a V-formation behind Rong Yuan made exactly the same reaction - they flew to Rong Yuan's back at the fastest speed, formed a line, deployed the strongest defense, and faced the torrent that broke through the defense shield head-on.
Rong Yuan's eyes were bloodshot!
The six mechas were destroyed instantly. The next second, Rong Yuan felt that his body had melted in the light.
The white light retreated, the flames shrank, and the last mecha once again turned into a ball of fire before his eyes.
The pointer showing the time suddenly jumped back one notch.
——Time went back silently for one second!
Pea jumped out of Rongyuan's arms, opened its arms, and its body turned into thousands of threads, wrapping Rongyuan like a cocoon.
The jet was turbulent and mighty, destroying all objects it encountered along the way, except for a tiny cocoon that floated up and down, like a small leaf in the waves, and was pushed away into the distance by the waves.
