Humanity is missing, luckily I have billions of clones-Chapter 393: Towards Galactic Heart

As death approached, Tom’s heart gradually regained its calm.

Even now, he did not regret the choice he had made.

If given another chance, Tom knew clearly that he would still choose to carry out this mission.

Being retaliated against by the Destroyer Civilization at this moment could at most be described as a low-probability event occurring, and he simply had bad luck.

If he had abandoned the moral and value concepts inherited from Human Civilization that he had upheld for such a low-probability event, then he would not be worthy of being a human.

Furthermore, the Destroyer Civilization regarded all intelligent beings in the entire Milky Way, except themselves—whether legitimate intelligent civilizations or Mechanical Disaster life forms—as enemies, and would launch destructive strikes upon encountering them.

This meant that as long as he wanted to develop in this Milky Way, he would eventually confront the Destroyer Civilization one day.

Therefore, helping the Red Star Alliance and disrupting the Destroyer Civilization’s plan was also helping himself.

Any sufficiently rational civilization would make such a choice.

"My compatriots, farewell.

If I have a future, I swear I will avenge you.

Destroyer Civilization, you had better utterly destroy me this time.

As long as you leave me a single opportunity, in the future, I will let you know what true cruelty is..."

...

Tom sat quietly in his seat, silently watching the vast, pale blue starry sky outside the viewport, feeling the violent energy coming from all directions, and calmly awaiting fate’s judgment.

But at this moment, for some unknown reason, the blue outside the viewport suddenly vanished.

Just like a tide suddenly receding, the color of the entire universe in Tom’s eyes instantly dimmed, changing from blue back to white, then to red, light red, and finally disappearing completely.

In just a few seconds, the entire universe returned to its vastness and profound depth.

The scattered starlight reappeared, as if all the previous changes were his illusion and had never happened.

Most of the piercing alarm sounds also instantly disappeared at this moment.

Hmm?

Tom gently stood up, walked to the viewport, and stared blankly at the calm and deep universe outside the window.

A piece of information, in the form of a gravitational wave, was instantly detected by Tom.

After decryption, an incomplete message appeared before Tom.

It was only half a sentence.

"Don’t stop, don’t look back, keep going forward, keep going, keep going.

The Destroyer Civilization was..."

A flash of realization crossed Tom’s mind.

He probably knew what was going on.

This message was sent in Cloud language.

This clearly indicated who the sender of this message was.

The Red Star Alliance.

Then, the one who blocked the Destroyer Civilization must also be the Red Star Alliance.

Only the Red Star Alliance, also a Space-level civilization, had enough strength to save him.

So... had the Red Star Nation escaped from the Destroyer Civilization’s blockade?

Had the Demonic Eye Nation been destroyed?

Tom didn’t know.

He only knew that the Red Star Nation, by blocking the Destroyer Civilization’s fatal blow to him, must be taking an enormous risk.

From a moral standpoint, since he risked his life to save the Red Star Alliance back then, it was perfectly reasonable and expected for the Red Star Alliance to now risk their lives to rescue him.

But Tom knew clearly that many things are not done simply because they are reasonable or should be done.

Not to mention between civilizations, even between individual intelligent beings, how many acts of ingratitude have there not been?

At this moment, the vast and deep starry river outside the window was still so quiet it was almost dead silent.

But Tom knew that in places he couldn’t see or perceive, dangerous confrontations beyond his current comprehension were taking place.

Standing before the viewport, Tom softly said, "Thank you.

Red Star Alliance, I did not betray your kindness, and you did not betray mine.

You are our Human Civilization’s, and my... true friends."

The Red Star Alliance had bought him extremely valuable escape time, and he should take advantage of this time to escape as quickly as possible.

However, his fleet had already reached its maximum speed of 87% light speed.

If he continued to increase speed, not only would the speed not increase much, but it would also lead to frequent accidents.

After comprehensive consideration, Tom could only maintain the current cruising speed, "slowly" escaping.

External situations were beyond his interference, so all he could do was manage internal affairs well.

Tom immediately controlled numerous clones, using Primal as a tool, to fully repair the damaged spacecraft from the previous stage and eliminate hidden dangers.

At the same time, he directly intervened with his control into the various races, assisting with management while also allocating large amounts of resources to fully ensure stable order and sufficient material supply within the various shelters, reducing potential casualties and losses caused by this unexpected event.

For the entire year that followed, nothing changed externally.

The starry sky remained vast and serene.

After comprehensive judgment, Tom lifted the state of emergency, and thus, the intelligent beings of various races, who had lived in the shelters for a full year, were finally allowed to leave and began to resume normal production and living order.

Tom explained this disaster as the fleet encountering a special astronomical event, and that the disaster had now passed.

Only the high-ranking officials of the various races knew that the danger had never truly left.

Time quietly slipped away amidst the trepidation of all those in the know, and in the blink of an eye, another 100 years passed.

According to the conversion of relativistic effects, over 200 years had passed in external time, and his fleet had traveled over 170 light-years.

This distance might still be nothing for a Space-level civilization.

But since they hadn’t pursued him for so many years, perhaps... this crisis had been resolved?

With a cautious mindset, after multiple discussions, Tom finally made a decision.

While ensuring that the general direction of continuing to track the human fleet remained unchanged, he activated random maneuvering mode for the fleet.

Thus, after centuries of silence, the countless engines restarted, beginning to slowly change the direction of the fleet with only one ten-thousandth of their maximum thrust.

At one ten-thousandth of the thrust, the acceleration it could impart to the fleet was only 0.12 mm/s^2.

Converted to gravity, it was only about 8.1 ten-thousandths of Earth’s gravity, so slight that it could not even be felt by the human body.

From the outside, the engines appeared as if they hadn’t started at all, emitting almost no light.

The exhaust plumes were so faint that specialized instruments were needed to detect them.

The engines ran like this for a full year, giving the fleet a transverse velocity of approximately 3.8 km/s.

Afterward, Tom randomly selected another thrust direction and continued weak propulsion for another year, repeating this process, occasionally interspersed with periods of inertial navigation where the engines were completely shut down.

This massive fleet now resembled a headless fly, moving left, then right, then up, then down in the vast starry sky, with no discernible pattern to its movements.

Thus, over 600 years quietly passed, which, when converted to external time, was nearly 1,300 years, and Tom had traversed over 1,100 light-years.

But Tom still felt somewhat insecure.

In the subsequent journey, Tom maintained this random maneuvering and cautious mode, traveling for another 300-plus years, covering a distance of approximately 500 light-years, until the Flying Star was completely depleted and the warehouses in the various aerospace carriers and transport ships were completely empty, before finally deciding to find a solar system to dock.

In total, since encountering the Destroyer Civilization, his fleet had traveled nearly 1,700 light-years.

If this distance was still insufficient to escape the Destroyer Civilization’s pursuit, then... Tom had no other options but to accept his fate.

"A distance of 1,700 light-years... adding to the years I pursued the Purple Moon Civilization, and even earlier, avoiding the Mechanical Disaster, in total, my distance from the Solar System is already over 3,200 light-years..."

At this location, over 3,200 light-years away, the sun was already extremely dim, with an apparent magnitude of only about 16.

The larger the magnitude number, the dimmer the star.

On Earth, under extremely good weather conditions, the dimmest star visible to the naked eye is about magnitude 6.

Even with the vision of the clones, which had undergone multiple genetic optimizations, the sun was completely invisible.

It had completely merged into the vast sea of stars.

Only by using a large telescope could Tom see that dim yellow star.

Sighing inwardly, Tom turned his gaze to the stars ahead of the fleet’s path.

The closer to the Galactic Heart, the greater the stellar density.

Just like the starfield where Tom was currently located, because it was 3,200 light-years closer to the Galactic Heart than the Sun, the stellar density had significantly increased.

The stellar density around the Sun is approximately 0.004 stars per cubic light-year.

Here, the stellar density has increased to about 0.01 stars per cubic light-year, meaning on average, there is one star within a sphere with a radius of 2.9 light-years.

The mutual distances between stars here are also relatively closer.

The distance between any two closest stars generally does not exceed 4 light-years.

This manifests in the scene seen by the naked eye as an increasing abundance of stars and a more brilliant space.

However, it also means that the interstellar medium density here is higher, and the radiation is stronger.

"More stars are good, more stars mean more interference, and I can hide better."

With this thought, Tom finally selected a solar system with a red dwarf as its primary star, surrounded by a total of six planets, and began to decelerate towards it.

It would take approximately seven more years of deceleration before final docking.

Gazing at the increasingly bright star, Tom felt a hint of anticipation.

During these years of full-speed escape, Tom’s clones, along with numerous intelligent life scientists, had fully digested and absorbed all the technological data from the Purple Moon Civilization.

They had even gone a step further, completing research in all valuable fields within the scientific framework that unifies the electromagnetic, weak, and strong fundamental forces as its basic physics.

At this very moment, unless a breakthrough in fundamental physics occurred again, Tom’s technology would not be able to advance any further.

In recent decades, not only the intelligent life scientists but even Tom himself had reached a point of having little to do.

There was truly nothing left to do.

Even the engineering-level tasks, such as designing experiments and engineering projects that might help them unify gravity and advance to a Gravity Civilization, had all been completed.

All that was lacking now was one thing.

Sufficient resources and energy.

Once these were available, the experimental equipment and large-scale scientific devices that currently existed only on paper, as well as research in numerous disciplines and fields, could immediately begin.

It was in this situation that Tom’s fleet finally decelerated to a speed of only a dozen kilometers per second, successfully docking next to the planet.

Looking down at this ordinary, equally barren and desolate solar system, which had likely never been visited by intelligent life since its birth, Tom was filled with excitement.

"Let’s achieve the breakthrough from the Strong Nuclear to the gravity stage in this solar system. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

I command... Gravitational Engineering, activate!"

Accompanied by cheers erupting from every residential spacecraft, one industrial spacecraft after another, along with scientific research spacecraft, transport spacecraft, and others, left the main fleet and flew towards every valuable planet.