Chapter 1498 — The Mother Planet Barrier

"We have not yet achieved full control, but progress is smooth," Gao Yang said, holding nothing back in this extraordinary assembly. "Cecil has been working with the Deep Blue Well and the Deep Sea Kingdom. We have taken over the technology left behind after the fall of the Sentinel and the Order of the End of All Things—this has not been fully publicized, but everyone in the upper echelons of the alliance should be aware of it. To date, we have deciphered a portion of the basic protocols among those runestones, and have relinked most of the runestone nodes through several key channels. The subsequent work of command decryption and authority replacement is underway—especially in command decryption, where I have certain unique... advantages."

As he spoke, he raised a finger and tapped his own head. Understanding dawned quickly on the faces around the round table—by now, at least among these people, the connection between Gao Yang Cecil and the Navigators' legacy was no secret.

"At present, the specific decryption and takeover work is handled by the Deep Blue Well, while the Deep Sea Kingdom continues to search for and locate those nodes in the Deep Blue Ley Lines that remain out of contact, and keeps deploying signal relays to strengthen our control over the entire system," Gao Yang continued. "In fact, we do not need to control all the nodes, nor do we need to decrypt and take over the entire system the Sentinel left behind—after all, we are not planning to permanently destroy the world the way the Sentinel did.

"As things stand, it seems we need only grasp roughly two-thirds of the nodes and a few key system authorities to activate the 'Mother Planet Barrier,' and this work is entirely expected to be completed within a year..."

"But what if the number of nodes really is insufficient?" Luoyan frowned. "From what I know, quite a few of the nodes the Sentinel deployed back then were destroyed in confusion by the sirens, and some were intercepted by the allied forces before they could even be deployed. Your progress in reactivating the lost nodes is smooth, yes, but what if in the end we find that the total number of nodes in the Deep Blue Ley Lines is not enough to build the Mother Planet Barrier? By then we may no longer have the chance to turn back."

"Simple—runestones are something even a pack of cultists could manufacture. Why can't we?" Gao Yang spread his hands. "Over the past few months, the sirens have completed scan-slices of every salvaged node. Through multiple cross-comparisons and data reconstruction, they successfully recovered the complete blueprint of the node runestones. In a sense, we should thank the Sentinel—to enable the technologically limited cultists to be of use to it, it thoroughly modified the Navigators' blueprints. The construction and processing requirements of those nodes are, in the eyes of arcanist engineers, not difficult at all.

"So if the runestone nodes in the Deep Blue Ley Lines cannot meet the minimum activation requirements for the Mother Planet Barrier, then we will manufacture new nodes ourselves to make up the number—though ideally the existing nodes would suffice, since the cost of manufacturing new ones is hardly low."

"In other words, we can not only use the Sentinel's 'legacy' to activate the Mother Planet Barrier, but this technology is, at the level of basic blueprints, controllable and reproducible," Bayar, who had scarcely spoken until now, suddenly said, fixing his eyes on Gao Yang's. "We can fully understand the structure of these things, analyze their principles, and Cecil is already doing so—is that right?"

"Yes," Gao Yang nodded. He well knew why the dragon leader before him had specifically emphasized this point. "I do not care for things that are mysterious and uncontrollable—though many believe mysterious ancient legacies are somehow 'classy,' I prefer things that can be explained clearly by blueprints, produced and reproduced in factories, studied and discussed in laboratories. Such things are more reassuring to use."

"If this is truly feasible... then the Mother Planet Barrier does indeed have indisputable advantages," Luoyan said, stroking his chin, his expression thoughtful. "In terms of reliability, nothing we build could be 'sturdier' than a Mother Planet Barrier sustained by a planetary power system... Or put another way, if even something like the Mother Planet Barrier were breached, then the shelter-city network, the Gondor Barrier, and the Tarrond Great Shield would all be no better than paper;

"And in terms of the 'shelter' scale, needless to say, the Mother Planet Barrier can of course ensure everyone's safety... In fact, apart from the need to keep the protective system running, the lives of everyone in the world would be entirely unaffected by the demon tide. Production need not be interrupted, social structures need not change, there would be no supply crisis, and no worry about the chaos of order under shelter conditions..."

"Yes—'production as usual beneath the barrier'—this is in fact a crucial point. In a sense, maintaining the order of production is precisely what ensures the Mother Planet Barrier's 'disaster resilience,'" Gao Yang nodded slightly. "Because all production and research continue as normal, even if a crisis occurs we have a chance to respond. Even if nodes in the ley lines are damaged, we can simply start the factories and manufacture replacements; if other parts fail, we can find ways to repair them, to organize manpower to study and solve them—as long as the entire barrier does not collapse in an instant, we still have a chance.

"And considering the scale and strength of the entire Mother Planet Barrier, if something could truly make it collapse in an instant... then I suppose we would not die with any grievance, would we?"

Gao Yang's words clearly struck a chord in everyone, for what he pointed out was precisely the pain that no "shelter" could avoid—when the unexpected truly happens, do those huddled inside a "shelter" still retain even a shred of control over their own fate?

The smaller and more flimsy the shelter, the more it must face this "cave predicament"—nowhere to hide, nowhere to flee. However great one's abilities, they cannot be brought to bear, cannot be brought to respond. A cramped shelter is a shell, but that shell can only make those within feel deeply uneasy, and in the moment of crisis, a profound sense of powerlessness—because inside a narrow "shell," there is simply no way to repair your shelter; you can only watch helplessly as it collapses.

But beneath the Mother Planet Barrier, the alliance nations would retain all their social production and research capacity. Even if the unexpected occurred, a cornered beast would still have the strength for one final struggle—and a struggle with everything it had.

Of course, as Gao Yang's final sentence implied, even if the "Mother Planet Barrier" were truly built, even if the cornered beast truly retained the chance for one final all-out struggle, the unexpected might still occur. There might truly come a day when the combined strength of all mortals could not avert the end... But if that day truly came, at least civilization would die standing.

"Perhaps there will come a day when all our efforts cannot save our civilization. Perhaps even the Mother Planet Barrier will fail to hold back the end. Perhaps after that day, no tombstone belonging to Loren will remain in the sea of stars, and no one will remember that this season of civilization ever existed," Gao Yang broke the silence after a brief hush around the round table. He stood at his place, both hands braced on the tabletop. "But I hope that at least when that day comes, we will be worthy of summing up the road we have walked in a single brief sentence: we did everything in our power—not 'we could have done better.'