"Star Spirit, how long has it been?" This was the first question Chen Feng asked.
"It’s been ten years, three months, twenty-five days, thirteen hours, and thirty-six minutes since before you went to sleep." The Star Spirit gave an extremely precise response.
But Chen Feng’s attention was all on the first number.
For him, it was just the blink of an eye.
He exhaled slowly, and the self-check light screen had already popped up in front of him. Over the past ten years, his body hadn’t had any issues, as he was already modified, and he didn’t even need to adapt.
"What’s the directive?" he asked again.
"Assemble." The Star Spirit’s voice was very cold.
In fact, the personality and voice of each person’s personal Star Spirit could be adjusted, and most people’s Star Spirits even had exclusive names.
However, Chen Feng, like most people who followed Shen Shi, inherited Shen Shi’s view on AI.
An AI without a true self is just a tool.
Upon hearing the command, he left the hibernation pod immediately, even without needing to rest. After packing up his training equipment, he headed straight to the assembly point.
He found that it wasn’t just him; hundreds or even thousands of people throughout the training base had awakened.
And they were all the very best batch.
He could even clearly feel the Primordial Energy fluctuations of the others.
He suddenly understood that it was probably time to activate them.
Feeling slightly excited in his heart, all the hard training for ten years without rest, even staying away from family, away from this drastically changing society, was precisely to meet the standard, to once again step into the interstellar stage and truly qualify to serve humanity.
When everyone had gathered, the next task popped up in front of Chen Feng.
"Get accustomed to society."
In other words, he had to go home first.
Thinking of his family, he couldn’t help but exhale.
Chen Feng was the second eldest among four brothers, coming from a rural area. After finishing high school, he joined the army. Because of his outstanding performance, diligence in learning, and talent with mechas, it took him less than ten years to become a special forces soldier, and a sniper at that.
Adding up the years, with these ten included, it had been about fifteen or sixteen years since he last went home.
"Old Chen, we’re from the same town, let’s go together." After the dismissal, a person next to him came up.
"Okay." Chen Feng recognized him; his name was Sun Yan, a very ordinary name. Although he called them fellow townsmen, they were from the same city district but not even the same county.
Unlike him, who had outstanding performance from the start in the army, Sun Yan only joined the army after the Starry Era began, steadily rising due to his exceptional talent with Primordial Energy.
Their military ranks differed by quite a margin.
However, during interactions, it wasn’t necessary to strictly adhere to ranks, so addressing him as Old Chen wasn’t unusual.
"Ten years, huh," Sun Yan felt a bit of the apprehension of returning home after a long time, "Not a single word for ten years, I don’t even know how things are at home, my sister might’ve even gotten married."
Sun Yan’s family only had one sister.
When he first joined the army, his parents actually opposed it, but at that time humanity was facing the threat from the Worren Fleet, and he was full of enthusiasm.
"Let’s go." Chen Feng spoke little, and his actions were even more decisive. The two directly took a small flying shuttle towards Blue Star.
As they approached, they could deeply feel the difference in Blue Star now.
The blue protective shield aside, the most notable difference wasn’t the more than two hundred Space Cities but the ships constantly shuttling between various ports.
"Star Spirit, give a simple introduction to the current state of Human Civilization." Chen Feng said.
"Yes, currently Human Civilization has a total population of 10.3 billion, with only 5.6 billion residing on Blue Star. The remaining 3.6 billion people are scattered across the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn’s four major space areas..."
As the Star Spirit introduced and with the scene before them, Chen Feng could clearly feel the current strengths and shortcomings of Human Civilization.
The strength lay, of course, in the various Space Bases and Space Factories.
The dense array of ships before him weren’t for transporting people, but goods.
Most were core industrial products from Blue Star and core products from Space Factories.
But the shortcomings were also particularly obvious.
—Insufficient population.
Although a nearly 50% increase in ten years sounds impressive, this population is fundamentally insufficient to utilize the advanced equipment brought by the Commander-in-Chief.
Early on, before the closed training, Chen Feng had already roughly understood the Commander-in-Chief’s vision, and now he could almost guess the main reason for calling them out.
Sure enough, it was truly time to prepare for entering the interstellar realm.
Chen Feng’s heart burned slightly.
For someone like him, nothing is more exciting than seeing his country, his civilization, growing stronger and stronger.
"The changes are really huge," Sun Yan looked at the Space City passing by, unable to hide his amazement, "Such drastic changes in just ten years, I can’t even imagine how it will be in another hundred years."
"This is nothing," Chen Feng spoke up for once, "Haven’t you seen the Daike’s bases? They can jump, use curvature navigation; the Daike Civilization has set them up at every node."
"That’s true... If it weren’t for the Commander-in-Chief, we wouldn’t even be a match for the Worren now." Sun Yan nodded, then shook his head, "But these changes are still huge."