Rebirth: Starting from Lighting Up the Tech Tree

Chapter 265 Mars Answer Sheet

The sentence translated by Yu Ying prompted Zuo Cheng to make two decisions.

First decision: leave the other data for the Mars Cube untouched for now. A hundred Library of Congress can wait. Europa cannot.

The second decision: use Origin Decoding to directly read the data from the highest priority level in the cube. Not line-by-line translation. Not cross-checking. It's about letting the system directly convert the Creator's code into a comprehensible flow of information. He didn't have time to spend months decoding an entire library. The Sentinel's countdown was ticking.

He returned to his office, closed the door, and opened the system panel. The Origin Decoding icon glowed with a pale gold light in the center of the six leaves on the ninth branch. He placed his hand on the holographic scan data of the Martian cube.

start up.

Information doesn't appear line by line. It's a network.

The Founding Civilization's interplanetary communication network was called the "Web." The Web started on Earth, passed through Mars, and extended to Europa. From Europa, it connected to nodes even further out of the solar system. There were at least nine nodes throughout the solar system. Earth had 217 terminal nodes. Mars had two relay nodes. Europa had one warning node. Five more nodes were located in the outer solar system—on Titan, Triton, and three asteroids in the Kuiper Belt.

Nine nodes. A network. An interstellar communication network stretching from the innermost to the outermost edge of the solar system. Two hundred and seventeen terminal nodes on Earth are like capillaries spread across the globe; two nodes on Mars stand like signal towers guarding the threshold of the inner solar system; and a node on Europa stares like a sleepless eye above the icy surface. Further outward, six nodes in the outer solar system are scattered in the vast darkness between Saturn's orbit and the Kuiper Belt. It was laid out four billion years ago. Humanity only became aware of its existence today.

Zuo Cheng projected the entire node architecture of the web onto the office wall. Nine points of light. Five were already lit—the 217 nodes on Earth were glowing as a whole, and the two relay nodes on Mars were transitioning from dormancy to semi-active. The sentinel nodes on Europa were pulsating at an unusual frequency. Not dormant. Waiting. The remaining four points of light were completely dark. Titan. Triton. Three Kuiper Belt asteroids. They had slumbered at the edge of the solar system for four billion years, waiting for someone to press the start button.

The information transmission continues. The second layer of decoding has begun.

Europa's watchdog nodes are called "Sentinels." Sentinels have been in a semi-active state since Earth's civilization reached the electromagnetic communication stage. When Earth's civilization reaches level eight, the Sentinels will automatically trigger a wake-up countdown. The initial plan was not five years.

It has been fifty years.

However, one human prematurely triggered the Sentinel's acceleration protocol.

When Zuo Cheng read this part, his finger stopped in mid-air.

That person's name is Chen Xinghe.

During his third entry into the Sahara Relics, Chen Xinghe accidentally connected to a Mars node via an interface station. He was unaware that a data link, dormant for four billion years, existed between the interface station and the Mars relay. He simply touched a glowing control panel. He thought he was exploring. He didn't realize he had pressed a fast-forward button. The fifty-year buffer became five years.

Zuo Cheng took Chen Xinghe's seventh diary out of the drawer. He had read this diary countless times, but there was one passage he had never fully understood. Now he understood it.

Chen Xinghe's handwriting is messy, but every stroke is forceful.

"Deep in the Sahara, I touched something I shouldn't have. It didn't warn me. It just quietly lit up for a moment, then went out. I don't know what it did. But I feel it did one thing."

That flash of light was the signal that the Sentinel Acceleration Protocol had been activated. In those fractions of a second, the entire solar system's surveillance network switched from a fifty-year mode to a five-year mode. Chen Xinghe was unaware. He didn't even know there was a node on Mars. He was simply sitting alone in a four-billion-year-old cave deep in the Sahara, inadvertently pressing the acceleration button for all of humanity.

Zuo Cheng closed his journal. The night sky over Hangzhou outside his office window was quiet. One satellite after another streaked across the sky, like a slowly moving diamond necklace.

This wasn't a mistake. If Chen Xinghe hadn't triggered the acceleration protocol, the Sentinels' buffer period would have been fifty years. Fifty years is too long for humanity. Long enough that everyone would forget about it. Long enough that Earth civilization might be tripped up by the sudden interstellar threshold before it could even be prepared. Five years, though short, gives humanity a deadline that's urgent enough to be ignored. It lets everyone know—not some day fifty years from now. It's five years. Five years from now, you either have to press option A and wait for someone to come pick you up, or you have to build a ship yourself and press option C.

New information popped up on the system panel. The complete node map of the Solar System Origin Network unfolded in Zuo Cheng's field of vision. All three inner solar system nodes were now activated—the 217 terminal nodes on Earth, and the two relay nodes on Mars' Mariner Canyon and Greek Plain. Of the six outer solar system nodes, Europa Sentinel was in a semi-activated, waiting state, while the other five were completely dormant.

The system notification indicates a refreshed progress for the main quest to find the origins. The prerequisites for the second stage, interstellar travel technology, have been updated—at least six solar system nodes need to be activated to unlock the core interstellar travel technology. Four have already been activated. Europa is the fifth. Once the Europa node is explored, only one more outer solar system node needs to be activated to meet the unlocking requirement.

Three new lines of text appeared at the bottom of the panel.

Tenth branch budding progress: 3%. Unlock condition: Activate at least six web nodes. Tentative direction for the tenth branch: Interstellar travel.

Zuo Cheng stared at the line "three percent" for a long time. A branch that hadn't yet been named. At the tip of the leaf of the ninth branch's inheritance agreement, a tiny point of light was forming. It was still far away. But it was already there.

Yu Ying knocked and came in. She saw the nine-node projection on the wall. She stood at the door for a full half minute.

"Nine nodes," she said. "This is the skeleton of the entire solar system."

Zuo Cheng nodded. He pushed Chen Xinghe's diary in front of her and pointed to that passage. Yu Ying remained silent for a long time after reading it.

"Fifty years became five years," she whispered. "He fast-forwarded for us."

Zuo Cheng printed out a copy of the decoding report for the Martian cube. In the last paragraph, he added a line: Chen Xinghe's "mistake" turned fifty years into five. But it is precisely because it is only five years that humanity feels a real sense of urgency. If they waited fifty years, the entire Earth civilization might not be ready before entering the interstellar age. Five years may be short, but it is just enough for one person to exert all their strength.

Then he wrote a note below that line.

"It's not a mistake. It's a legacy."