The "Beta Test" Concludes!

[Server Announcement: The Lagrange Point Space Station has been captured by the Burning Corps!] [Server Announcement: Congratulations to players "Passing White Horse," "Long Days Ahead," "Force 8 Gale"... on obtaining the limited title "Savior of Civilization"! This achievement will be inducted into the Hall of Fame!] [Server Announcement: The Beta test will conclude shortly. The Open Beta will soon arrive with a bang alongside the expansion pack "Opening of the New Route"!] [...] Three consecutive server announcements flooded the official website! The already lively forum erupted as if someone had dumped a barrel of gasoline onto an open flame! The Lagrange Point Space Station was captured! The greatest sinister force on the wasteland had been eradicated! Of course, none of that was the main attraction— What made active players and armchair gamers alike scream at the top of their lungs was the long-awaited Open Beta and the brand-new expansion!!! The instant the announcements appeared on the official site, forum posts flooded the screen at a rate of tens of thousands per second, an immense avalanche of information surging forth! Tail: "Ooooh! New routes!! (?ω?)" Scavenger Lv 99: "Brother Guang is awesome!!! (voice cracking)" Thunder King Professor Yang: "Open Beta!!! My Open Beta!!! (screaming)" Lord Proud: "Heh, keep hyping it up. If this trash game is real, I'll stream myself doing a handstand while having explosive diarrhea! (sneer)" Tyrannosaurus Warrior: "I'm crying! I went from middle school to high school waiting for this damn game to finish testing. T.T" Elaina: "Then hang in there another two years, you'll be an adult soon. (funny)" Tyrannosaurus Warrior: "Holy crap!" Tengteng: "Time really flies, doesn't it? So many years have passed in the blink of an eye. (???`?)" Yaya: "Indeed~" Sisi: "Mmh, I almost forgot about the Open Beta. Didn't expect Ah Guang to still remember." Owling Sesame Paste: "Feels like we're gonna have a ton of new players. o(*￣︶￣*)o" Meat Mountain Big Bun: "In other words, the server's gonna be crawling with weirdos. (o__) ?" Owling Sesame Paste: "Ahahaha... That's inevitable, isn't it?" Elaina: "Like Brother Proud here? (funny)" Elven King Fugui: "Ancestral trade, cures low blood pressure guaranteed. (funny)" WC Really Has Mosquitoes: "Quack quack quack, leave him to me. I love cute noobs the most. (smirk)" Mole: "Where are the Burning Corps boys? Why haven't they come down to flex yet?" Commander Spring: "I heard from Lao Bai that they're planning to take a group photo on the space station. Probably gonna be a little while, haha." Ye Shi: "Holy shit! Leaving me out of something this good?! What a massive loss!!! QAQ" In Debt God: "Get lost! You want a piece of everything, you greedy bastard! (angry)" Construction Site Boy and Bricks: "Exactly! You already have a whole damn starship, what the hell are you complaining about?! (angry)" Tail: "A starship!!! Tail wants one too! QAQ" Sisi: "Uh, let me see what I can do? (guilty)" Tengteng: "(snicker) (snicker)" Jiu Jiu Loves Pineapples: "You guys can have the starship, I'm taking Dora, hehehe. (///ω///)" Sleepy Upon Waking: "Heard she's even bigger than Yaya. (blank stare)" Makka Pakka: "T-Two Yayas of power?" Stop Bullshitting: "(nosebleed) (nosebleed)" Yaya: "What the hell is 'Two Yayas of power'?! Don't use me as a unit of measurement, quack!!! (angry) (angry)" Midnight Chicken Killer: "Here, don't mention it. (*?ω?)-?" Elaina: "Shivering in my boots. (funny)" The forum was brimming with merriment, and the banter between active players and stream-watchers rolled on. However, the topic had already drifted from which planet the new route would open up to shipping the Administrator. This was an old, well-worn topic. Ever since the Alpha test, gossip about this had never ceased on the official website. After all, as everyone knew, the vast majority of NPCs in this game had full-blown mortal emotions and worldly desires—except for the Administrator, who felt the most like an actual NPC. The guy seemed to have no personal life whatsoever, pouring every waking moment into his work. To the vast majority of newer players, their only impression of him was "the Alliance's mascot," and nothing more. A busybody had created a poll thread listing every NPC suspected of dirty dealings with him. Beyond Boss Xia, it even included Heya, Neko, Yin Fang, and even the trash dev—an outlier who wasn't even in the game. Normally, a poll like this would never yield a serious result; the most ridiculous option was bound to take top place. Yet to everyone's surprise, the one that claimed the throne was none other than the wastebasket named Xiao Qi! The reason this caught everyone off guard was not that it was undeserved—after all, Xiao Qi was wildly popular on the forum, second only to the Alliance's true mascot, Xiao Yu. What truly took people by surprise was that the outcome was bafflingly "legitimate," claiming an astonishing ninety-nine percent of the votes! So much so that Dev No. 2, "Xiao Qi," who appeared on the list with one percent of the vote, barely drew any roast in comparison. Many users voiced that their vote button felt as though it had been plucked right off the board, not making the slightest ripple no matter how they clicked. Tail: "Giao! That many people voted for Xiao Qi? Tail voted for Boss Xia. (guilty)" Meat Mountain Big Bun: "Same here. (whispering)" Tengteng: "I voted for Elisa... (guilty)" In Debt God: "Who the hell is Elisa?!" Tengteng: "Don't you think they're a good match? They're both the kind that glows... (whispering)" Commander Spring: "Miraculously, she picked a somewhat normal ship this time. I honestly thought she'd vote for Yin Fang... (facepalm)" Tengteng: "That works too! (///ω///)" WC Really Has Mosquitoes: "Quack quack quack, I voted for him! (smirk)" Brother Edge: "*Pfft*—" Ye Shi: "Wait, Elisa would die, wouldn't she? At least Boss Xia has a thicker HP bar. By the way, I voted for Yin Fang too." Commander Spring: "Ahem, if you're putting it that way, then it could only be Frost. So yeah, I voted for Ibus." Brother Edge: "???" In Debt God: "Wait, so who the hell voted for Xiao Qi?! (stunned)" Lord Proud: "This is f*cking rigged!" (Pre-registered player "Lord Proud" encountered a random forum event: struck by a meteorite and hospitalized. Muted for 24 hours.) Thunder King Professor Yang: "Wait, at least make it a human?!" (Pre-registered player "Thunder King Professor Yang" encountered a random forum event: hit by a flowerpot outside. Muted for 24 hours.) Tail: "!!!" ... While merry banter permeated the forum, a similarly joyous atmosphere filled the distant Lagrange Point Space Station. Of the two thousand brethren who had boarded, the casualty rate was only fifty percent. A full one thousand players survived, far exceeding the initial projections of the general staff who had planned the operation. In all seriousness, the battle to board the Heart of Steel years ago had been vastly harder than this one. Although the Celestials were far stronger than General MacLaren had been back then, the Alliance was no longer the fledgling force of those early days either. Tempered through countless trials of blood and fire, any random member plucked from the current Burning Corps and tossed into the past would count as an elite beyond Tier 0. By contrast, while the Celestials hiding behind the scenes possessed pre-war technology and heritage, they fell far short of the Alliance in both combat experience and the sheer resolve to achieve victory. From that perspective, their defeat was hardly an injustice. Because the boarding craft dispatched to the Lagrange point had no return capability, everyone had to remain here for a while—at least until the Alliance repaired the Orion Guided Missile Cruiser parked in geostationary orbit and flew it over. To celebrate their hard-won victory, a portion of the players proposed taking a group photo. And so, a large crowd carrying the Alliance banner headed outside the station, striking all sorts of poses for commemorative photos. Beyond those eager to flex and snap souvenir shots, other players with voracious curiosities chose to wander through the station. During their hurried assault, they hadn't had the time to properly inspect this wonder of the Human Alliance era. Now that the fighting had concluded, they finally had time to rummage through every nook and cranny. A massive wave of players surged into the station's various sectors, marveling at and poking around this unimaginably vast space fortress. In the station's shipbuilding sector, the cavernous fabrication bay resembled a skyscraper lying on its side— And one straight out of the Ideal City, at that. An unfinished hull rested quietly within the vast berth. From its exterior alone, the boxy hull appeared to be merely a single section of one deck from an Orion-class missile cruiser. Starships of the Human Alliance era seemed to rely on this modular manufacturing technique. Once a block was completed, it would be transported along fixed tracks, shifting horizontally or vertically as a whole out to the "U-berth" beyond the station, where it would be assembled with other modules, culminating in the construction of an entire starship like building blocks. Perhaps it was precisely due to this modular design that the Gemini, when it crashed in Alpha Centauri, had shattered into dozens of fragmented sections. Yet even for a modular process, the scale of a single module here was staggering. All the space stations back on Earth combined could not match a single suspension rig in this place. Gazing at the armored hull anchored to the gantries and the dense rows of robotic arms, Corner Camper Six, rifle in hand, could not help voicing his awe. "I just can't wrap my head around it... How could something as mighty as the Human Alliance vanish into thin air?" Walking beside him, Fang Chang shot him a sidelong glance. "Why are you still asking that question after all this time?" "Aren't you curious?" Corner Camper Six asked. "Curiosity is one thing, but you shouldn't lump two logically disconnected concepts together." Fang Chang sighed, explaining patiently, "Mighty does not mean immortal. Even the sun will burn out one day, let alone a political regime existing in a specific historical era. When it can no longer satisfy the interests and demands of the classes within it, it naturally reaches the end of its lifespan. So it was with the Legion, and so it was with the State of Brahma under Absaik... And when that time comes, its sheer power helps nothing; on the contrary, it becomes a colossal liability." Corner Camper Six scratched the back of his head with a bewildered look. "Why?" He couldn't understand. Fang Chang pondered for a moment before answering. "Between a ton of black powder and a ton of metallic hydrogen, which explosion packs more punch?" Caught between laughter and tears, Corner Camper Six replied, "Metallic hydrogen, obviously. But... isn't that an unfitting analogy?" Fang Chang remarked casually, "It's the most fitting analogy there is. Use your head for a second and you'll get it." Because the Human Alliance was so mighty, it could never fall. When everyone thought that way in unison, it was often the beginning of the end for the Era of Prosperity. For behind "it can never fall" lay another hidden implication— *We can mess around however the hell we want.* This so-called "messing around" did not refer to the specific action of any single high-ranking Human Alliance official, but rather to the fractures running bottom-up and top-down across every stratum of society. The Human Alliance's might was not some castle in the air; rather, every social class within the Human Alliance wielded incomparable power. When their differences reached a tipping point, and that incomparable power was no longer channeled into creation but into eliminating dissent, the Human Alliance's "Minsky moment" arrived. By then, unless an even greater external force intervened to forcefully suppress that detonating powder keg, nothing could stop it from blowing apart. Evidently, no such entity existed alongside the Human Alliance. Even the Academy, which commanded wind and rain across the wasteland, had been nothing more than a loose academic organization during the Human Alliance era. Fang Chang was no historian; he could hardly dissect the precise causes of the Human Alliance's collapse or pinpoint the exact moment it came undone. Yet based on his past professional experience, he could judge with certainty that the Three-Year War was merely the fuse that ignited the contradiction—the final straw that broke the camel's back. "...If even you can't analyze it, I guess this part is destined to remain a blank in the lore." Corner Camper Six gave a resigned sigh, his face tinged with lingering regret. On second thought, it made sense. If the Human Alliance had truly collapsed from the loss of a single battle or the flawed decision of a single person, then no matter who that person was or what they had done, it would have rendered that mighty civilization far too frail. In fact, not to mention the Human Alliance, even Boulder City with its population of merely several hundred thousand was something that could not be summed up in a few sentences. For a Human Alliance spanning hundreds of millions of people, to truly articulate the reasons behind its dissolution would require starting from before the dawn of the Era of Prosperity and writing an entire book. And the thickness of that book would undoubtedly dwarf the history of the Alliance. Seeing the regret on Corner Camper Six's face, Fang Chang smiled faintly and spoke in an understated tone. "When a whale falls, all things flourish. There's nothing to regret. The wonders left by the Human Alliance already surpass the miracles forged by any organization in the Classical Era, and that century long gone was probably more magnificent than all the shifts and upheavals this planet saw over tens of thousands of years combined..." "Even if their era has ended, it cannot change the fact that they were once giants." "Besides, we haven't failed the great hopes they placed in us. We've risen once more from the ruins." With that, he clapped Corner Camper Six on the shoulder and turned his gaze toward the next compartment with a smile. "Time to look forward."