Uncle here isn't your average office worker!

"A silvery-white barrier that blocks everything, rejects everything, yet embraces and protects everything, like a mother embracing her child, protecting the entire land of Terra!"

Roy suddenly stood up and blurted out:

"Angels of euthanasia?!"

Volume 1: Chapter 220 The Pioneering Laws of Space Columbia

What is an angel of euthanasia?

As if he had grasped the lifeline, the Witch King's pale, thin face flushed a blood-red hue, and his eyes seemed to be piercing with a laser beam, as if they were cast by a curse. Roy even felt that the Witch King would rush up to him in the next second, straddle him, hold his shoulders, and force him to reveal everything he knew.

To preserve his innocence and the image of the Witch King, Roy remained silent for a moment before confirming:

"May I say that you have finished telling me the secrets of Terra that you know, and now it's my turn?"

Roy hoped the Witch King would say more; the more he said, the more certain Roy would be of his guess. But unfortunately, the Witch King gritted his teeth and shook his head.

He may have finished speaking, or he may have simply decided not to continue. In any case, he extended his hand to Roy, indicating that it was his turn.

Roy took a deep breath, considered for a moment, and decided to begin his long speech with a simple and easy-to-understand assumption:

"Ladies and gentlemen, let's make an assumption here. I believe that you have all been or are currently following the pioneering movement in Colombia, right?"

The Queen and the Elector exchanged a glance and nodded. Although they didn't know why Roy suddenly brought up that country that had been established for less than fifty years, as one of the rulers of the land, a qualified politician and schemer, regardless of their stance, they could not possibly ignore a political entity that was rising at an extremely rapid pace.

The Queen frankly stated, "Although the nations of the land, especially the old core empires led by Victoria, still hold Colombia in utter contempt and even disdain, even I cannot deny that the achievements this country has made in just a few decades have surpassed those of many civilizations that have existed for over a thousand years. This is especially evident in their level of technology."

Although not a single word was mentioned about Kherrag, Roy felt that the Kherrag people had been offended.

The Grand Election Emperor then added, "As for the Great Frontier Movement, it was a wilderness development movement recruited by the Colombian government and funded by major corporations. Colombia was once just a colony of Victoria. After its independence, its population, land area, and economic strength could not compare with other countries, let alone join the competition in the core circle. The Great Frontier Movement was simply a way of survival they chose to avoid the most direct conflicts of interest with other countries."

Roy nodded and affirmed, "That's a very good explanation. Now, let's officially begin this hypothetical scenario. Suppose that you two, along with the Witch King, are a pioneering team on the Columbia Wasteland, and in front of you is a tribe whose civilization is still undeveloped and whose military strength is very weak, making them easy to subdue. What would you do?"

The Queen and the Elector both frowned, clearly hesitant. But the Witch King, seemingly devoid of any moral compass, answered Roy's question directly the very next second:

"Destroy them."

His voice was firm and unwavering, seemingly leaving no room for negotiation. The Queen's electoral ministers, including Roy, all turned their gazes to him, but he simply and calmly explained his reasons:

“This land will belong to Colombia in the future. They will either join or submit. But I don’t think it’s necessary to spend time, energy, and resources educating a group of indigenous people who may awaken and rebel in the future. It’s better to just physically eliminate them.”

Roy pursed his lips and nodded somewhat helplessly. He knew the Witch King wasn't joking; he treated the native inhabitants of certain regions of Letania, the Winter Spirits, with the same attitude, or even worse.

So he continued:

"Yes, that is also an option. So, what if you consider this option on the scale of the universe, that is, the starry sky?"

On a cosmic scale, imagine a nation like Columbia, expanding outwards, discovering a nascent civilization in the vast expanse of space. This civilization has not yet sent probes beyond its home planet, nor has it achieved unification among its various races and ethnicities. What would this "cosmic Columbia" do in the face of such a civilization?

"Your answer is to eliminate them."

Seeing the Witch King's expression gradually turn serious, as if he had realized something, Roy coldly stated the truth:

"Similarly, Cosmic Columbia also provided their answer. To destroy this backward but potentially developing indigenous civilization that poses a threat to their frontier, that is, to occupy the [frontier (planet)] and exterminate the species on it, they developed a weapon—[neutron annihilation]."

Roy's physics knowledge was insufficient to explain to the Witch King what a neutron was, but because of the assumptions and analogies he had made beforehand, the Witch King understood what "neutron annihilation" meant in an instant.

He was like the biological poison gas or poison used by the Colombian pioneers; with just a small sip or a drop, he could kill off the entire herd of wild camel-like beasts that had lived and thrived on the wasteland for thousands of years overnight.

The next day, the pioneering team was able to easily clean up the poisonous corpses, carry them to the incinerator or even the food factory, disinfect and process them, and sell them to the infected people who couldn't even afford to eat, reaping a wave of grateful praise.

During this time, the pioneers did not feel the slightest guilt or apprehension, because the differences between different species were enough to erase such discomfort, and human morality, as the name suggests, only applies to humans.

The cold, ironclad rules were laid bare before the Witch King, leaving him momentarily speechless.

After hearing the answers from the Witch King and Roy, the Queen finally spoke up:

"What if I leave these people behind?"

“Keeping these people alive would be a threat. And it would be meaningless for you, the pioneer,” Roy rejected. “Imagine if one day in the future, these natives finally develop to the point where they can look up at the sky, only to find that their planet, their country, and their space for survival and development have been annexed by someone else’s territory. What would they do?”

They will rebel, they will raise their flags in resistance, they will declare independence.

The Queen knew the answer perfectly well. Normally, she might have chosen to annihilate them outright, but this was a hypothetical situation. If she chose to eliminate them as well, she would only get the same answer as the Witch King. Therefore, after a moment's thought, she said:

"Then as long as I make their existence meaningful to me, that's enough, right?"

"From the perspective of the stars, as you mentioned, is there any way to eliminate their threat once and for all and preserve their civilization?"

"I ask tentatively," the Queen asked. She didn't actually have high hopes for the answer, as it sounded like a thankless and arduous task. Having grown accustomed to the zero-sum nature of everything on Terra, where everything was a lose-lose, win-lose, life-or-death game, she found it difficult to imagine any other solution.

But Roy surprisingly nodded.

The Queen's expression brightened slightly. Did Roy's words mean that the pioneers of the Star Sea truly possessed such a moral standard?

But Roy's expression remained cold, and there seemed to be a hint of irony in that coldness.

He felt a pang of sadness. The fact that the Empress could show such an expression meant that she had not yet truly placed herself in the sea of ​​stars, nor considered "civilization" as a distinguishable concept, like ordinary humans and infected individuals.

Therefore, he coldly said:

"Yes. With the development of technology, any miracle that seems impossible to us can be replicated. Solving the threat to a civilization once and for all is certainly possible."

"We know that Space Columbia is a civilization capable of extraterrestrial exploration. So, what kind of civilization would he consider to be 'no longer a threat'?"

Without waiting for an answer, Roy answered his own question.

"The answer is, civilizations incapable of space exploration."

"Just as a herd of camel-like beasts cannot compete with the Columbia high-speed warships and cannot conduct space exploration, a civilization that only possesses the resources of a single planet cannot contend with the Space Columbia, which already possesses the resources of several star systems. This is a gap in hard power that cannot be bridged by any means."

"And what Space Columbia wanted to do was to ensure that the indigenous civilization could never conduct space exploration. Thus, the Angels of Euthanasia were born."

Roy looked up at the sky: "The Angels of Euthanasia will create an insurmountable barrier around the entire planet. This barrier will isolate all communication, and life on the planet will never be able to open the barrier on its own, because the technology and conditions for verifying that technology exist only in space. Space is a world beyond the reach of the Angels of Euthanasia. But conversely, if other civilizations do not open the barrier from the outside, the civilizations within the Angels of Euthanasia will also be free from any external interference. They can live carefree, just as if they were living in a paradise under the protection of angels."

Roy commented, "Or, in the zoo?"

The outside world cannot interfere with the inside, and the inside can never break through the barrier to enter the outside world. It's like animals being kept in a zoo called the mother planet, only able to look at the outside world's chaos through the glass called the "barrier," and then being frightened into hiding back in the embrace of the mother planet.

A seemingly gentle and happy ending, but with all possibilities cut off, a slow death.

"This is... the truth behind the barrier that shrouds Terra? This is the False Heaven?" The Witch King's voice trembled noticeably as he looked at Roy and couldn't help but ask.

Roy shook his head and gave an answer that was hard to say whether it was good or bad: "I'm not sure."

After all, he didn't witness everything the Witch King saw with his own eyes. Even if he had, as the "national will" in front of the computer back then and as a member of civilization now, as the stars back then and Terra now, seeing two different technologies from two different perspectives, he might not be able to confirm whether it was the Angel of Peace in his mind.

The Witch King fell silent, his eyes somewhat dim, as if he were lost in thought.

Roy turned his gaze to the last person who had not yet spoken. The Teutonic Elector's expression suddenly became flustered. Clearly, the shock of the cold, hard answer he had just received on such a high level had left him momentarily disoriented. He could only ask:

"Isn't there any other choice?"

Roy smiled. "Of course."

The Grand Election Emperor was taken aback, and asked with a mixture of anticipation and fear, "What is it?"

Roy abruptly stopped smiling and said in a tone more cruel than ever before:

"On a cosmic scale, the stars are vast and I don't need your colony. Since you may cause me trouble in the future, and I'm too lazy to waste time eliminating your species one by one or extinguishing your future potential, I might as well choose some lower-cost and more economical options."

"Earth Explosion Sky Star!"

"If your land becomes a mine, you can bring me some resources."

P.S.: 3500 words, a bit late because I got carried away writing. The pre-Terra civilization was certainly not a civilization that had just left its home planet; this is just a brief overview of the pioneering principles of the Columbia universe. More details to follow.

What are your plans for the May Day holiday, guys? I'm thinking of going to Chengdu because I couldn't get tickets to Shanghai.

Volume 1: Chapter 221 Glory Enduring Ten Thousand Years Later!

Your house has become a mine.

The literal meaning of this sentence is not difficult to understand; there are places on Terra like Rembiton, where the entire country is a huge mine.

But the idea of ​​an entire planet being turned into a mine was still slightly beyond the imagination of the Terrans.

Teutonic's smile froze on his face, and his already somewhat forced upturned lips twitched even more as he asked incredulously:

"They have...that kind of ability?"

"Yes. And that's not even their most powerful weapon."

Among all types of colossus weapons, the Planetary Devastation is at best a cheap one, its only and greatest feature being its simplicity, affordability, and ease of use. Besides it, thanks to the boundless imagination of scientists, there are countless other types of colossus weapons: some capable of instantly brainwashing all life on a planet, turning them into fanatical religious believers; some capable of forcibly altering the landscape, turning an entire planet into a vast ocean; and some even capable of changing the entire planet's biological species, directly solving the problems of the indigenous inhabitants.

And this cannot even be considered the true pinnacle.

Above all, there is the galactic destruction weapon that, once built, would mean becoming the enemy of the galaxy, its ambitions blatantly obvious, and would provoke a galactic-wide crusade—the Heavenly Blazing Divine Weapon!

Detonating a star and erasing an entire galaxy from the star map—that kind of power is almost unimaginable to the Terrans, who currently know nothing about the universe.

The answer Roy gave him seemed too shocking, and a thick cloud settled over Teutonic's face. Roy understood his feelings, and showed no sense of superiority or contempt. He knew that if he hadn't lived in a more enlightened era, learning these concepts from all sorts of imaginative works, he might have ended up like the Teutonic Elector.

Moreover, knowing and truly facing are two different things. Like war, a battle fought thousands of miles away might just be a topic of casual conversation for you, but when war concerns our very survival, the oppressive and suffocating feeling is indescribable. Who can accept that someone who once held power and wielded authority on earth is less than a speck of dust in the vast sea of ​​stars?

Roy thought for a moment, trying to say something to comfort the group who had suddenly received so much weight of knowledge. Unexpectedly, yet predictably, all three quickly recovered from their initial despondency. The Witch King, in particular, showed some of the madness on his face, leaving behind more reason.

He seemed to have noticed something amiss, and after a moment's thought, he asked again:

"Mr. Roy."

The sudden addition of a respectful title caught Roy off guard, but the Witch King asked with utmost sincerity and seriousness,

"If the false sky covering Terra is truly a zoo enclosure fabricated by the Angels of Peace, then the humans of Terra should have completely lost the possibility of exploring the stars. But why... do I see those buildings?"

Construction began beyond the limits of what the naked eye could see, an elliptical ring of structures encircling the entirety of Terra, standing like a spindle, covered with a dense network of tracks and lines. Even its collapsed fragments surpass the grandest structures on Earth today, such as those of Londinium, and the most illogical of all, the second moon that appeared outside the barrier and shone brightly for tens of thousands of years.

Everything the Witch-King witnessed proved to him that before them, Terra had been home to more than just a civilization. Those structures were clearly beyond the capabilities of the Terran people, who hadn't even launched their first satellite.