Rebirth of the Super Battleship-Chapter 39: Three Possibilities
The aliens’ tactic was indeed ruthless. It wasn’t the method itself but the implications of such a strategy that made it so effective.
If the aliens had employed all-encompassing detection measures, sparing no effort to locate Xiao Yu, there was no guarantee that he could have evaded them. However, at that point, the situation would have devolved into a head-on confrontation, with no room for maneuvering. The outcome of such a clash was unpredictable.
Although the alien civilization was about ten years ahead of Xiao Yu in terms of technology, Xiao Yu’s exceptional precision and mastery in commanding his fleet could help bridge that gap. In such a direct confrontation, the likeliest outcome would be mutual destruction: the losing side annihilated, and the victor left grievously weakened.
But now, the aliens had chosen not to find Xiao Yu. Instead, they opted to hide themselves.
This meant that they were deliberately stalling for time. They planned to leverage the advantage of having an entire planet as their base to outlast Xiao Yu, forcing him to exhaust his resources. They were betting that Xiao Yu would eventually be unable to sustain his fleet and would have to reveal himself, at which point they could seize the initiative.
Of course, Xiao Yu had a way to break this stalemate—by locating the aliens. However, that was far easier said than done.
If Xiao Yu could find them first, he would regain the upper hand. If he couldn’t, he risked being worn down, eventually facing total annihilation.
The intense radiation interference lasted three days. Only after three days did it gradually weaken and finally disappear.
As calm returned to space, Xiao Yu began pondering how to locate a fully hidden planet that emitted no detectable radiation across any spectrum.
“They chose to hide instead of finding me. That means they don’t have absolute confidence in defeating me,” Xiao Yu sighed. The aliens’ actions once again revealed their apprehension toward him.
“I must find them, or I’m very likely to die,” Xiao Yu thought to himself. “I’ve traveled for thousands of years, leaving the Solar System to come all this way. How could I die here?”
“I must find them. I must find them…” Xiao Yu murmured, pushing his central computer’s utilization rate to 90% as he worked on calculating possible methods.
Then, one idea came to him.
“Maybe… this could work,” Xiao Yu thought as he directed his high-precision telescopes to scan the entire sky, searching for visible stars that had suddenly disappeared or dimmed.
The method was straightforward: find any stars that had been obscured or whose brightness had diminished due to the alien planet blocking his line of sight. Xiao Yu could then calculate the planet’s position and distance based on the degree of the star’s dimming.
But after a month of searching, there were no results.
“No stars disappearing or dimming? Then there are only three possibilities…”
“First, they’ve deployed some kind of camouflage to simulate normal starlight, making it appear as though the stars’ brightness is unaffected. This is unlikely since such a technique would require an extremely high level of technology.”
“Second, their planet isn’t blocking any of the stars recorded in my Chronicles of Heroes Across the Cosmos. If they’re only obscuring stars not documented in my catalog, I wouldn’t notice. But this is also improbable. My Chronicles have cataloged over 300 million stars so far. The odds of them not blocking even one of those stars are slim.”
“Third, they’re simply too far away… If their distance exceeds 30 million kilometers, my telescopes would be observing over a trillion stars at this level of precision. Most of those stars aren’t cataloged yet.”
“The third possibility is the most likely,” Xiao Yu concluded. Reluctantly, he abandoned this method of searching for them.
Time passed, day by day. A month went by. Then two. Then half a year.
Both sides maintained silence, with neither daring to reveal themselves.
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Xiao Yu had no idea what the aliens were doing during this time. Meanwhile, he remained focused on finding a way to locate them. But after six months, he had made almost no progress.
Over the past six months, Xiao Yu had experienced tens of thousands of failures.
He had tried to locate the alien planet using methods such as gravitational acceleration and detecting infrared radiation. However, either due to the vast distance or other factors, the gravitational pull exerted by the planet on Xiao Yu’s fleet was too weak to measure, and its infrared radiation was nearly undetectable. Reluctantly, Xiao Yu had to abandon these approaches.
Once again, Xiao Yu confirmed that the alien planet must be at least 30 million kilometers away.
“Maybe… I could just run away? At such a distance, even if their interstellar missiles travel at 3,000 kilometers per second, it would take over three hours to reach me. I’d have plenty of time to intercept or evade them. Their high-powered laser cannons would also be nearly useless at this range,” Xiao Yu mused.
After a period of contemplation, Xiao Yu painfully abandoned the idea of fleeing.
“A wandering planet’s best fate is to find a stable star and enter its orbit. Judging by the overlap between their trajectory and mine, their target is likely Tianyuan IV. Changing my destination isn’t an option, and it’s unlikely they can alter theirs either. And a single star system can’t accommodate two civilizations. Only one of us will survive.”
With a heavy sigh, Xiao Yu resumed his work, crafting plans to locate and eliminate the alien planet.
After another failure, Xiao Yu forced himself to stay motivated, running his latest plan through the feasibility testing program. In half a second, the result appeared: the plan had cleared 37,000 obstacles but was ultimately rejected by the 37,001st.
In other words, the plan was still infeasible.
“No. There has to be a way. There must be a way. I’m the greatest among 7 billion humans. How could I fail? I won’t fail!” Xiao Yu encouraged himself. Yet, as his next plan was rejected, a faint sense of despair began to creep into his thoughts.
“Damn it! If nothing works, I’ll just reveal myself and fight them head-on! I refuse to believe I can’t defeat them!” Xiao Yu growled internally. His impulse battled with his strong rationality, leaving him gritting his teeth, unable to calm down.
Suddenly, Xiao Yu remembered a program he had written when he first left the Solar System. Quickly searching through his vast storage system, he found the program buried in a remote corner.
When he ran it, the ship’s three-dimensional holographic projector displayed a human figure.
It was Chen Mo. She stood there quietly, smiling at Xiao Yu. Her gaze was soft and calm, radiating an invisible warmth that slowly soothed Xiao Yu’s agitated mind.
Xiao Yu recalled something Chen Mo had once said to him on Earth.
It was during a moment of triumph when Xiao Yu had led his research team to overcome a technological challenge that the outside world had deemed insurmountable. Chen Mo, with her large eyes curving into crescent moons, wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand and shyly said, “Director Xiao, you’re amazing. I knew you’d find a way.”
At that moment, her cheeks were slightly flushed, and she wore a white cap, gazing at Xiao Yu with an expression of pure admiration.
“I knew you’d find a way.”
Looking at the holographic image of Chen Mo, Xiao Yu was lost in memories.
His hands trembling, Xiao Yu quickly wrote a short program. When executed, the hologram of Chen Mo repeated her words.
“I knew you’d find a way.”
“Yes, I will find a way,” Xiao Yu murmured, his restless heart gradually calming. With the hologram of Chen Mo watching over him, Xiao Yu dove back into his calculations, testing plan after plan for feasibility.
Another month passed. The silent and dark expanse of space remained unchanged. The alien civilization, for its part, seemed to have made no progress in locating Xiao Yu either.
But today, something unusual caught Xiao Yu’s attention.
Through faint starlight reflections, Xiao Yu’s high-precision optical telescope detected an object drifting aimlessly through space. It was roughly cubic, a few cubic meters in size, with several protrusions resembling signal emitters on one side.
Immediately, Xiao Yu’s alertness spiked.
“Could it be… I see now. Of course, it wasn’t going to be this simple. It must be that during the signal interference, while hiding their planet, they also deployed a swarm of these probes to randomly scan the surrounding space. If one of these probes detects my presence, it would broadcast a signal… and they would find me. This way, they avoid exposing their position while tracking me down.”
The more Xiao Yu thought about it, the more alarmed he became.
“Thank goodness I found this thing first before it detected me,” Xiao Yu thought, feeling a wave of relief. If the probe had initiated a spatial broadcast, Xiao Yu would have intercepted the signal. The fact that it hadn’t meant it hadn’t found him yet.
Quickly, Xiao Yu formulated a plan to destroy the probe.
