Chapter 1 "Mr. Li, are you really from up there?"

In the afternoon, when De Wen saw Mr. Li arriving at his studio right on time, he glanced behind him several times to make sure no one else was there before finally voicing his curiosity.

"Ah, yes. Up there… it's pretty dangerous."

Mr. Li answered vaguely. Seeing De Wen's curious expression, he asked, "Do you… really want to go up?"

"Of course! Who wouldn't?"

"I wouldn't."

De Wen's mind stalled for a moment at the NPC's answer, but he quickly understood why the other man wouldn't be willing.

He chuckled awkwardly and steered the conversation towards the photo size and frame.

"I want to get a bigger house for my wife, and this will go in the living room."

The man had chosen a frame inlaid with dazzling rhinestones. De Wen glanced at it, thinking it wasn't exactly ugly, but it would definitely blind anyone who looked at it.

He really wanted to show off his family's happiness.

"Is your current house very small? This size should fit even now."

De Wen looked at the fifty-something-inch frame and considered the space in a living room. It should fit under normal circumstances.

"It's not big, just eighty square meters. It was enough for me and my wife, but it'll be too small once the kids are older." The man happily talked about the future, seemingly unaware that Gu Lan Star wouldn't exist for much longer. "I'm thinking of getting a bigger house and hanging these on the sofa wall…"

De Wen had some emotional intelligence; otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to ask about the situation "up there" during the photo shoot that morning. But clearly, he didn't have much. The man was happily imagining the future, and he butted in with:

"Should I shrink this photo so you can carry it around? In the future… you can look at it when you miss them."

De Wen was practically saying, "Once your wife and kids are gone, you can just look at the photo and remember them."

Mr. Li: "…"

De Wen had abruptly ruined the hopeful atmosphere.

"No, thanks."

After a long pause, Mr. Li managed to say that, his gaze filled with something De Wen couldn't understand.

"Ah, I'll get back to work."

The photo processing and framing were done quickly, but De Wen was clearly too curious about the situation "up there," so he dragged his feet while trying to inquire about it indirectly.

The other man wasn't stupid. Realizing what De Wen was trying to do, Mr. Li finally couldn't stand De Wen's dawdling and took the initiative to tell him himself.

"A lot of people died. They all need gene modification up there."

Mr. Li's deepest memory of the starship was the dead people.

He had met someone he clicked with while waiting in line, and they boarded the starship together. Then they both lost consciousness. When he woke up, he was surrounded by blood and gore. The other survivors looked terrified, and some of them went mad. He also felt extremely unstable, wanting to scream, yell and push everything away to run.

He watched as others went crazy and ran, only to be shot in the head by a laser from afar. That instantly calmed him down.

He couldn't die.

He couldn't go crazy.

His wife and children were waiting for him to return home.

"Ah, those star… er, those aliens, they didn't have good intentions to begin with. But thanks to them, we knew about the Zerg soon after. It's a good thing to survive gene modification."

De Wen didn't know how to comfort him. He finished framing the photo, packed it up, and then spoke.

"Indeed, it's great to survive…"

Mr. Li took the photo from him, caressing the wide frame. He lowered his eyes, suppressing all his emotions.

He knew all this.

"I never understood before,"

Mr. Li said softly, his head lowered. De Wen looked up at him, hearing him suddenly say, "I'm just an ordinary person. How did I get chosen? I grew up normally, studied a normal major, and couldn't even find a job after graduation…"

…

"I told you, he probably won't be back."

Ming Mei leaned over to look at the message on the other person's optical computer, sent from below.

Information about those selected, those who survived gene modification, and those who were waiting in line had already been sorted. Ming Mei recognized the NPC who had left last night.

Mu Chen had said he would be back.

But the message clearly stated that he had given up on returning.

"I'm sorry~ His family didn't ask him to return. They will face everything together."

Ming Mei's tone was slightly mocking, but her eyes flashed with complex emotions about the NPC's choice.

"My uncle, why does he design NPCs with such…"

Ming Mei couldn't quite describe it. Even if she described these NPCs as having awakened consciousness, she still felt that the intense emotions of these NPC characters were shocking.

She had once asked, and her uncle only said it was because he had seen too much.

"Mei Mei, do you know who was the first person on Hua Lan Star to record this history? The person who wrote this period of history?"

Mu Chen looked repeatedly at the submitted application, closing his eyes as if recalling something.

"I don't know."

Ming Mei shook her head. She had never looked into that.

"The author of that historical memoir interviewed many people who survived that disaster and left a strong mark on the construction of Hua Lan Star. However, at the beginning of that book, the author wrote a preface from his perspective."

"Really? I don't think I've seen it."

"There's no electronic version, only the original manuscript stored in the Hua Lan Star Library."

Ming Mei remembered that Mu Chen liked to read paper books.

"Is there something wrong with the preface?"

"It's not the problem with the preface, it's the author who wrote the preface. I remember his surname was also Li."

"Although there is no biography of that editor-in-chief, the preface also mentions that when he first graduated, he didn't choose a job related to his major due to the pressure of life. He recalled in other works that he had a gentle and kind wife with poor health."

"And four quadruplet children who had just turned one year old when the incident happened."

"For his family, he had done many jobs. Only after being abducted and resettled on Hua Lan Star did he pick up his pen again, whether it was to record or express his feelings. After that, he returned to the path of literature."

"In the preface, he wrote, 'They are all shining in the vast corners of the universe for the continuation of Gu Lan Star, unlike me, who only left an empty shell here. I will forever leave my heart on that frozen, gray little planet.'"

"In addition to writing the historical memoir of that period, he also wrote other articles, but perhaps because they were too depressing, those collections were not made into electronic versions for publication and circulation."

Mu Chen recalled that he had once been very fond of that person's books. Although those works were depressing, he had poured all his emotions into them, living alone in the interstellar space, carrying all the memories of the past, living alone.

This was similar to his state of mind when he first came here and resonated with him.

It's just that that person had no hope, but he still did.

[If I had another chance, I would turn back and be buried there with them, telling them that no one could separate our family…]