Chapter 49: History Class
After taking a shower in the evening, Xiang Chuan sat at the head of the bed flipping through the shopping page on the terminal light screen, with another light screen for notes hanging beside the window.
“Bowl, plate, chopsticks, knife and fork spoon… It’s better to buy spoons in small and large sizes… Small bowls and small cups are really scarce…”
“Pot… pot… Why are they all metal pots? Has the clay pot become an antique in the modern era?”
“Vegetables, meat, flour… Do we need rice noodles… Now that we have yeast, rice noodles aren’t that useful. Even if made into rice noodles for hot tossing, without soy sauce and oyster sauce for seasoning, it would still… Let’s put it aside.”
She muttered while writing and deleting on the notebook, and it was almost midnight before she finished organizing the list of club essentials. She moved her somewhat stiff shoulders, looked at the list with satisfaction, nodded, saved it, turned off the light, got under the quilt, covered her head, and fell asleep in one go.
Take it to show the two new club members tomorrow!
She thought excitedly, but because she was a bit overly excited, she didn’t fall asleep until two hours after closing her eyes.
In the morning, when woken by the alarm clock, she almost couldn’t resist going back to sleep.
“Yawn~~~… Yating, Liang Gong, good morning.”
Xiang Chuan yawned as she entered the classroom and saw that her two little partners had already arrived at school early, so she quickened her pace to greet them.
“Lea… Club President, good morning.”
Liang Gong subconsciously wanted to call her Leader, but then remembered that their club had been renamed yesterday, so he quickly changed the address.
“Just call me by name. No need to emphasize it in class.”
Xiang Chuan shrank her neck and saw Ouyang Yating looking at her with a complicated expression, feeling puzzled: “Yating, what’s wrong? Is there something on my face?”
“No… um…” Ouyang Yating rubbed her temples, thinking that being called Yating was something only her parents and brothers did at home, and it was the first time a classmate called her that. Her own club president was really familiar, “Forgot to say, good morning, Xiang Chuan.”
“Mm! … Yawn~…”
Unaware that she had been classified as an extrovert by her own club member, Xiang Chuan happily sat down at her seat and couldn’t help but yawn again.
“Morning, Xiang Chuan. Why do you look like you haven’t woken up? What new thing were you doing yesterday?”
Chou Manman bounced over and asked curiously.
“I did make a new thing, but I didn’t stay up late because of that.”
As she spoke, Xiang Chuan opened her terminal and flung the table document she had organized yesterday to the left and right, right in front of Ouyang Yating and Liang Gong.
“This is…?”
Ouyang Yating swiped through the table on the light screen, slightly frowning at the messy sorting.
Just as Xiang Chuan was about to explain, the class bell (or was it a chime? Music? Xiang Chuan: Anyway, just call it the class bell for short) rang, and homeroom teacher Zhu Bingwen stepped into the classroom on the bell.
“Good morning, classmates.” Zhu Bingwen waved cheerfully, “If you’re not back at your seats and sitting properly within three seconds, you’ll have to clean the sports field during lunch break today.”
Amid the chaos, Xiang Chuan could only send a quick message to the two saying “talk after class” before hurriedly opening the history document of the teaching program to prepare for class.
The day before yesterday for handling the construction procedures of the club activity room, yesterday for interior decoration, Xiang Chuan had missed her homeroom teacher’s history class for two consecutive days. Today, upon listening, she found it quite interesting.
Just like 21st century Huaxia history classes that started reviewing from the most ancient Yan-Huang emperors, the history class 30,000 years later also began with 5000 years before the Tianyuan Era. This was also her first contact with knowledge related to the “Dark Virus Crisis” where the Common Era civilization and Tianyuan Era had a succession break. Previously, when searching history information online, she had only glanced over it without delving deep.
“…In Tianyuan year 5000, the Twelfth Fleet was not distributed in different positions within the same galaxy as now, but was voyaging through the universe together, and thus, when the virus crisis broke out, no fleet was spared.”
“The source of the virus outbreak remains an unsolved mystery to this day. Some say it was Ares of the Ninth Fleet who got infected while developing resources on a new planet, others say it was Hermes of the Eleventh Fleet who came into contact with unknown matter while leading the way, and there are even theories that it was matter we brought from Earth that mutated in space, of course, that’s absolutely impossible.”
“Teacher,” Liang Gong raised his hand to ask, “Why can it be determined that it definitely wasn’t Earth matter that caused it? Didn’t we enter space because Earth’s environment deteriorated to the point where humans could no longer survive?”
“Good question, Liang Gong.” Zhu Bingwen smiled and nodded, then continued: “First, the land resources of the main ships and escort ships of the Twelve Fleets were all obtained using material conversion technology, not native Earth matter. The organisms on the fleets were also recreated using matter transformation technology and cloning technology based on past gene banks, not transplanted from Earth. According to the surviving records, when people left Earth, they did not bring any native Earth physical matter, including clothes and furniture. Everyone underwent twelve sterilization procedures when boarding the spaceships to ensure no one brought Earth’s polluting matter onto the fleets.”
“Because physical matter could not be carried onto the fleets, scholars in various fields at the time did their utmost to store the world’s books and existing data from the Earth network into the servers of each fleet. At the same time, to prevent malicious use of the technology inside and repeating the mistakes of Earth’s wars, these materials were encrypted layer by layer by scholars from each fleet for safekeeping.”
“But this also became the greatest loss of the Dark Virus Crisis.”
Mentioning this, Zhu Bingwen couldn’t help but sigh. As a scholar, no one wouldn’t beat their chest over this loss.
“After the scholars in charge of the encryption programs unfortunately died, development in various fields of the fleets stagnated for a time, until humans cooperated with the ‘Xueke’ life group from the Centaurus Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy to eliminate this devilish virus, which stopped the situation from worsening.”
“Even so, after the crisis, most people fell into grief over the death of loved ones and friends. Many committed suicide or caused violent incidents as a result, and some even claimed it was punishment for humans stepping into space, and that everyone should return to Earth… and so on.”
This was a familiar operation. Xiang Chuan recalled a novel written by a famous domestic sci-fi author she had read in her previous life.
“At the time, the government did everything it could just to prevent further collapse of social order, with no time to deal with the data on the servers, until Tianyuan year 5500 when social order was barely restored, but the population had also dropped from 12 billion to 300 million in this crisis.”
Less than Huaxia before entering the 21st century! Xiang Chuan inhaled sharply, instantly understanding why people were so desperate at the time. The habitable area for humans on a fleet main ship was 15 million square kilometers, just a bit smaller than modern Russia, and the average population per fleet was only about 25 million, only a quarter of India’s!
After experiencing the exhausting crisis, looking at the silent streets where things remained but people were gone, how could it not make one despair?
