Voyage of the Stars.

Chapter 697 Fireflies in the Nebula

The entire fleet of ships sailing at warp speed is led by humans, with small boats of other races following behind the main force. They are all spaceships that have been replaced by humans with warp engines.

Seeing that each spaceship is larger than their own civilization, it would be a lie to say that these vassal races are not envious, especially the Red Flame Civilization, whose almost entire civilization has surrendered to humanity. Envy is simply written on the faces of the people in their society.

The entire social elite is basically "human-praising", some of them are alien versions of Lin and others, and their networks are full of praise for humans.

For example, humans have designed personal mechas to fulfill their individual dreams of flying, showing their respect for life; humans’ dining environment is cleaned seven times a day; and humans’ living spaceships are as beautiful as their home planet, etc.
There are even more outrageous ones. No one knows where the fake news came from or whether it is the imagination of the netizens of the Red Flame Civilization. On their website, there are even statements such as "human toilet water is so clean that it can be drunk directly". It is obvious that this is exaggeration.

In order to show that what he said was true, the individual of the Red Flame civilization who expressed this view also wrote a long article about his experience of having the honor of visiting humanity's new residential spaceship. He also specifically stated that he had tried toilet water. He spoke so convincingly that people who didn't know believed it to be true.

This kind of thing was posted on the human intranet by human residents who climbed over the firewall to watch as entertainment after dinner. The titles were generally: "How do people of the Red Flame Civilization view humans?", "The reaction of people of the Red Flame Civilization after seeing humans living in spaceships", "Shocking! Individual life forms of the Red Flame Civilization actually claim to like drinking human toilet water".
Some netizens who were curious about the topic even acted very professionally and posted titles on the internal website such as "Research on the individual life characteristics of people from the Red Flame Civilization was derived from the fact that they like to drink human toilet water."

Of course, when there are rumors, there will naturally be people who clarify them. These people are either humans who often climb over the wall to go inside the affiliated civilization, or vice versa.

In fact, these behaviors of circumventing the firewall to access the Internet are seen by the upper echelons of human society, but since they are just civilian activities, no one pays too much attention to them. They just treat them as individual entertainment activities, so they turn a blind eye.

However, after the human fleet cluster sailed for more than a year, it stopped at the first target star for a few days, carried out some simple supply replenishment there, and then continued along the previously planned route. The second voyage spanned an even longer distance. Humans directly crossed several stars and sailed a hundred light years. After arriving at the destination, they carried out another major supply replenishment there, probably stopping to use the matter and energy in the star system to produce antimatter or something, and then continued to move forward after completing the replenishment.

During this process, humans did not find any traces of other civilizations, nor did they encounter any strange phenomena. It was as if they were the only one left in the universe. This is a normal phenomenon of space travel, nothing to be surprised about. Humans have been accustomed to it for many years. It would be abnormal to encounter a civilization every step of the way.

In this way, human beings have traveled one distance after another, crossed one star after another, and unknowingly have traveled thousands of light years.

And now, the human fleet, which is traveling at a warp speed of 10 times the speed of light, suddenly detects a very dense nebula on the fleet's route.

According to the detection data feedback, the nebula is very large, with a diffusion radius of at least 50 light years, and its overall shape is a flat sphere. Based on its appearance and structure alone, human astronomers believe that there should be a gravitational source in the center of this star field, otherwise the nebulae in the universe generally do not appear in such a regular shape, but instead present various irregular shapes.

The disk of the nebula, or its ecliptic plane, is at a 90-degree angle to the Milky Way disk. If you look at it from the position of the solar system, if the technology is advanced enough, you can probably only see a thin line.

Of course, you have to be able to see it. This is an interstellar star field, and it can be said that there is no village in front and no shop behind. There is no star light to illuminate the nebula. It is extremely difficult to detect the existence of the nebula with the weak light of the stars in the universe. However, using other detection methods is another matter.

At least now humans can see its shape and size clearly.

After discovering the nebula, humans further increased their exploration efforts and then realized the special features of this star field. Its density is far greater than any nebula humans have encountered before.

Soon, human scientists came to the conclusion that such a dense nebula was very unfavorable for the fleet's warp speed navigation. If the human fleet continued to move forward at a warp speed of ten times the speed of light, it might cause a huge load on the engine, making it unsuitable to travel at the maximum speed for a long time.

There are two solutions: one is to take a detour, and the other is to reduce the warp power to pass through. Reducing the speed to pass through is obviously the worst option, because it is not as fast as taking a detour, so after reaching this conclusion, humans decided to take a detour without much hesitation.

However, as this was the first magical cosmic phenomenon encountered during the voyage, humans did not intend to just leave it alone, but instead sent out a probe to observe and record it.

After all, this is the first time that humans have encountered such a dense nebula, so it is necessary to conduct a scientific investigation on it.

However, such an ordinary decision has allowed humans to discover more magical places in this nebula. After the probe came to the edge of the nebula for close detection, humans were surprised to find that this dense nebula was not dark, but would flash from time to time like fireflies.

In the visual images sent back by the probe, humans decided that the picture was like seeing fireflies twinkling in the distance on a dark night on Earth.

These lights are very faint, and most of them are blocked due to the high density of the nebula itself, and it is difficult for them to be transmitted outside the nebula. That is to say, human detectors can only reach the edge of the nebula, otherwise they cannot be discovered.

Judging from the feedback from the spectrometer, the nebula is mainly composed of common hydrogen molecular clouds, doped with a small amount of helium. Such a large nebula should have gathered together over a long period of time due to the difference in gravitational force, and then formed a new star or became a failed star.

But after observation, humans discovered that this nebula had no tendency to gather further together.

This strange phenomenon soon attracted the interest of scientists, so more unmanned probes were sent out. Scientists plan to let unmanned probes go deep into the nebula to see what these twinkling lights are.

(End of this chapter)