Chapter 2: Unexpected Turns

“Subject from another time and space, physiological age thirty-two, former chief fighter pilot of the Alliance air defense forces, currently serving as the team leader and main pilot of the Shan Hai Jing under the global Space Administration’s Time Bureau, codename Luo Yu, real name unknown.”

In her hazy state, Luo Yu heard someone reciting her resume, followed by a gentle question: "Hello, Luo Yu. Is everything I just mentioned correct?"

The recitation and this question did not come through any spoken language; they felt more like a direct connection at a spiritual level. This was… she thought for a moment, a form of mental communication?

“Luo Yu? Are you there?”

“I… I’m here. Where did you get my resume? Who are you? Where is this place?” She had many questions and didn’t know where to begin.

The other party chuckled softly, “Please don’t be nervous. For necessary considerations, we have read your memories from the past seven days to ensure your intrusion bears no ill intent. We hope you can understand.”

Luo Yu: “…”

Strictly speaking, they had indeed "intruded" onto someone else’s territory. After a brief silence, she explained, “We entered by mistake.”

“Yes, we are aware. You come from thirty thousand years in the future.”

Once the other party said this, Luo Yu suddenly felt a sharp pain in her head, her eyes refusing to open. She didn’t know where she was lying, only that she was struggling.

It seemed the other party could see her distress and continued, “Mental communication is indeed too taxing for you. We are prepared to implant a semantic super crystal in your brain so you can communicate in our language when you awaken. Please rest assured, the implantation is minimally invasive and reversible, and can be removed at any time without affecting your memories or self-awareness.”

At that moment, she felt like a fish on a chopping board, and from the sound of it, she had no other options. It was merely a "friendly" notification.

Thinking this, another wave of pain shot through her head, making her struggle again. The other party quickly added, “You are almost exceeding your tolerance. Please rest well. We will see you tomorrow.” With that, the mental communication abruptly ended, and the headache vanished. Luo Yu drifted back into a deep sleep.

She wasn’t sure how long she had slept, but she vaguely heard voices this time—not mental communication, but real people moving about and whispering nearby. Though she still couldn’t open her eyes, her mind began to clear, and she tried to distinguish the nearby voices.

“Let’s give her another supplement. These people are quite small; they seem somewhat malnourished.”

Small? Luo Yu frowned. Were they talking about her? She was five foot ten, weighing one hundred fifty pounds; she certainly didn’t fit the description of “small.”

Then another voice spoke up, tinged with suspicion, “Alright, I see the medicines equipped in their cabin; the ingredients are quite crude. Are these people really from the future?”

The first voice remained flat, “Yes, we will discuss the specifics when I bring those individuals over.” Following that, a series of footsteps indicated that the speaker had walked away.

Luo Yu was taken aback. The medicines in their cabin included some cutting-edge technology that wasn’t even on the market yet; crude?

At that moment, she sensed someone adding a cool gas into the breathing mask on her face, refreshing and comfortable.

As she inhaled this sweet air, memories of recently passed events began to slowly resurface—the images of waiting for the magnetic explosion to end inside the time capsule, and the entire process of their fall and emergency landing, right up to that peculiar mental communication.

Suddenly, she recalled the low-flying silent aircraft she had seen outside the capsule. Among all the manned vehicles she had heard of, she had never witnessed such a level of silence. She even doubted whether she had been deaf at that moment; what kind of advanced technology was this?

Wait a minute, she almost regained her thoughts at that moment. The matriarchal society thirty thousand years ago… how had it become so advanced?!

As she wrestled with these chaotic thoughts, footsteps approached. A few people entered the room where she was, engaged in hushed conversation.

Before long, her breathing mask was taken off, and someone said softly nearby, “Luo Yu, you can try to open your eyes now.”

She recognized that voice; it belonged to the person who had commented on her being small. She frowned and struggled to open her eyes a slit. The lighting in the room was very soft and not blinding at all. She blinked a couple of times, and the bed beneath her slowly folded up to sit her upright.

Now she could see several stern-faced women standing in front of her, observing her closely, as though studying some rare species. From her initial judgment, these women were all at least two meters tall.

What an imposing presence; Luo Yu silently shrank back. She never expected that her physique could be overshadowed to this extent, making her feel so small and weak.

The person who had awakened her remained at her bedside, gently placing a hand on her shoulder. “Luo Yu, you might remember me; we had a brief exchange yesterday, but I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself. I am Mo Chuan.”

Following the voice, she looked up at Mo Chuan, standing beside her. Wow, she was tall! Must be at least two meters two!

“I… where are we…?”

Luo Yu felt overwhelmed; her mind didn’t seem to function well, and her words were stumbling.

“A brief period of minor aphasia is a normal effect of the super crystal implantation. Don’t worry; it will pass. Here, have some water,” Mo Chuan said calmly. As she finished speaking, a mechanical arm next to the bed quickly handed a cup of water to Luo Yu.

She took a sip and then looked at the serious faces of the people standing in front of her. An eerie atmosphere of tension filled the room.

Mo Chuan pulled a chair over from the side and sat down beside Luo Yu’s bed, gently asking her about the content they had extracted from her memories.

It turned out that the recent memory extraction Mo Chuan mentioned involved pulling out some memory fragments from Luo Yu’s mind. The content was not complete, so they needed to confirm the missing parts with her.

For some unknown reason, it seemed they had not extracted any memories from after the Shan Hai Jing set off until their arrival in this time. Luo Yu breathed a sigh of relief; after all, the Time Bureau’s missions were highly confidential. Once the Shan Hai Jing was repaired, she needed to return to report. It would be enough trouble if her identity was exposed in other timelines, so the mission details could not be leaked.

Fortunately, Mo Chuan appeared to be uninterested in the tasks they were carrying out and only inquired about snippets of her daily life.

“So you really work ten hours a day every day? Only eight days off in a month? Is such an intense workload voluntary?” Mo Chuan asked incredulously, throwing a series of questions that left Luo Yu puzzled.

After receiving an affirmative response, the women standing at the foot of her bed furrowed their brows even deeper.

Luo Yu’s life at the Time Bureau was very structured. Memory fragments showed that she woke up at seven every morning, spent an hour working out on an empty stomach at the gym in her apartment, took a shower, and then went to the cafeteria for breakfast before attending morning meetings around nine at the administrative building.

The mornings were mostly spent organizing reports in the office or attending mission workshops. After taking a break in the nap pod for an hour after lunch, she would grab a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and walk to the space base for training. When there were no missions, she practiced flying and trained interns for the entire afternoon until around seven in the evening when she would eat dinner and then walk back to her apartment.

The past two years in the Time Bureau had been much easier than her time on the battlefield, but judging by Mo Chuan’s questioning tone and the expressions of the others, it seemed she lived a hard life.

If this was considered suffering, then what kind of heavenly life were they leading here?

She exchanged questions and answers about these daily issues with Mo Chuan for a while, and her initial speech impediment gradually faded away. At that moment, another person pushed the door and entered. This person nodded at Mo Chuan and then turned to the women standing at the foot of Luo Yu’s bed: “The two next door have also awakened.”

Upon hearing this, Mo Chuan stood up, exchanged a glance with the others, and then turned back to Luo Yu with a smile: “Let’s go check on your teammates. Please rest a bit longer; once we finish our conversation, we will bring you together.”

After saying this, she raised her hand and exited the room with the others, leaving Luo Yu in a fog of confusion. The two next door? That must refer to her deputy team member Zhu Huai and the accompanying scientist, but there were five of them in total, and the tail section had two intern team members as well. Mo Chuan hadn’t mentioned them; did they not notice them, or had something happened to those two?

While she was pondering this, the young woman who had entered earlier approached her bed. Luo Yu recognized her voice; before she woke up, she had heard her mention that the medicines on the Shan Hai Jing were crude. She guessed that the woman was probably a nurse.

Looking at the medical equipment beside Luo Yu’s bed, the nurse smiled and said, “You’re recovering well. Are you hungry? Should I order you something to eat?” As she spoke, a semi-transparent screen appeared before Luo Yu, displaying various meal options. Seeing that Luo Yu seemed unsure of what to choose, the nurse enthusiastically recommended a meal.

While waiting for the food, Luo Yu recalled Mo Chuan’s earlier question about her work hours and curiously asked the nurse, “How long do you all work in a day?”

The nurse was adjusting the dining table for her as she responded cheerfully, “Three hours, including half an hour of break.”

“Only three hours every day?”

“Every day? Not really! I work one day and rest for three; long vacations are separate.” Just then, as the dining table was adjusted, a nursing robot entered the room and delivered the meal to Luo Yu on a conveyor belt. The nurse laughed and said, “Alright, you can eat now, I’ll take my leave.”

After she turned and left the room with the robot, Luo Yu stared in the direction they had gone for a moment before turning back to open her meal. It was a mixed stew where she could not identify the specific ingredients, but it smelled wonderful.

Thinking about what the nurse had said regarding work hours, she ate the meal with mixed feelings. Shortly afterward, another nursing robot entered the room and invited her to meet her two teammates.

Luo Yu followed the nursing robot to a meeting room. She was the last to arrive. Once inside, she immediately spotted Zhu Huai, the deputy team leader, sitting in the center, with a young woman, the accompanying scientist Ying Zhao, beside her.

They exchanged glances, each looking confused.

Seeing Luo Yu enter, Ying Zhao quickly stood up and walked over to her. “Sister Fish, have you been asked a lot of strange questions too?”

Ying Zhao was a theoretical physicist recruited to the Time Bureau from a top university, specializing in M-theory and the multiverse. As the accompanying scientist, she had actually been with the Time Bureau longer than Luo Yu. However, due to her young age and friendly personality, the rest of the team called her “Sister Fish.”

“What kind of questions did you get?”

As they walked toward Zhu Huai, Ying Zhao shared her experience, which was quite similar to Luo Yu’s. She had also undergone super crystal implantation and had been asked a lot about her memories from a few days prior when she had accompanied a friend for a prenatal check-up.

Zhu Huai, on the other hand, had been shown her daily routine of slacking off at work, playing on her phone, and browsing the news, leading to a flurry of questions about societal dynamics.

As the three of them exchanged a few words, a robot in the hall approached them, requesting that they proceed to the “assembly hall.”

Following the robot, they took the elevator down to the underground level and walked through a transparent corridor to a round meeting hall.

About a dozen people were already seated inside, with an outer ring of several older women with gray hair and an inner circle of middle-aged women, including Mo Chuan, who waved at them.

After finding their seats, dozens of additional people arrived, while others joined through holographic projections until all seats were filled.

Once everyone was present, the elderly woman sitting at the front began to speak. “Ladies and gentlemen, the situation is serious.” She slowly glanced around the room, her tone heavy. “We have recently learned that thirty thousand years in the future, humanity lives in a hell.”