Chapter 165 Moving Company

Hilda stared blankly at the place where Darklight Island had once been. Now, only emptiness remained, along with the faint glow left behind by the force barges as they warped away. The final, desperate declaration of the leader of the "nail户" (stubborn holdout) islanders still echoed in the communicator—righteous and impassioned, but even the most steadfast spirit of a holdout couldn't stop a professional moving company that could pack up and take away the entire house.

Hao Ren sighed quietly, "No matter how broad your thinking, it's not as good as having seen it all. How could I not have thought of this trick?"

"Didn't I tell you before that I found a lot of force barges?" 883 shrugged. "The hiring fee for these ships isn't cheap. They've already packed up and taken away one floating island. There are still ten sets of force barges waiting in the fleet. See which floating islands you want to keep and mark them, and I'll have them drag those islands to the World Gate for you. Then, after everything here is moved, the rest of the stuff belongs to our fleet."

Only then did Hilda react from her daze, hurriedly fumbling for a small device on her body, "Wait a moment, I'll have Vimm send over the identification codes. The ones to keep are the ecological domes."

"Ecological domes?" Hao Ren looked at Hilda in surprise, "Not keeping the Sunburst Island? Your palace is on it."

"The palace can be rebuilt, but the ecological domes contain the foundation of our ancestors. Not much is left of Planet Aerym, and we can't lose what little remains," Hilda smiled slightly. "Since dismantling the planet, we have always preserved complete ecological samples, hoping that one day we can find a new home and recreate the forests and grasslands of our homeland, so those ecological domes must be taken."

"This machine still doesn't quite understand your thinking," the data terminal interjected from the side. "You have to think carefully, the new planet has an existing ecosystem. Even if you move your ecological domes there, you can only temporarily place them in a closed environment. You have to spend decades or even centuries to slowly transform the inside and outside of the domes so that the things inside your domes can seamlessly connect with the ecosystem of the new home—that's definitely not easy."

Hilda nodded firmly, "I know, but the ecological domes must be taken. Perhaps this is a burden for us now, but I don't want our descendants to blame their ancestors one day in the future because they have no way of understanding their homeland."

This was the family matter of the Aerym elves, and since Hilda insisted so much, Hao Ren and the captains of the ships naturally didn't say much. 883, as the temporary commander of the fleet, passed down the order to begin transferring the space floating islands. Soon, many strangely shaped special ships branched out from the immigration fleet. Those were the force barges from various private ship bosses. These ships had all kinds of shapes, but without exception, they all had narrow hulls and small sizes that didn't fit the "cargo ship" designation. These advanced and expensive space cargo ships surrounded one ecological dome after another in the Aerym island chain. After a series of continuous flashes of strong light, these ships, along with several space floating islands, disappeared from everyone's sight.

"Let's go too," Hao Ren glanced at Hilda. "Let's get a team together early and send people over there, and we have to come back early to pull the next trip."

Hilda silently looked at the holographic projection on the bridge, deeply imprinting the final scene of those space floating islands in her mind, then nodded firmly, without any hesitation.

The image from the external monitor twisted for a while, and the light of the Aerym star was stretched into strange strips and quickly disappeared from everyone's sight. The Tortoise Rock Platform left this desolate and remote place and rushed to the World Gate deep in the universe at faster-than-light speed.

After entering hyperspace, only pitch black remained outside the ship. The holographic projection on the bridge began to display boring charts and data. Hilda sighed softly and said to Hao Ren in a low voice, "I want to go to the cargo hold and take a look."

"Oh, let Lily take you, she knows the way."

Lily was idle anyway, and when she heard this, she immediately jumped up happily and dragged Hilda away from the bridge.

The Tortoise Rock Platform was not a dedicated passenger ship. It had huge space expansion cargo containers, but they were just cargo containers. Under normal circumstances, they were used to load goods, but now these cargo holds were crowded with uneasy elves. Of course, the conditions for such a voyage were not good. There were no seats in the cargo hold. Although the space was wide, it was still extremely narrow and cramped for the large number of elves it contained. The elves could only crowd together with great difficulty, leaning on their luggage and families, and whispering about the end of the journey with slight anxiety and expectation, to pass the difficult time at hand.

Fortunately, this journey would not take too long, and the Aerym elves did not have high requirements for the environment. They had no dissatisfaction with the current situation of being crowded in the cargo hold.

This was the scene that Hilda and Lily saw after arriving at the cargo hold.

"Your Majesty!" "Her Majesty is here!" "It's Her Majesty!"

Hilda's appearance brought a commotion to the lifeless cargo hold. The elves closest to her stood up one after another and respectfully saluted. Hilda didn't put on any airs. She walked into the crowd with a warm smile and sat down on the ground in an open space. Being with her people again dispelled a lot of the haze left in her heart when she bid farewell to her homeland. "Don't be so polite, at least along the way, I'm just a passenger like you. What are you talking about?"

"I don't know what the new home is like," a middle-aged elf moved to the side very cautiously and kept a non-offensive distance from Hilda. "Your Majesty, are we really moving to a place with abundant resources?"

Hilda smiled and nodded, "It's true."

A little girl poked her head out of the crowd and asked rashly, "I heard that the new home has a very, very big dome, so big that you can't see the edge. Is it true? What is a very, very big dome? Who built it?"

"That's the sky, not a man-made dome." Hilda smiled and looked at the little girl, and began to patiently explain to her what the sky is, as well as the breeze of nature and the vast land. She felt a little like crying, but she had to try her best to hold back. How many generations had it been since they had seen the real sky? Not to mention children, even the existing Aerym elders could only see what the sky of their former home planet looked like from past data discs. She still clearly remembered the almost terrified shock she felt when she looked up and saw the sky for the first time when she was sent into the dream plane by the Big Bang. She knew that soon the elves around her would experience the same fear and shock as she did that day—the hard days were finally over. At this thought, she was filled with emotions.

Outside the closed cargo hold, the Tortoise Rock Platform had left hyperspace and was now standing still in front of the majestic light curtain of the World Gate.

Along with the Tortoise Rock Platform, there were other immigrant ships that had arrived one after another, and the entire fleet was basically stuck at the door.

Hao Ren was staring in astonishment at something that looked like a progress bar displayed by the shipboard computer: "What is this thing? Do you have to queue up to pass through the World Gate? Such a big door, it doesn't look crowded to me."

"This is a big conversion," the data terminal was stuck on the console slot, explaining lazily. "This group of elves and the supplies they brought are crossing over to another world for the first time, so they need to be converted before they can pass through."

Hao Ren didn't quite understand, "Conversion? What conversion?"

"Law adaptation," the data terminal seemed to be waiting very bored. "Think about it, the basic rules of many universes are different. Some places have different definitions of basic forces, some places have different speeds of light, and some worlds don't even have molecular structures in their matter—these differences are deadly to travelers. Soul travel is okay, but if a body travels over, it will be refined into basic particles by the will of the great universe on the spot. So mature inter-universe navigation technology must come with a conversion process, either when the ship starts the void engine, or when it passes through the World Gate. Only after conversion can safety be guaranteed. Wait, crossing from this universe to our home is crossing a void quadrant, so it takes a while to convert."

Hao Ren was stunned, "I understand the meaning of conversion—but we weren't stuck like this last time when we pulled Hilda over here, were we?"

"More people," the data terminal explained. "There were only a few people last time, but this time there are hundreds of millions of people at once, and this time we're also pulling millions of square kilometers of land and countless supplies. The World Gate here is still a simplified version. This poor and remote place, even the Sovereign Hub is version 1.0..."

Hao Ren nodded in confusion, looking strangely at the progress bar on the holographic projection. The more he waited, the more he felt that the thing hardly moved at all. Finally, he sighed, "Damn it, I finally got to do something big... pulling hundreds of millions of people, and I'm stuck on a loading screen..."