Chapter 2

Five years later.

　New star calendar year 275, eighth galaxy, Beijing β star.

　"Beijing β" is a bad planet name. Every galaxy has a dozen "Beijing Stars", "London Stars" or "Zimbabwe Stars" series. Just like in the ancient earth era, many cities in China had "Beijing Road" and "Nanjing Road" "Same.

　Perhaps because of this name, Beijing Beta Star has a very oriental temperament, and many residents have more or less ancient Chinese ancestry - of course, in the eighth galaxy, this ghost place, even if they have the blood of ancient dragons, don't even think about it. What a decent life.

　It is said that among the top ten daily headlines of mainstream media in other galaxies, one must lament that the people of the eighth galaxy are living in dire straits.

　They also gave this place another name, "Desert."

　There are a total of eight major galaxies in the alliance. The first galaxy where the capital star Voto is located is of course the top of the pyramid. The further back and further away from Voto, the more lagging development becomes. By the eighth galaxy, it is basically a pyramid. of the sewer.

　The reason why the eighth galaxy has become a "desert" has both natural and historical reasons. Lack of resources and inconvenient transportation are on the one hand, but more are problems left over from history. Let's start from the beginning, that is, children without mothers. It's a long story –

　in the old star calendar era more than two hundred years ago, the Alliance The fight with the interstellar pirates was lively - the members of the interstellar pirates are all descendants of ancient earthlings. They are not ETs with eyes as sharp as tennis balls. They are not called "interstellar pirates" in the first place, which is a bad name that immediately sounds like a villain. , and there is more than one force among them. After the Alliance government took control of most of the galaxy's governments, in order to save trouble, all the anti-government organizations that refused to recognize the Alliance were collectively called "Interstellar Pirates".

　The eighth galaxy "lives in isolation". Compared with the other seven galaxies that are clustered together, it is like a pitiful island. In order to fight against the powerful alliance, a small group of anti-government forces were forced to form an alliance and use the eighth galaxy as their stronghold to confront each other from afar. At the beginning of the New Star Calendar, the eighth galaxy was occupied by the interstellar pirates for a hundred years. It was not until the 136th year of the New Star Calendar that it was recovered by General Lu Xin, then the alliance general, and the shipping lanes with the other seven galaxies were re-established.

　Over the past hundred years, the Alliance has developed at the speed of light under the two searchlights of science and humanity. The eighth galaxy has been displaced by the constant conflicts and civil strife of the pirates. The two ends of the channel gradually opened up. The gap is irreparable. The gap between the two sides is as big as that between contemporary Homo sapiens and ancient chimpanzees.

　After General Lu Xin regained the lost territory, the Alliance sent people to inspect the eighth galaxy. They found that this ghost place was useless and worthless, so they established a "democratic autonomous" government in the eighth galaxy - that is, they released these chimpanzees. Nature, let them play with their own eggs.

　When the alliance has important occasions and requires representatives from the chief executives of each major galaxy to attend, the chief executives of the other seven major galaxies have their own name tags. Only the representative of the eighth galaxy has no name, so the name tag simply prints "Eighth Galaxy" . It's not that the alliance is engaging in regional discrimination, it's because these orangutans are constantly fighting among themselves. The chief executive and his government are basically disposable, and the representatives change every day, so that everyone doesn't know who is who, so they have to refer to each other by their "racial names" .

　Anyone who had the means to do so tried their best to immigrate, and the rest were poor bastards abandoned by the times in the desert.

　In the eighth galaxy, Beijing Beta is quite respectable. It is the planet with the largest population. Although it is chaotic and depressed, there are still some surviving industries and interstellar shipping lines in operation, allowing people to survive.

　As night falls, on Beijing's Beta Star, a slow bus pulls drowsy passengers and drives slowly along the road. On the paint-peeling car body, the words "Galaxy Transport" were mottled, leaving only "Rikeyun Vehicle". The artificial intelligence driving the car may be an "artificial retard". The damage rate has reached more than 95%. Currently, only the "ultra-safe mode" is available. It drives at a slow speed in the night and whistles every five minutes. .

　Not a single window on either side of the car was intact - they were all smashed by residents along the way who were awakened by the honking of night train horns.

　The car was drafty and dusty from all sides, and no one maintained it. Because the "Galaxy Transportation" company has been bankrupt for two hundred years, and now there is only an urban bus system that cannot stop, running half-deadly on its own every day.

　It was the severe winter in the area at this time. Due to the laws of planetary revolution, the winter on Beijing's β star was very long. According to the unified new ephemeris, it would last for three years. However, the city's constant temperature heating system had been shut down due to lack of money. The biting cold wind invaded the unsuspecting human city-state and passed through the car windows. The poor passengers in the car wrapped tightly in their shameful coats, like a nest of quails burying their heads under their wings.

　Those who use this kind of free public transportation are mostly the poorest of the poor, and there are many homeless people among them. They are all so dirty that you can't tell whether they are men, women, old or young. Fortunately, the carriage is not sealed, otherwise the smell of these passengers could be used as a biochemical gas bomb.

　In the corner of the last row of the "Riko Cloud Car", there was a drunk girl sitting. Her face was so smeared with makeup that she couldn't tell her age. She was not afraid of the cold. Her jacket was open, revealing strange-shaped underwear, and she had tattoos on her waist. He had a skull on his head - from the looks of it, this person should be a female hooligan who is not easy to mess with.

　The girl had a one-meter-high backpack at her feet, with headphones plugged in. She was leaning on a tattered chair with her eyes closed, her expression a little grumpy—because she was still hungover, and there was a naughty kid in the car all the time. Crying, the crying sound is so penetrating that even the deafening music in the earphones can't resist it.

　She reluctantly endured it for a few minutes. When she couldn't bear it anymore, she took off her earphones and prepared to find some trouble.

　But the strange thing is that as soon as the headphones are taken off, the noise disappears.

　The girl looked around angrily, but as far as she could see, there were only half-dead adults in the carriage, huddled up to avoid the wind, and no children at all. She burped in confusion, suspecting that she was hallucinating. She shook her head, plugged in the earphones with a suspicious look on her face, pulled down her hood again, and closed her eyes sleepily.

　Just when she was drunk again and was about to fall asleep, a child's sharp cry penetrated her eardrums like needles: "Mom!"

　The girl opened her eyes with excitement, and the "Rikeyun Car" happened to be leaning against it. He stood, let out a long sigh, and stopped.

　She turned off the music and heard clearly this time. The child's pitiful cries came from not far away and were constantly reaching her ears.

　But... where did the child come from in this ghost place?

　The stop sign had been stolen long ago by someone unknown, and the street lamps were all destroyed. It was dark all around, and not far away was a large filth-covered path, connected to each other. My eyes in the middle of the night looked through the stained corners, as if they were in the middle of the night. Peering outside, I saw that the "artificial retard" driving the car had trouble again. It sounded the "terminal reminder" in advance and automatically went to sleep without waiting for the passengers to protest. The passengers had no choice but to line up and get off the bus, cursing.

　The girl frowned, picked up her luggage, and followed several tired travelers. In front of her was a middle-aged man wrapped in a thick cotton coat. He was very thin. He was holding an old man with a sallow complexion in his hand. The old man staggered due to the pull, and he hit her.

　The little female gangster raised her eyebrows. She didn't have time to show her true colors as a hero. Suddenly her eyes blurred. She rubbed her smoky eyes that were covered with mascara, and she saw to her surprise that the old man who hit her had rejuvenated and turned into a little boy!

　"Am I poisoned by fake wine?" She muttered in her mind and closed her eyes hard again.

　As the image in front of her changed from blur to clarity, the girl discovered that the person in front of her was definitely a child. He looked to be two or three years old, and he was still walking unsteadily. He was wrapped in a dirty rag, with a corner of his body exposed. The little children's clothes are very exquisite. Although they cry very inhumanly, you can still see the delicate skin and tender flesh.

　The "tramp" beside him choked the child with one hand and grabbed his wrist with the other, carrying him away without his feet touching the ground. He kept struggling and crying, but no one around him looked up, or even looked strange - I'm afraid they were just like her just now, they only saw a crazy old homeless man acting bad.

　This is a collective hallucination!

　The girl's pupils shrank slightly, and she suspected that the "tramp" was a human trafficker with black technology, so she followed him calmly.

　The "tramp" carrying the child didn't pay attention to the little girl. After getting off the car, he walked straight into a narrow alley. There were several shabby small houses in the narrow alley. At the deepest part was a dark bar with a shadowy back door. The bright night lights were like fireflies, shining on the thin snow, finally allowing night travelers to see the road clearly. The children's shrill cries echoed in the narrow alley, but failed to disturb anyone.

　This couldn't be a hallucinogen - whether it was on the bus or in the narrow alley just now, the howling night wind was enough to sweep away all biochemical products.

　The girl carried her bag on one shoulder, pushed up her hood, and called out to the homeless man: "Hey, stop for a moment."

　The "tramp" paused slightly, and grabbed the child's back of the neck with his hands, but there was a look on his face. With a cowardly and flattering smile, he slightly arched his shoulders, hunched his neck, and put on a cowardly look as if he didn't want to cause trouble. He stammered, "Call...call me?"

　The girl narrowed her eyes warily and said... He raised his chin and nodded at the child in his hand: "Is this your child?"

　The "tramp"'s expression suddenly changed, his expression flickered for a moment, and he forced a smile: "Wha... what? You... You see - are you wrong? There is no child here? This old guy looks like... an old monkey. He is small, not a child,"

　he said . Pushing the person in her hand in front of the girl, for a moment, the girl felt as if there was a malfunctioning screen in front of her eyes. The little boy who was crying so hard that he couldn't breathe stretched and shortened, and jumped into a shadow. It will be described as a wretched old tramp, and then it will turn into a crying child, flashing back and forth.

　She frowned, took two steps forward, and tilted her head calmly: "That's weird."

　Seeing that she was fooled, the "tramp" opened his mouth and smiled with yellow teeth: "Look, I , What did I say - what..."

　Before he could finish his sentence, the girl suddenly pulled out a wine bottle from her bag, and moved her hands at lightning speed. The bottle collided with the tramp's forehead, and his bones were shattered. , sharp broken glass shattered everywhere, and the pungent smell of low-quality alcohol suddenly dispersed. The heroine carried half of the wine bottle, wiped the remaining lipstick on her lips, and spat: "Bah!" You bastard, are you fooling your grandma?"

　The drink flowed down the "tramp's" head and face, and the smile on his face gradually disappeared, and his eyes were sinister and cold, showing blood. Immediately, I saw him throwing the child aside, the bones around his body crackled, and his whole body stretched and widened as if inflated, and in an instant he turned into a burly man nearly two meters tall!

　The arrogant girl suddenly changed from looking down to looking up. She was a little confused for a moment and subconsciously took a step back: "You..."

　The "tramp" smiled, and his mouth was as long as a palm. When he opened it, a bloody mouth was revealed: "Let me tell you, it turns out he is a cripple with empty brain disease."

　As soon as the word "cripple" came out, the girl's face suddenly changed, from fear to rage, and she flew up to tease her vaginal foot. While the other person was bending down, she He grabbed the opponent's hair, pushed it down, and stabbed half of the bottle into his face - this series of actions was steady and cruel, showing that he was a veteran gangster with rich experience in street fighting.

　But when the sharp half of the wine bottle hit the man's face, it slipped and didn't even scratch a layer of oily skin. His face was hard and pale, with a texture like some kind of metal.

　The "tramp" moved his neck carelessly, and gently grabbed her hand holding his hair, as if he were picking up a cat kit and grabbing the girl.

　The wine bottle fell to the ground, and the girl struggled in mid-air, looking at the reflective face in shock: "You... you are not a human being."

　The "tramp" showed a weird smile, and pinched her hand with a palm-like hand. His head and veins suddenly appeared on his hands -

　at this moment, a bright light suddenly swept across, and then, three or four high-speed motorcycles swooped down from the air, clearly violating the prohibition that "high-speed motor vehicles are not allowed to touch the ground within 100 meters." The light arrived first, and then came the thundering sound of the engine, stirring up a whirlwind on the ground and sweeping over them.

　The "tramp" may have realized something, his expression changed, and he made a quick decision to let go and run away.

　The wind brought by the high-speed locomotive made the girl unsteady. She fell to the ground together with her luggage in a panic, and she quickly grabbed the wall with all four feet on the ground.

　The little boy who had just been left aside screamed and was blown directly into the sky by the whirlwind.

　The monster-like "tramp" jumped up like a beast, and settled on the wall for a moment. Then, a laser flashed across his body, and he disappeared into the night in an instant.

　The little boy's limbs were slicing in the air, flying straight towards the dark bar not far away.

　The back door of the bar suddenly opened, and a man came out. He stretched out his hand and hooked the boy's neck.

　The high-speed locomotives fell to the ground and were silenced. The girl lying in the corner raised her head and looked out through the seam of her hair that was blown into strips by the wind. She saw that the man was tall and tall, with the light behind him, and his face could not be seen clearly.

　He bent down, put the child on the ground, flicked the cigarette ashes with a flash of fire in his other free hand.

　"No need to chase, there is a space field, and we have already run away," the man said slowly, "The next time you appear, you can make more noise. It is best to scare people from a light-year away."