Chapter 528: The Ruler Forces You into Submission with Power, While the Megacorp Wants You to Stand Up!
The dim sky was gradually obscured by these colossal steel behemoths. Once the planetary-class engines were ready, they began spouting immense flames that soared thousands of meters high for preheating.
This spectacular and bizarre scene left the Trisolarans, who had not yet entered dehydration, utterly stunned. They wondered what exactly these things were meant to do.
The very pillars of fire spewing out were several times larger than their biggest buildings. Could something like this really be deployed in just a day or two?
Frightened, they scrambled into underground shelters, faces full of terror as they watched the supermassive engines shriek and blast fire into the skies.
Beside Paul, monitoring officer No. 4396 trembled so violently it collapsed in a puddle of its own brine. More and more physiological saline seeped out beneath its feet. This uncontrollable dehydration reflex, triggered whenever fear took hold, was simply part of its instinct.
Seeing this, Paul could only shake his head and have the timid 4396 carried away to soak in water. Thankfully, preparations to clear the area had been made in advance; otherwise, the project would have been heavily obstructed by the Trisolarans.
The planetary engines did not immediately ignite at full power to push Trisolaris. Instead, they kept blasting pillars of fire to further compress and stabilize their own foundations.
From the planet's interior, materials were forced out by pressure. Massive amounts of obsidian mixed with gold and other minerals were flung skyward, only to rain back down as a storm of stones.
Just one planetary-class engine was enough to make it rain rocks across a radius of over a thousand kilometers—let alone more than five thousand of them.
As soon as these engines activated, nearly half the planet was battered by crashing stone storms. Trisolarans who failed to dodge in time were crushed to pulp beneath falling rocks.
And this was still only the preheating phase. Even so, the sheer shock was enough to convince the Trisolarans that a natural apocalypse had come.
After all, given the mass and scale of these engines, any movement they made was bound to unleash tremendous quakes.
Watching the engines thunder, waves of vibrations rippling across the land, many Trisolarans began to suspect these were some kind of "planet-shattering machines."
By shaking the ground and draining materials from beneath, they might trigger disasters until the planet was no longer habitable—destroying Trisolaris itself.
While the Trisolarans speculated on the Megacorp's true intentions, the engines finished preheating and began pouring out even brighter blue-white light.
Columns of energy speared into the heavens, their radiance heating up the mirrored faces of the Trisolarans.
Superheated beams scattered among the clouds, creating swirling halos of prismatic light. The entire sky turned into a kaleidoscope of color—bewitching, magnificent, and overwhelming.
Yet at the same time, stone storms fell harder and faster, pelting ever-wider regions with cascades of minerals.
Only those deep underground or near orbital altitude could escape being struck.
Meanwhile, the entire planetary crust trembled. The tremors grew so intense that Trisolaris itself began to shift its position.
Inertia raised titanic waves kilometers high, crashing against coastal cities. Scalding winds drove boiling seawater in every direction.
Between the towering plasma beams, the world became unbearably hot. Glowing rocks and steaming floods transformed the planet into a living hell.
Any Trisolaran without protection was like a fragile skiff caught in a typhoon, liable to be shattered at any moment.
Some who had rejected the Megacorp's assistance now regretted their decision.
They fled in panic, cursing themselves for not dehydrating and hiding earlier. Now they had no choice but to face the apocalypse firsthand.
They had to watch the end of days with their own eyes—after a lifetime of toil, when all they wanted was to enjoy a quiet twilight, disaster had come instead.
But what they did not know was that this was not the end of Trisolaran civilization—it was its rebirth.
What the Megacorp intended was to carry them away from this death-trap of a planet, and escort them to the stable, gentle Solar System, to live alongside humanity.
By now, the Megacorp's planetary-class engines were no longer what they once had been. After multiple upgrades by the Science Nexus Department, conventional heavy-nuclear fusion fuels had been replaced with energy crystals, kyber crystals, and high-energy gases.
Some of the core units even had traces of spice mixed in.
These extraordinary, high-energy substances endowed the engines with unparalleled thrust.
For the same fuel mass, this blended propellant produced hundreds of times the power of older versions.
Before long, under the combined thrust of over five thousand engines, Trisolaris veered off its orbit, guided by Megacorp engineers toward the wormhole point.
Paul and his companions watched silently from the Hyperion. For the Megacorp, this spectacle was nothing—mere routine. They had seen far more magnificent feats of industrial technology.
But for Dr. Luo Ji, witnessing such black-tech for the first time, it was utterly overwhelming. He stood frozen, eyes wide, desperate not to miss a single detail.
"You can actually push an entire planet in so little time!"
Luo Ji had never doubted the Megacorp's ability to move worlds. What stunned him was that they had completed preparations in less than seventy-two hours.
Logically, projects of this scale should take decades to assemble.
Yet for the Megacorp, executing such super-engineering feats was as easy as eating or drinking. Their industrial system had advanced to a level bordering on the divine.
For them, reshaping a planet was as simple as a bartender carving ice into a sphere.
"Does this really surprise you so much? Who says Trisolarans can only flee their home aboard starships?"
Paul Atreides smiled. Once, he too had been a staunch "starship faction" believer—convinced that any civilization cornered by doom had no choice but to build fleets and abandon its homeworld.
But the Megacorp had proven time and again how vital imagination was to a civilization. The idea of moving Trisolaris came simply from dismantling the War Moon.
Besides, the Megacorp had already encountered civilizations that drifted through space with their planets. Back in Universe 003 Edge of Tomorrow, they had clashed with the Reaper civilization—whose battleships were spherical worlds three thousand kilometers across.
In truth, this represented the ultimate form of a starship civilization. No matter how massive a vessel you built, its efficiency could never compare with a planet.
A planet carried its own ecological system. Some even possessed planetary consciousness, subtly shaping their environments.
Trisolaris had perished and reborn more than two hundred times, experimenting with countless possibilities—yet had always lacked that spark of wild imagination. Until now, when humanity had opened their eyes.
"Now that both the Trisolaran system and the Solar System have been exposed, where do you intend to take the Trisolarans?"
Luo Ji turned to Paul. He couldn't help but think—if Earth itself were pushed off like this, the shockwaves would be unimaginable, and the chaos enormous.
"Of course, the Solar System," Paul said without even turning his head.
"Don't you fear the Dark Forest Law? Higher civilizations could launch an attack on the Solar System at any time!"
At times, Luo Ji truly couldn't understand what the Universal Megacorp was trying to do. They were always making choices beyond his expectations.
Paul gave no answer. He only smiled faintly, watching the holographic screen as Trisolaris grew more and more distant.
Meanwhile, the Trisolarans hiding in underground shelters were beginning to realize that the planetary engines on the surface were not some kind of star-shattering weapons.
The sky-piercing plasma columns spewing from the engines extended endlessly upward, forming a colossal curtain. The Trisolarans, observing through their external surveillance devices, each had different thoughts as they looked upon these roaring engines.
As time passed, they became completely certain: these engines were pushing their homeworld off its orbit. Such an industrial miracle was beyond their imagination.
The temperature began to fall steadily, the sun hanging in the heavens slowly vanished, and the light levels plummeted.
All signs indicated they were leaving their original orbital zone.
"Humans are moving our planet!" a Trisolaran child cried out. The words instantly jolted those around him into realization.
It had to be that human civilization, in order to minimize losses, had decided to use those colossal machines to move Trisolaris back and dismantle it.
But wasn't this far too outrageous?
To move an entire planet—this shocked the Trisolarans no less than the first time they witnessed a proton's two-dimensional unfolding.
For a long time, the Trisolarans had been obsessed with colonizing the Solar System and enslaving Earth.
Even if such a great enterprise ended in failure, even if they gained nothing in return, they still felt an intense fascination.
Colonizing the Solar System—escaping their own suffering—might not necessarily benefit ordinary Trisolarans. Yet, so long as they could see Trisolarans standing on Earth's neck, lording over humanity, even a Trisolaran about to be sent to the incinerator would still puff out his chest in pride.
Only a very few Trisolarans clearly understood their actual plight—such as the very first listener to receive a signal from Earth.
He fully understood what kind of civilization Trisolaris was, and thus he understood why Ye Wenjie's trust was misplaced, why he had sent his warning: [Do not answer, do not answer, do not answer!]
For he knew Trisolaris was never a god that could bestow blessings upon lesser civilizations. They only sought to plunder resources for their own survival.
Thus, when Ye Wenjie prayed for Trisolarans to descend and save humanity, cleansing its filthy history, Listener 1379 could not comprehend such self-destructive folly.
In short, whether or not they reached the Solar System, the colonization plan carried immense significance for every Trisolaran.
Yet, unexpectedly, they did indeed have a chance to go to the Solar System—not led out of suffering by their so-called far-sighted Leader, but by the very human civilization they had regarded as their enemy.
In this moment, whether lowly listeners or lofty officials, all Trisolarans began to re-examine their relationship with humanity.
With the Leader's death, the information blockade imposed by the ruling class collapsed. As information grew symmetrical, more and more Trisolarans learned about the cultural knowledge their fleets had gathered from humanity.
Humanity had Yu the Great taming the floods, symbolizing perseverance and self-strengthening. Humanity had Jesus Christ, representing divine love for all beings. Humanity had the Buddha's enlightenment, representing ascetic discipline and inner cultivation.
So it turned out humanity was the "god" who could save Trisolaran civilization!
Strangely enough, once words like "god" and "religion" began spreading through Trisolaran society, more and more of them felt awe and reverence toward humanity.
Where the Leader had wielded violence and tyranny to paint humanity as lowly and insignificant like insects, the Universal Megacorp had shouted forth humanity's true divinity with its world-shrouding planetary engines.
The Leader had forced them to kneel, stripping them of everything without condition. Yet the Megacorp had given them dignity and the hope of survival.
Which side embodied true compassion was now obvious.
Religion may be a fabrication, yet its influence is immense. A faith beyond the power of tyranny itself was slowly flooding into every Trisolaran.
It was as if, in a single night, they evolved—from tools to be sacrificed and discarded by the Leader, into sentient beings with feelings and thoughts.
Perhaps thought and emotion had always been innate to Trisolarans, merely buried beneath their brutal environment.
Only with the Leader's death did they finally find release.
Meanwhile, the orbital shipyards, the giant particle accelerators of the Sophon Project, and other facilities were all packed up and hauled away under the gravitational pull of Enterprise warships.
Because the engines propelled the planet with such force, even with three stars weaving chaotic orbits, they still managed to slip through and escape this death zone.
As Trisolaris drifted farther from its suns, its climate transformed into a frozen world.
Fortunately, the planetary engines' blazing exhaust jets kept the balance of temperature—for now.
Some Trisolarans near the engines even used the fire plumes for warmth.
The closer they stood to the planetary engines, the more they felt humanity's divinity.
All life in the universe instinctively reveres the colossal and the sublime. For a rational species like the Trisolarans, the planetary engines—these titanic iron beasts—were the ultimate objects of admiration.
Those towering metal mountains stretched endlessly across the wasteland. With every second they gazed at these mountain-gods of machinery, their awe of humanity grew deeper.
Of course, to ensure every engine operated safely, the Enterprise stationed AI sentry robots there.
Some radical religious zealots would attempt to sacrifice their lives at the engine sites. Yet before they could even approach the core, the heat zones reduced them to charred husks.
Just as with human fanatics, some Trisolaran zealots believed only the sacrifice of their most precious life could properly honor the gods.
Paul cared little for such strange behaviors. What worried him was that restless Trisolarans might damage the engines. Thus, he ordered the creation of a forbidden zone.
No Trisolaran was allowed to approach.
As for those merely seeking warmth, as long as they stayed out of the restricted area, the sentry robots would not attack—only sweep the surroundings with wary eyes.
(Show your support and read more chapters on my Patreon: [email protected]/psychopet. Thank you for your support!)