After passing through Pluto's orbit, the Ark continues to fly deep into the solar system, where a starship is like a ship sailing in a harbor. The sun soon brightened, and the Precursors took a look at Jupiter through a telescope and found that the surface of the planet had changed beyond recognition, the Great Red Spot was gone, and the storm streaks seemed even more chaotic. He didn't pay any attention to the other planets and flew straight to Earth.

The forerunner pressed a button with a trembling hand, and the opaque metal curtain of the tall porthole was slowly opening. Ah, my blue crystal ball, the blue eyes of the universe, the blue angels...... The Precursor closed his eyes and prayed silently, and it took a long time before he forced himself to open them.

He saw a black and white globe.

The black is the rock that melts and then condenses, and that is the black of the tombstone: the white is the ocean that evaporates and freezes, and the white of the burial cloth.

The Ark entered low orbit and slowly passed over the black continent and the white ocean, the Forerunners did not see any ruins, everything was melted, and civilization was a thing of the past.

But there should always be a monument, a monument that can withstand 4,000 degrees of heat.

The forerunners were thinking so, and the monument appeared. The spacecraft received a video signal from the ground, which was displayed on the screen by a computer, and the Forerunners first saw the cataclysm more than 2,000 years ago, captured with a heat-resistant camera. When the energy flickered, the sun did not suddenly increase in brightness as he had imagined, and the energy emitted by the sun was mainly radiated in addition to visible light. He saw that the blue sky suddenly turned hellish red, and then nightmarish purple; He saw that the tall buildings he was familiar with in the Epoch City first rose with smoke in the heat of several thousand degrees, then glowed a dark red light like coals, and finally melted like wax: the scorching magma flowed down from the high mountains, forming huge waterfalls, and countless such waterfalls merged into rivers of magma glowing red, and the flood of fire on the earth was overflowing; Where it used to be the sea, there was only a tall mushroom cloud formed by steam, and the lower part of this hideous cloud mountain reflected the red of magma, and the upper part showed the purple of the sky, and it expanded dramatically, and soon everything disappeared into the steam......

By the time the steam had cleared and the scenery could be seen again, it was a few years later. By this time, the earth had initially cooled from its molten state, and the black corrugated rocks covered everything. You can also see rivers of magma, which form an intricate web of fire across the land. The traces of humanity have completely disappeared, and civilization has disappeared like a dream. After a few more years, the hydrogen and oxygen dissociated from the water in the hot state were resynthesized into water, and the heavy rain fell from the sky, and the scorching earth was filled with steam again, and the world was as dark, sultry, and humid as in a big steamer. Torrential rains for decades have cooled the land further and the oceans have gradually recovered. After another hundred years, the clouds formed by the evaporation of the sea water finally dissipated, the sky turned blue, and the sun reappeared. Later, as the Earth's orbit shifted outward, the temperature dropped sharply, the sea froze completely, the sky was cloudless, and the dead world became quiet in the bitter cold.

The forerunner then saw an image of a city: first, he saw a forest of slender high-rise buildings, and the camera descended from above the high-rise buildings, and a square appeared, and the square was filled with people. The camera descends again, and the Precursor sees that all the people are looking up at the sky. The camera ends up on a platform in the middle of the square, where stands a pretty girl, who seems to be only a teenager, waving at the forerunners on the screen and shouting, "Hey, we see you, like a star flying fast!" Are you Ark One? ”

In the final years of their journey, Forerunner spent most of their time in virtual reality games. In that game, the computer receives signals from the player's brain and constructs a three-dimensional picture based on the player's mind, and the people and objects in this picture can also make limited activities according to the player's thoughts. The Precursor had built countless virtual worlds from home to kingdom in loneliness, so now he could see at a glance that this was such a picture. But this picture is very clumsy, because of the erratic nature of the mind in the brain, there is always something wrong with this imaginary picture, but there are too many mistakes in the picture in front of me: first, when the camera moves over the skyscrapers, the forerunner sees a lot of people coming out of the windows on the roof, jumping straight down from a height of several hundred meters, and after a dizzying fall, these people all fall to the ground unharmed; At the same time, there were many people on the ground who jumped up several floors as if they could do a light thing, and then they stepped on a small piece of pedal (there was one on every few floors, as if it were specially designed for this purpose) on the wall of the building, and then they jumped up a few floors, and so on until they reached the top of the building, and got in through one of the windows. It's as if these skyscrapers don't have doors or elevators, and that's how people get in and out.

When the camera pans to the platform of the square, the forerunner sees several crystal balls hanging from the sea of people with wires, which may be more than a meter in diameter. Someone put their hand into the crystal ball and easily grabbed a part of the crystal ball, and when their hand was removed, the crystal ball immediately returned to its original shape, and the part of the person who grabbed the hand immediately turned into a small crystal ball, and those people threw the transparent ball into their mouths...... In addition to these obvious fallacies, there is one thing that best reflects the confusion of the thinking of the person who made this computer picture: in all the spaces of this city, there are some strange objects floating, they are two or three meters large, half a meter small, some are like a broken sponge, some are like a big bent branch, those east ones float slowly, and a human branch floats to the girl on the platform, she gently pushes it away, and the big branch spun and drifts away into the distance. The forerunners understood this, and in a world on the verge of destruction, people would not have clear and normal thinking.

It may have been some kind of automata that was buried deep underground before the cataclysm, sheltered from the heat and radiation, and then spontaneously ascended to this devastated surface world. The device constantly monitors space, and automatically emits that image when it detects sporadic ships returning to Earth, giving the survivors such a terrible and comical comfort.

"So you later launched the Ark spacecraft?" The forerunner asked.

"Of course, twelve more were launched!" The girl said. Not to mention the rest of this absurd and perverted picture, this girl is really good, her well-calibrated face that blends the best of East and West shows an extremely innocent look, as if the whole universe she looks up to is a big toy. Her big eyes seemed to be singing, and her long hair seemed to float in the air forever, making her look like a mermaid in the sea.

"So, is anyone still alive now?" The Precursor asked, his last hope burning like wildfire.

"People like you?" The girl asked innocently.

"Of course it's a real person like me, not a virtual person like you who made it out of a computer."

"The previous Ark returned seven hundred and thirty years ago, and you are the last one to return. Do you have any women on board? ”

"I'm the only one."

"You mean there are no more women?" The girl's eyes widened in surprise.

"I said I was the only one. Are there any other ships in space that haven't returned? ”

The girl wrung her two white hands in front of her chest, "No! I'm so sad, I'm so sad, you're the last person like that, if, woo...... If not cloned...... Woo woo...... "The beauty covered her face and cried, and the crowd in the square also cried.

The hearts of the forerunners sank to the bottom of the sea, and the destruction of humanity was finally confirmed.

"Why don't you ask me who I am?" The girl looked up at him again, and she regained her innocent look, as if she had forgotten the sadness she had just had.

"I'm not interested."

The girl cried out delicately, "I am the leader of the earth! ”

"Yes, she's the Supreme Archon of the United Earth Government!" The people below also turned from sadness to excitement at the same time, which is really a clumsy product.

The forerunner didn't want to play this boring game anymore, and he got up to leave.

"How are you like this! All the citizens of the capital are here to greet you, seniors, don't ignore us! ”

The girl cried out.

The Precursor remembered something, turned around and asked, "What is left of humanity?" ”

"Landing with our instructions and you'll know!"