Era of Mist

Shi Tiexin gazed out at the scenery, his mind replaying the accounts from his history books.

In the twenty-third year of the Mist Era, or 1941 by the old calendar, the Human Federation was founded. Humanity cast aside its old grievances to forge ahead. The exchange and integration between all races, regions, and nations intensified to an unprecedented degree, and the pace of human progress accelerated immensely.

In 1946 of the old calendar, humanity began to freely travel to and from geosynchronous orbit. In the thirtieth year of the Mist Era, 1949, humanity officially left the Central Star, establishing permanent settlements on the Moon and beginning the wholesale conquest of the Earth-Moon system. From that point on, humanity’s exploration and conquest of outer space entered its most fervent age.

In the forty-first year of the Mist Era, the first human deep-space exploration fleet was completed, and the great expedition to Mars began. In the forty-fourth year of the Mist Era, humanity began designing and building city-scale space stations, aiming to create larger, more comfortable, and more mobile habitats in space.

Tumu Fortress Space City was started in the forty-eighth year of the Mist Era and completed in the fifty-second, taking a total of four and a half years. Building a massive space city in just four and a half years was not at all unbelievable. Considering that even a nurse could tear a man in half with her bare hands, the speed and precision of the Era of Mist’s space industry were beyond the imagination of the people from the old era.

Besides, with force arts and mind arts, you could just brute-force any problem with battle qi and thought qi.

Four years was considered a long time back then. Nowadays, newly constructed space cities are said to be colossal, and they’re built much faster. This Tumu Fortress Space City has weathered the first, second, and third Great Solar System Expansions and is now part of the Saturnian System. It’s still in service, a testament to its solid construction.

Many of the design philosophies behind this old space city were already obsolete.

It lacked highly integrated residential zones and complex, multi-level transportation systems. Even the streets weren’t quite wide enough. Tumu Fortress was originally designed as an agricultural and residential city, a provider of farm and livestock products, which was reflected in its unique shape. It was like a flower blossoming in space, its petals facing the sun in a generally flat, sprawling configuration.

Its surface area was roughly twelve thousand square kilometers, yet its population was over eight million. According to the latest census, it had already surpassed eight-point-six million, nearing the red line of its population capacity. Rumor had it that City Hall’s Office of Population Management was considering policies to curb population growth.

Shi Tiexin looked down at the streets below. People milled about, most of them on foot.

It wasn’t for a lack of private vehicles. But finding a docking bay in the Upper City District was no easy feat, so many accomplished force art practitioners chose to walk. It wasn’t as if they were slow on their feet anyway. For these masters of force arts, the Upper City was a small place; they could get anywhere they needed to go with a quick jog.

The sky-rail train clattered along the curved track, a sound from a bygone era. The buildings in Tumu Fortress weren’t particularly tall, with the highest only reaching forty-six or forty-seven stories—nothing like the skyscraper forests of other cities that soared three to five hundred floors. When Tumu Fortress was built, the designers had a flare-up of nostalgia for their home world, giving the city an old-fashioned feel. One could even see many low-rise brick and stone structures.

Perhaps it wasn’t until the moment they truly departed for deep space, until they had to bid a final farewell to their mother planet forever, that this first generation of space pioneers truly understood the bitterness of leaving home.

CLANG, CLANG. The train continued its advance. Light spilled through the gaps between the high-rises, causing Shi Tiexin’s vision to flicker between bright and dark.

This, of course, wasn’t sunlight.

Although Tumu Fortress was designed with an isolation layer and a protective field that could turn transparent, and it could indeed retract its shielding to bask in the sun when it was in the inner solar system. That large, flower-like shape was designed specifically to maximize its exposure to light.

But this was the Saturnian system.

Here in Saturn Orbit, the closest it ever got to the sun was over 1.35 billion kilometers away—nearly ten times the distance between Earth and the sun. At this range, sunlight was faint. Gazing toward the center of the solar system, one could only see an incredibly brilliant point of light, far brighter than any star seen from Earth, but to expect it to provide adequate illumination was pure fantasy.

What illuminated Tumu Fortress was an artificial light source.

The light source looked remarkably like the sun; even with Shi Tiexin’s sharp vision, he could barely tell the difference. He figured it must be a specially designed lighting apparatus, created by the first generation of spacefarers who had left their homes behind, a way to hold on to some semblance of their home world.

The artificial gravity was set to a coefficient of 1.0, perfectly simulating the average gravity of the Central Star. There was no difference whatsoever.

It was precisely because Tumu Fortress was designed to preserve the flavor of Earth as much as possible—even having systems to simulate its climate, with wind, rain, and seasons—that Shi Tiexin had felt no shock when he crossed the world-line. It had taken him several days to fully accept that he was no longer on Earth.

The sky-rail didn’t travel particularly fast.

This was, after all, a miniature artificial ecosystem and a product of a bygone age; its equilibrium was still somewhat fragile. Even after subsequent upgrades and renovations, many precautions still had to be observed. The sky-rail’s speed was limited to eighty kilometers per hour to prevent it from causing unpredictable side effects.

But even at its modest speed, with no traffic to contend with, the sky-rail soon left the Upper City District behind and headed toward the Mu Yuan District.

The difference was night and day.

It was like crossing a clear-cut border. The moment the sky-rail train emerged from the last cluster of high-rises, the view before him opened up dramatically into vast, verdant plains.

As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but rolling fields of crops and man-made forests. The crops swayed gently in the artificial breeze, RUSTLING, painting a picture of idyllic, natural scenery.

Tumu Fortress had nine districts in total. The core was the Upper City District, while the others each had their own distinct character. The Mu Yuan District was one of these, an area with a more pronounced rustic feel.

Even today, Tumu Fortress Space City remained a standard agricultural space city. Farm and livestock products were its main output, and the Mu Yuan District was where its agriculture and animal husbandry industries were most developed.

An area of over twelve thousand square kilometers might not sound like much, but it certainly didn’t feel small when you had to cross it. Even on the sky-rail, with all its stops, it took a full hour to reach the urban center of the Mu Yuan District. The buildings here were lower and looked older. In fact, the Mu Yuan District was one of the poorer of the nine districts.

CLANG. The sky-rail pulled into the station. The doors opened with a HISS. Shi Tiexin rubbed his forehead, the throbbing in his head finally subsiding.

From the moment he had awoken, the amount and intensity of thought qi in his mind had been rising without pause. It wasn’t until he stepped off the train that his thought qi finally stabilized, reaching the level he had possessed when he left Fengming First Middle School.

’This means my mind art cultivation has been brought back completely intact.’

Shi Tiexin stepped off the train and stood on the platform, taking in the familiar scenery. A sudden surge of emotion welled up within him.

’Tumu Fortress, Mu Yuan District, the Star Worker School, and the Orphanage... I, Shi Tiexin, am back!’