Chapter 164: The Last Supper

June 17, Year 3 of the New Era: an ordinary yet extraordinary day.

That evening, all the civilians aboard the Noah gathered on the sprawling lawns of Central Park.

Countless dishes covered dozens, even hundreds, of tables. There were assorted appetizers, homemade meatballs, cheese platters, grilled shrimp skewers, fresh pastries, olives, dill salmon, and stuffed eggplant. Of course, there were also plenty of hearty comfort foods: roasted turkey, garlic mashed potatoes, thick-cut steaks, savory stews, and pulled pork sandwiches.

These meals had been prepared collectively by the community, making it the grandest gathering in recent years. Even their past holiday celebrations hadn’t been this lavish. Normally, automated robotic systems handled the cooking, but tonight, men and women joyfully prepared the feast themselves.

As the artificial sun set and bottles of champagne were popped open, people ate, drank, and conversed. For the first time in a long time, life felt leisurely and carefree. This massive potluck made them feel like one giant family, brimming with warmth and harmony. Sometimes, a smaller population was a blessing; everyone knew each other, or at least recognized familiar faces.

In moments like this, the economic system didn’t matter. Everything was free!

Fifty thousand people was a tiny number. A single major sports stadium on Earth could have easily accommodated them all, so Central Park had more than enough space. To be exact, there were just over fifty-seven thousand people left… the entirety of the human race.

They savored the delicious food, experiencing a bittersweet wave of emotions. It had only been three years since Earth’s destruction, yet it felt like an entire lifetime. Everyone had lived so intensely. These past few years had been packed with joy, pain, panic, and unrelenting anxiety…

But none of that mattered now. Everything was in the past. At least for this one moment, there was peace.

Having survived so much trauma, humanity’s collective mindset had evolved. In the past, they might have descended into panic or rioted in the streets. Now, they simply chose to peacefully enjoy the time they had left.

Perhaps this would be their final meal together. When facing the end, do you spend your last moments in panicked despair, or in quiet dignity?

People gathered to talk. There were apologies, confessions of love, words of admiration, and heartfelt goodbyes. Things they had been too afraid to say before, they finally voiced aloud. If they didn’t say it now, they might never get another chance. Some singles finally found partners, while others found closure and forgiveness.

They shared small personal anecdotes and debated the grand fate of civilization, laughing heartily one moment and sighing in mutual understanding the next. Humanity had never been this united. They marveled at the sheer scale of the universe, the fragility of their civilization, the vastness of the Milky Way, and the profound ignorance of humankind.

What was the point of internal divisions and racial conflicts when stacked against the infinite cosmos? Even the most powerful presidents of old Earth had ultimately been reduced to cosmic dust.

Surrounded by this grand, extended family, everyone felt genuine warmth. Death suddenly seemed far less terrifying. If the end truly came, it would be over in a fraction of a second.

Dozens of children played in the grass, their innocent laughter ringing out periodically. They were the only ones truly free from worry. Happiness was simple: being together with family was happiness. Having a full stomach and a safe place to rest was happiness…

Jason walked to the edge of the park, resting his hand against the thick, cold metal of the radiation shielding wall. He sighed, unable to put his feelings into words. The Viridian spacecraft would crash into the sun in just a few hours, and he had no idea what would become of his people.

To be weak meant your fate was never your own. To be weak in this universe was the ultimate, unforgivable sin.

Jason stared into the distance, lost in thought. The universe was pitch black; the starry sky was dim. They had already lost Mother Earth, and soon, they would lose the sun that had birthed them. They were merely a tragic footnote in another empire’s history book, like fallen leaves or rootless weeds drifting in the tide. Their footprints marked a desperate path to the stars, and their tears echoed silently in the vast void.

This was no heaven.

The Milky Way stretched on endlessly, containing billions of stars, yet they could never replace their original sun. Only the red, cooling slag of their failed nuclear strike remained to testify to humanity’s weakness and sorrow. Detonating stars, breaking the speed of light, fielding planetary-sized dreadnoughts, commanding limitless energy… that was the glory of other species. All of humanity’s struggles, their sacrifices, their desperate searching… where did it leave them?

Jason remained trapped in his grim thoughts for a long time until a group of scientists hurried past him. Their faces were flushed, their expressions a bizarre mix of manic excitement, elation, and underlying terror.

He remembered then: after enjoying the literal feast, this group of researchers was rushing to attend their “scientific feast.”

Jason instinctively followed them. He smiled bitterly, realizing he was the only one standing around being hopelessly sentimental. It was time to pull himself together and watch the sun set for the very last time.

Perhaps, it was also the final moment of his life.

Because the Noah was hiding directly behind Mars, their line of sight was completely blocked. The ship’s primary radio telescopes were useless and had been dismantled. However, external receiver relays had been strategically placed in orbit. These relays would catch the telemetry from the distant probes and transmit the data via heavily shielded fiber-optic cables through the seventeen blast walls and into the Noah’s command center.

Humanity would witness the end together.

Hundreds of hardened probes were already in position near Venus and Mercury. Even though they would be incinerated by the expanding sun almost instantly, they were programmed to transmit every possible byte of data before they died.

Right now, all optical feeds were locked onto the Viridian spacecraft.

The curvature bubble enveloping its hull had finally collapsed, revealing the vessel’s true state.

Humanity finally got a clear look at the spacecraft’s armor. The hull area struck by the human tetrahydrogen warhead showed massive, ugly scars of melted and re-solidified metal. It proved that humanity’s weapons weren’t completely useless after all.

The spacecraft’s main warp drive was completely offline, but caught in the sun’s immense gravitational well, it was accelerating rapidly toward the star’s surface!

Half an hour later, it breached the outermost layer of the sun, the corona. While the sun’s actual surface temperature hovered around 6,000 degrees Celsius, the plasma in the corona burned at over a staggering 1 million degrees Celsius.

The moment the Viridian spacecraft plunged into the corona, its outer armor rapidly liquefied, peeling away and merging with the solar plasma.

Even a vessel 150 kilometers across was nothing more than a speck compared to the sheer mass of the sun. As it sank into the star, it barely generated a noticeable ripple.

However, this impact triggered a violent solar flare, which immediately disrupted the closest observation probes. The monitors inside the Noah’s command center began to violently flicker and shake; several telemetry feeds flatlined entirely.

But it wasn’t a total blackout. The solar wind only traveled at a few hundred kilometers per second, a fraction of the speed of light. The probes positioned further out remained unaffected for now, continuing to stream data.

Crushed by unimaginable gravity and superheated plasma, the Viridian spacecraft plummeted toward the solar core, melting and tearing apart simultaneously. In less than ten minutes, nothing remained but its heavily reinforced internal skeletal structure.

It was a stark reminder that the raw power of a star vastly eclipsed humanity’s most advanced tetrahydrogen weapons. The sun could sustain this unimaginable energy output for billions of years, while a nuclear warhead burned out in mere seconds.

Was that it? Where was the neutron star fragment?

The crew stared blankly at the monitors, searching for any anomaly. The Viridians weren’t suicidal fools. Their objective was to annihilate their enemies, not to throw their flagship into a star for nothing.

Soon, the astrophysics team detected a region of extreme, localized fluctuation. The telemetry indicated that this specific sector of the solar surface was becoming violently unstable.

“Can you magnify that sector?” Jason ordered.

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