Chapter 166: A New Journey

The moment the screens in the observatory whited out completely, everyone knew it: the sun had detonated!

Adrenaline spiked through the room. The survival of the entire human race would be decided in these next few seconds!

“Switch to the security feeds!” Jason roared, leaping from his seat. His face was flushed so deep red it looked ready to burst.

Right now, there was nothing anyone could do but hunker down in the safe zones and pray. They had no visual on the outside. How much impact could Mars take? Could the Noah actually survive the blast wave? What was the status of the radiation shields?

They knew absolutely nothing. The not-knowing was the most terrifying part, it was true fatalism. Humanity had always despised relying on blind luck, but this time, they had no other choice.

Within seconds, the central mainframe’s security protocols began flooding the screens with data.

Jason only caught a fleeting glimpse, but a cold sweat immediately washed over him:

“T+1.44 seconds: Radiation Shield 1 telemetry lost. Status: Presumed vaporized.”

“T+5.67 seconds: Radiation Shield 2 telemetry lost. Status: Presumed vaporized.”

“T+19.34 seconds: Radiation Shield 3 telemetry lost. Status: Presumed vaporized.”

…

In under three minutes, the first six radiation blast walls were breached, incinerating every scientific instrument housed within their buffer zones!

The command crew was deathly pale, drenched in sweat.

Each radiation shield was over 500 meters of solid, reinforced mass, thick enough to shrug off multiple direct nuclear strikes. They were also embedded with countless external sensors used to monitor the outside world. But no sensor could survive temperatures soaring into the hundreds of millions of degrees. “Telemetry lost” was just a sterile way of saying the wall had been entirely eradicated.

If all seventeen layers failed, humanity would be completely exposed to the raw, unbridled fury of a supernova. Every living soul would be incinerated in the endless light.

Hold! Damn it, hold! Jason screamed internally, the veins bulging against his temples, his uniform soaked through with sweat.

“T+5 minutes, 45 seconds: Radiation Shield 7 telemetry lost. Status: Presumed vaporized.”

The mainframe coldly generated line after line of catastrophic failure reports, each one sending icy shivers down their spines.

Professor Hao Yu suddenly jolted, his eyes rolling back as he collapsed to the deck. A medical team hurriedly stretchered him off to the infirmary.

They were witnessing the unfathomable destructive power of a supernova firsthand.

Compared to the Noah’s colossal surface area, its exterior breaches were minuscule. Scaling it down, it was like a sealed 100-square-meter bunker with a few pinprick holes, some the size of a sesame seed, the largest barely the width of a cigarette butt. Humanity’s task was to plug those tiny holes before the blinding light seeped in and cooked them alive.

Yet, even that felt impossibly difficult. Against this cosmic inferno, human radiation shielding was as fragile as tissue paper, struggling to block even the residual ambient heat.

A few minutes later, the monitor flashed: *”Radiation Shield 8 telemetry lost…”* No sensor could calculate the external temperature, because anything that touched the thermal wash was instantly reduced to subatomic ash. They were flying completely blind.

The agonizing wait was excruciating, like a blindfolded prisoner on death row waiting for the firing squad. That final, breathless moment before execution is pure torture. You don’t know exactly when the bullet will hit, and every tiny sound makes you flinch.

That was exactly how humanity felt. All they could do was watch their blast walls vaporize, one by one, as their hope burned away.

“How long will the blast wave last?!” Jason demanded, gripping his hair in frustration, struggling to suppress his mounting panic.

Perhaps due to the backflow of liquid Martian rock, the rate of shield failure had begun to slow. The scorching magma had ironically formed an ablative protective shell around the Noah; the universe had a sick sense of humor. But he still wasn’t sure if they would survive.

“A natural supernova can last anywhere from a few minutes to several months. The timeline is highly variable…” an astrophysicist replied, his voice hoarse. “But… an artificial explosion triggered by a neutron star fragment shouldn’t last very long!”

How long was “not very long”? Minutes? Hours?

No one could definitively answer, leaving Jason to pace the command deck like a caged animal.

Fortunately, unlike the Federation officials and the science teams, the civilian population didn’t have to endure this agonizing wait. It was “late at night” by the ship’s artificial clock, and the populace was sound asleep, aided heavily by the mild sedatives the medical teams had slipped into the evening’s feast.

A new telemetry update flashed: Shield 9 had held for a full 11 minutes before succumbing!

*That’s nine layers down!* A collective shudder rippled through the room; more than half their defenses were already gone.

Finally, a shred of good news broke through the gloom atmosphere: the internal sensors behind Shield 10 registered the ambient temperature directly outside the wall. It was approximately 210,000 degrees Celsius!

While 210,000 degrees meant the specialized concrete was rapidly liquefying, it was a massive drop from the initial blast!

“The Noah’s hull absorbed over 99.999% of the initial thermal shock!”

“The ship’s purple metallic structure is deflecting a massive amount of the residual radiation. The further we are from the exterior breaches, the cooler the ambient temperature will be.”

“We still have a chance!”

Dr. Felix frantically typed at his console, his voice tight with urgency. “Based on current thermal degradation rates, if the peak supernova event ends within six hours, we… we will survive!”

Jason clenched his fists. The final layers of radiation shielding closest to the core were the thickest and highest quality; the engineering teams had placed all their faith in them. The sun simply lacked the mass to sustain a prolonged, multi-stage detonation.

The crew tried to comfort themselves with these facts, but the truth remained elusive. How long could the dying star keep pumping out this apocalyptic energy? Only God knew the answer to that.

As the minutes agonizingly ticked by, watching humanity’s defensive layers slowly melt away, a collective urge to scream profanities washed over the room.

When the eleventh wall finally collapsed, the normally reserved scientists couldn’t hold back any longer.

“Fuck!”

“Dammit!”

“Shit!”

However, their cursing skills were terribly uncreative. They repeated the same handful of words, some of them blushing furiously as they swore.

Jason couldn’t help but find a sliver of dark amusement in the absurdity of it all. If the marines had been stationed on the bridge, they could have cursed for an hour straight without repeating a single phrase, leaving the academics completely speechless.

But one thing was absolutely certain: the Noah hadn’t shattered. If the ship’s hull had breached, their internal blast walls would have been vaporized in a microsecond.

For the next several hours, the command crew sat slumped in their chairs like catatonic patients, only jumping up to curse whenever another blast wall failed. Otherwise, they remained perfectly still, staring blankly at the telemetry feeds, completely numbed by the stress.

After what felt like an eternity… a technician suddenly bolted upright, pointing at a monitor. “It’s stabilized! I think it’s stopped!”

Behind him, dozens of scientists crowded around the console. The telemetry indicated that the external ambient temperature was… gradually dropping?

It was definitely dropping. The rate of cooling wasn’t massive, but the downward trend was undeniable. Did this mean the peak of the explosion had passed?

“The initial shockwave has passed! We’re just dealing with the residual thermal wash now!”

“The Noah must have been pushed out by the light pressure! We’re riding the blast wave away from the epicenter!”

As the astrophysics team ran the numbers and confirmed the hypothesis, a profound, overwhelming surge of joy erupted from the depths of their souls!

The ambient temperature continued its slow decline, from 100,000 degrees Celsius down to 90,000. It took nearly three more hours before Shield 14 finally melted.

However, based on the current cooling curve, the remaining thermal energy was mathematically incapable of breaching the final three walls!

Had humanity actually survived?

They had survived!

The command center erupted. Men and women embraced, openly weeping with relief, before the room was consumed by deafening cheers…

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