STH Chapter 01 Bronze Coffin underneath the Stars

Life is the greatest miracle of the universe. Yu refers to the directions in Chinese, which is not a physical object but grounded on the reality. Zhou refers to the time, which has been in existence for billions of years, but without an exact ending.

In the boundless universe, earth might be the only planet with creatures, as scientists speculated. Humans are lonely because we haven’t found any other planet with living entities till now, despite of trillions of stars we have known in the whole universe. But we never give up exploring the outer space. Since 20th century, we have launched many detectors to the universe.

The Voyager II spacecraft was sent to interstellar space in 1977, with the mission to figure out the edge of the solar system. It was launched in Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, carrying a gold-wrapped album named “Greetings to the Universe”. 

That album consisted of several pop songs and greeting words recorded in fifty-five languages of the earth, with the expectation of being intercepted and received by alien civilizations one day.

From 1970s, the Voyager II spacecraft has been in its lonely journey for more than forty years. Compared with the boundless universe, it was like a grain of sand at the beach. Many spacecrafts launched in 1970s got broken down or lost their connection with the base. 

They permanently disappeared in the boring universe. With the help of advanced technology, we are now able to invent and build new spacecrafts. In the near future, we could achieve breakthroughs in our exploration for the universe.

However, newly designed spacecrafts couldn’t catch up with the Voyager II, which was 14 billion meters away from the earth in 2010. Right now, it operates in the speed of the third cosmic velocity. In some ways, the Voyager II has become a star ship in terms of its speed. But it also means that the Voyager II won’t return to the solar system anymore because it changed its original orbit for speeding-up.

Billions of stars twinkled underneath the dark icy universe, like shining diamonds decorated on a black screen. The Voyager II spacecraft is like a tiny ant crawling on the ground of earth, despite of its unbelievable speed. Unexpectedly, it captured a picture and sent back a set of data on May 22, 2010. That group of data sent back was received by NASA. It was tough for scientists to decode and restore its original information.

Finally, a picture was revealed: Nine enormous corpses lied perfectly flat in the silent universe. At that moment, all NASA staff in the major monitor room were overwhelmingly shocked, because that scene was totally incredible. It took a while for them to realize what they saw, and they suddenly started shouting. 

“Oh my god! What did I see right now?”

“How could it be! It is unbelievable!”

Losing its original orbits, the Voyager II was only able to fly in a straight line. After sending back that picture, it continued its journey toward dark galaxies. However, there was still nothing we could do for it, because that galaxy which contained those corpses were far away from the earth, though the Voyager II captured such astonishing picture for humans.

The news was not released to the public. Soon the Voyage II lost its telecommunication with NASA because of its breakdown. It seemed to be an end of that event, but things usually went beyond our expectations.

Generally speaking, space stations have distinctive advantages not only on observing the stars but also on conducting biological and physical research. There have been nine space stations since Soviet Union first launched its station in 1971. 

On June 11, 2010, several astronauts of a space station got frightened by what they saw in the monitor. Their pupil contracted rapidly because of astonishment. That was because scientists had already negated the existence of those bodies. At that moment, those elites were hit by a great shock for the unbelievable scene they saw.

Nine extremely large bodies lied perfectly still outside the space station as if they were set there since the birth of the universe. To be more specific, they were nine dragon corpses floating in the dark frozen universe, delivering a sense of desolation and remoteness. 

They were exact dragons, exact dragons in ancient Chinese mythology. Their length reached one hundred meters. And their bodies seemed to be built by iron, which were filled with strength. All of them were black dragons with five paws. Except for their translucent horns glittering in purple, their skin was totally black, covered by flickering scales.

Dragon, the mysterious animal embalmed in myth, was not in accordance with the laws of nature apparently. Who could truly believe in the existence of dragons in the modern world? Nor did those astronauts who first saw these dragons. 

They could even feel the horrible power contained in nine dragon corpses, which looked like unbreakable iron Great Wall. Fortunately, these dragons were dead and lost their dynamism, floating silently in the space.

“Oh my god! What’s that?” Their pupil contracted rapidly once again, when they saw a more shocking scene in the monitor.

All these bodies were tied with black iron chains on the tails. These thick chains were built in great solidarity, glittering in gloomy color. The other end of chains was tied with a bronze coffin with a length of over 20 meters. 

That bronze coffin was primitive and unsophisticated, decorated with vague patterns. Its sense of vicissitudes made it difficult to speculate how long it had floated in the universe for.

Nine floating dragon corpses and the bronze coffin, connected by thick iron chains, delivered an astonishing feeling to people. As soon as these astronauts settled down, they rushed to make radio call to the base: “Space Station to the Base! Space Station to the Base!”

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