Starting as a Wallfacer, his defection to the Three-Body Problem shocked the world.

Chapter 135 The Darkest Hour [Part 1]

The plot takes a turn here: Zhao Xin and Li Wei, who successfully escaped in the original story, die in the process of fighting the water droplets.

But their deaths were not meaningless; after destroying the Wanli Kunpeng, the water droplet finally ran out of fuel.

Left with no other choice, it had to abandon its pursuit of the fleet and, using its last remaining thrust, disappeared into space.

The Trisolaran fleet will be recovered after it arrives in the solar system.

But the slaughter continued. The remaining nine droplets were mobilized to pursue and clean up the remaining fleet. Just now, hundreds more warships escaped, but they were quickly blocked by the droplets and exploded into a pile of metal fragments in space.

The remaining fleet was already sparse, with the vast majority still inside the metal cloud. Most of the warships had exhausted their electromagnetic kinetic energy missiles and could only use lasers to open pathways within the metal cloud. However, the high-energy lasers were also insufficient due to energy loss, forcing the warships to slow down and navigate with difficulty through the debris. Most of the warships' speeds had dropped to almost the same as the expansion rate of the cloud. Thus, the metal cloud had become a trap for the fleet, making evacuation and escape impossible.

"Damn it, let's fight them!"

The command had already distributed the important intelligence provided by Zhao Xin and Li Wei to all ships, but it was too late; the kinetic weapons had already been exhausted.

Even if the fleet knew the droplets' weaknesses, they were still helpless against them.

Just as Li Wei said, their proud weapons were nothing more than stones thrown by monkeys in the trees.

Seeing that escape was impossible, the remaining fleet, surrounded by nine water droplets, gave up trying to escape, and the fleet command channel fell silent.

After a long silence, a calm and collected male voice broke the stillness.

"Asian Fleet, charge!"

No one knows who gave the order, but that doesn't matter anymore, because at this moment, it's the last and only thing they can do.

"European Fleet, charge!"

"North American Fleet, charge!"

The remaining thousand-plus warships all turned around and launched a deadly charge against the nine water droplets, using themselves as cannonballs.

"It's over, it's all coming to an end!"

"Comrades, see you in the next life!"

"Damn it, Stephen, you still owe me a meal. Don't forget to pay me back in your next life."

"Haha, Jiezi, I told you, you can't possibly outlive me. I'm an immortal, I've lived for 230 years. Who told you to join the Future Reinforcement Project? It's alright, it's alright. In the next life, we'll still be comrades-in-arms and join the army together again!"

Fleet International once posed a theoretical question to ship pilots.

How many electromagnetic cannon shells can a starship carry in total?

The answer is 121 shells. Of these, 120 shells were carried on the ship, and the last one was on the ship itself.

And now, they are fulfilling their final duty.

Lin Xuan may seem unchanged, but in reality, she has changed.

The main personnel of the three fleets today are all immortals and hibernators who will reinforce future plans.

They are a group of people who have spanned two centuries, and they still retain the fighting spirit they once had as soldiers.

Warships crashed into the tail of the water droplet, turning into bursts of flame.

The nuclear explosion lasted for a long time, and when the flames subsided, the nine water droplets remained intact.

This time, however, more than 500 star-class warships escaped the encirclement, 100 times more than in the original storyline.

Left with no other option, the Trisolarans dispatched three water droplets to pursue them, hoping to eliminate as many as possible before they got too far, otherwise they might cause a lot of trouble later.

The remaining 6 water droplets continued toward the sun.

With this, all of humanity's armed forces in space were wiped out.

Apart from the 500 intact warships that escaped, a small number of people in the fleet survived the great destruction.

They mainly escaped on small spaceships or fighter jets aboard the mothership before it was destroyed. The droplet could certainly destroy them effortlessly, but it had no interest in these small spacecraft.

The greatest threat to these spacecraft is high-speed metal debris. Small spacecraft have no defense systems and cannot withstand impacts, so some of them were destroyed by debris after detaching from the mothership.

Those who escape the mothership at the beginning and near the end of the attack have the greatest chance of survival, because at the beginning the large cloud of metal has not yet formed, and at the end the cloud of metal has become much thinner due to its own expansion.

The surviving small spaceships and fighter jets drifted in space beyond Uranus's orbit for several days before being rescued by civilian spacecraft traveling in that region of space.

The total number of survivors was around 16, which is less than one-thousandth of the population of the three fleets.

What destroyed the three fleets were merely ten probes from the Trisolarans. The combined size of these ten probes was less than one ten-thousandth the size of a single Trisolaran warship, and there were still a thousand such warships flying day and night toward the solar system.

Humanity collapsed, but the Trisolarans were not faring much better.

"What? Luo Ji has disappeared?"

When the officials received the news, they felt a chill run down their spines.

How did they disappear?

"It was during the time that Zhi Zi was completely tracking Lin Xuan that Luo Ji mysteriously disappeared!"

“We suspect that Lin Xuan provided them with the device used to shield Zhizi. Zhizi just searched the entire Earth but couldn’t find Luo Ji.”

"What about the others? Did anyone get lost?"

"No, the rest of Lin Xuan's faction are still here, including Luo Ji's wife Zhuang Yan and his daughter Luo Congmin, they are still on Earth."

"That's good. It means Luo Ji probably didn't run away. He's probably just hiding. Find him! Find him! He must be on Earth. What's that human saying... Right, dig three feet into the ground, dig three feet into the ground to find Luo Ji."

When Lin Xuan was cloning, she deliberately didn't have a replacement for Luo Ji, just to disgust the entire Trisolaran race and gain some shock points.

It's estimated that for some time to come, the Trisolarans who can't find Luo Ji won't be able to sleep soundly.

While the Trisolarans were searching for Luo Ji, the six water droplets accelerated their way toward Earth. They had already consumed a large amount of fuel under the deadly charge of the three fleets, but fortunately, the remaining fuel was enough to destroy all of Lin Xuan's backup plans.

The primary targets for destruction were the Dream Database and all the Thinker arrays.

This thing poses a huge threat to the Trisolarans. It's a database that's completely unmonitored by the sophons; who knows what humans will do with it?

Secondly, we must kill everyone connected to Lin Xuan, including the three people she met alone before going into hibernation.

Luo Congmin, Chang Weisi.

One of them is on the Trisolarans' kill list, while the other is already on the run.

It turns out that Lin Xuan likely orchestrated the escape operation of the Navigator, so the other two may still have other contingencies left behind by him, and they must be executed as soon as possible.

The third person they wanted to kill was Thomas Wade.

Finally, it is also necessary to destroy the Reach space station and those underground cities. During her time as a Wallfacer, Lin Xuan had devised a "Van Gogh Project".

This plan is part of the human memorial project. Although the Trisolarans do not see this plan as a real threat, they must be extremely careful about anything related to Lin Xuan.

At the very least, Reach must be destroyed, as it is the core of Van Gogh's plan. Destroying Reach would prevent Van Gogh's plan from continuing.

The only controversial one is a person.

Taylor the Wallfacer.

Taylor was the first Wallfacer to break through Lin Xuan's barrier. Judging from his activities over the next few decades, he did not participate in any projects related to Lin Xuan, and he is still in a state of hibernation.

Moreover, calculations show that Taylor poses zero threat to the Trisolarans, making it a very unprofitable deal for the Trisolarans to use their already limited fuel to kill Taylor.

Therefore, after unanimous discussion among the governors, it was decided that after conquering Earth, Taylor would become the new leader of humanity and be in charge of the great migration of all humans to Australia.

The Trisolarans don't care about humans.

At most, they would pay tribute to the fleet members who launched a death charge against the droplets in the apocalyptic battle and allow nearby civilian ships to retrieve their bodies and wreckage.

However, the Trisolarans must be extremely cautious about Lin Xuan; whatever Lin Xuan intends to do, they must stop him.