Chapter 4009  A Chapter of Connection

"Right now, the entire world thinks you have disappeared," Amare mused as she leaned her head against his shoulder as they sat on the couch on their balcony. Their hands were intertwined and fingers laced. Rui rested his head on hers. "I know. But…"

A smile emerged on his face as he gazed at the auburn evening sky. "They can wait for just a little bit longer. I want to spend time with my family."

Amare smiled warmly at those words, enjoying his presence.

The two enjoyed the silence for a little bit, gazing upon the City of Vargard that stretched out into the horizon. He could feel the presence of Gaia as he beheld the world, being able to detect her consciousness to a much deeper extent.

Amare turned towards him with a hint of impatience on her face, earning a wry smile from Rui. He knew that she wanted to know everything that had actually happened.

From the perspective of everybody who wasn't him, the sequence of events that had unfolded was truly unfathomable. Rui had gone off to deal with some alien entity he claimed was deep within Gaia, then the world started shaking violently despite the seismic energy absorbers.

Then they randomly got invaded by an alien civilization.

And then by an endless tide of space monsters that swarmed the solar system.

It was incomprehensible.

And only Rui understood everything that had happened.

"I'll explain everything," he promised. "It would just be better to do it all at once when everybody's gathered. It is a bit of a long and complicated story. I don't want to repeat it too many times."

"I'm the mother of your daughter."

"You're going to have to show some patience."

"I just fought a war."

"I fought multiple wars."

"What are those jellyfish? Why are they here? Where did those weird space bird-fish monsters come from? What is happening?"

Rui smiled at her impatience, gazing at the sky.

He could see, even from his balcony, the distant laminar world ship at the edge of their solar system.

They had not returned.

They were still present.

The laminar army had withdrawn and retreated for the time being, as had the leader of the laminar integuments. But they clearly had business left. Rui could imagine just how utterly significant the events that had just unfolded were to the leader of the laminar integument. The fellow was not going anywhere any time soon; he could imagine that the laminar integument was having a field day reporting all of this to whatever ultimate authority existed in its civilization. While it was clearly high up, he highly doubted that the jellyfish was the absolute supreme leader of its civilization.

Most likely, it was the leader of the world ship that came in, if he had to guess. Perhaps their entire civilization was a nomadic space civilization, of sorts, living in their world ships.

Regardless, the implications were all the same.

"The civilizations of Gaia thus far have been merely frogs in a well. We are merely big fish in a pond and now…" Rui's ethereal eyes sharpened. "Now we have entered the ocean."

Those words were ominous. They were both deeply exciting and deeply terrifying all the same.

If he were being completely honest, he would have liked this moment to have come at a better time. Ever since he ran into the manifold tree, he knew that aliens, and extremely powerful aliens, existed in the universe. And in the race to the stars, it would likely have been just a matter of time before they finally ran into them.

However, he would have liked it if Gaian civilization had first managed to expand to several star systems in its galactic vicinity and go beyond a type-two civilization. The biggest issue was that Gaia was a vast home capable of absorbing any amount of population expansion. Thus, even as Gaian Civilization grew to be a type-two civilization, it never once formed colonies on other planets because there was no need to with a planet that was close to that of a small star in volume.

Now, they had been detected by advanced civilizations with much greater technology than they had, and much more resources and energy than they had. The nebulars were vastly out of their league, and even the laminar civilization, just one world ship of it was at the very limit of what they could just barely cope with thanks to their pathwalker advantage. What if all of their other world ships came to this solar system and declared war?

It was not likely, based on the fact that the laminar integument leader ultimately decided to honor its promise and fight by their side, but it was still entirely possible. More than anything, it was not fun to be left at the mercy of an alien civilization. Of course, with Rui having turned into a Transcendent, the sheer amount of leverage they had was much greater, but the issue was that he couldn't handle everything by himself, and he couldn't protect Gaian civilization all by himself.

Especially when he thought about the endgame of reality, the alien virus infecting the Universalis Mensis. At that point, not even Transcendence would be able to save him from being erased from reality.

There was so, so much that they needed to do from this point on if they had any hope of long-term survival. STEP

He got to his feet as his ethereal eyes sharpened.

"Alright then, time to get to work."

That day, Gaian Civilization had changed forever. The existence of alien life, and not just life, but extremely advanced alien civilizations and extraordinarily powerful alien monsters, had become public knowledge.

It was impossible to hide this truth from the rest of humanity. Countless images and videos of extremely high resolution had already infested the interweb, as leaked governmental images as well as data captured by the amateur astronomy community had long spread across human civilization.

It had caused an upheaval unlike anything the world had seen since the Unfolding and the shocking return of the Lost Continent.

Gaia had entered a new chapter of her life.

A chapter of connection.

With the rest of the universe.