Read Novel Full Chapter 675: Passage Of Time
Chapter 675: Passage Of Time
Nearly a week had passed since the dual launch of Lucid Market and Nova Express, and the physical reality of planet Earth had fundamentally transformed.
Look up at the sky in any major metropolitan center, quiet suburban township, or rural village, and the skyline was filled with constant, silent motion.
Sleek, matte-black and polished-white autonomous drones of varying scales zipped through the upper atmosphere and low-altitude flight paths with precision.
To the billions of people watching from the ground, it felt as though the world had suddenly been hurled ten or twenty years into a sci-fi future overnight.
It was a mesmerizing, breathtaking sight—a silent orchestra of advanced engineering weaving between clouds and skyscrapers. But nothing quite matched the quiet thrill of watching a drone lower itself smoothly onto a residential driveway, an apartment balcony, or a corporate loading bay.
With a soft, barely audible hum, the craft would deposit or collect a package, perform its instantaneous molecular scan, and vault back into the sky at hypersonic speed, vanishing into the clouds in a heartbeat.
Daily sales volumes across LucidMarket surged exponentially with every passing hour. The primary catalyst was the sheer, unbelievable velocity of Nova Express. The concept of distance had been practically obliterated. "Intercontinental drone delivery"—a term that had replaced traditional shipping in the global lexicon—now took a maximum of a few hours between opposite sides of the planet. Domestic orders arrived in minutes.
For the average consumer, the psychological shift was profound. The familiar, agonizing era of tracking numbers, lost parcels, customs holds, and waiting days, weeks, or months for an international shipment was gone forever.
People found themselves holding items crafted by artisans in Kyoto or manufactured in Munich before their afternoon coffee had even gone cold—a feeling of instant gratification that many admitted they still couldn’t quite articulate in words.
For small and medium-sized businesses, the ease of conducting trade had reached a post-scarcity baseline.
The entire planet of 6.8 billion potential buyers was now instantly accessible to any seller with a verified account. Furthermore, the non-invasive, molecular-level scanning executed by the drones at the exact moment of collection created an unyielding security barrier.
Counterfeits, misrepresented goods, scams, and illegal contraband were caught at the atomic level before a package could even lift off, virtually wiping out fraud across global commerce.
Yet, this new era did not bring joy to every corner of the corporate world.
Beyond the legacy courier companies and shipping lines staring into financial extinction, a select group of industries found themselves stranded in the cold. Manufacturers and producers of goods explicitly prohibited under Nova Express guidelines—weapons, explosive compounds, unverified pharmaceuticals, live animals, and hazardous materials—were completely locked out of the airborne logistics grid.
Petroleum and fossil fuel conglomerates were hit hardest. Because raw crude oil, refined gasoline, and combustible petrochemicals posed inherent risks to atmospheric safety and violated Nova’s strict non-hazardous transport standards, oil companies could not utilize Nova Express heavy freight or cargo craft.
While the rest of global commerce moved at hypersonic speeds through the clouds, the fossil fuel industry remained trapped in the slow, decaying old world, forced to rely on crumbling rail lines, legacy tankers, and bankrupt trucking lines just to move their products.
It was a stark, intentional message: the future had arrived, and carbon-heavy energy was being left behind to rot.
***
Far above the atmosphere, suspended in the silent void at the Earth-Moon Lagrange 5 point, the physical birth of that future was underway.
Only a few hours after the space station announcement dropped across LucidNet, a massive, cavernous vessel decelerated precisely at the gravitationally stable coordinates. The vessel—a colossal, heavy-class warehouse and construction spacecraft—had departed the assembly bay of the Lunar Base just minutes prior.
Its colossal bay doors slid open with absolute silence, venting a faint mist of condensed gas into the dark. Within seconds, thousands of autonomous construction drones, heavy-element welding frames, and structural assembly rigs poured out from its hull like a swarm of mechanical fireflies.
Glowing plasma torches ignited against the void, slicing through thick plates of lunar-forged titanium-composite alloy as the foundational spine of the fifty-five-kilometer megastructure began to lock into place.
This immense industrial deployment was made possible by a critical shift on the moon: primary structural expansion of the Lunar Base on the far side had officially concluded.
The Development and Construction AGI extension was now able to reallocate over eighty percent of Nova’s off-world industrial capacity toward two major projects simultaneously.
The first was the 55-kilometer space station at Lagrange 5. The second was the construction of the Emperor Class II Starship.
According to AGI extension real-time calculations, the Starship’s hull synthesis and warp-core integration were progressing so rapidly that the vessel was expected to achieve operational readiness right alongside or shortly before the completion of the space station.
Once the space station was fully operational, Lucy and the Development and Construction AGI extension had already scheduled their next grand infrastructure phase: the construction of the Ganymede Military Outpost deep in the Jovian system, laying the defensive perimeter for humanity’s expansion into the outer solar system.
While these cosmic monuments were being forged in the dark, the human element of Nova Technologies’ grand plan continued to touch down on Earth.
Twenty more clinical trial volunteers—having completed their extensive off-world nanite treatments—were officially cleared and placed under the Twelve-Month Post-Trial Monitoring Phase. They boarded a pair of lunar space shuttles and departed the moon, bringing the total number of returned, healed volunteers to thirty-eight.
Once again, as the sleek, aerodynamically flawless shuttles dropped through the upper atmosphere and touched down at their respective regional commercial airports, the tarmac perimeters were overwhelmed by massive, breathless crowds of millions.
News cameras, civilian drones, and crying family members watched as the former terminal cancer patients, paralyzed and even comatose volunteers stepped out onto Earth soil in perfect, glowing health.
Simultaneously, Nova Technologies released the exact same brief, authoritative transparency statement as last time, documenting their cleared status, medical clearance metrics, and baseline monitoring parameters.
The affected national governments found their hands as completely tied as those of the first eighteen volunteers’ home states.
Facing an ecstatic public that viewed the returned volunteers as living miracles, state health agencies and intelligence directors had no choice but to quietly process their arrival, issue standard entry clearances, and assign state security escorts to protect them from media mobs.
Any attempt to detain or forcibly audit the returned citizens was politically impossible; the public would have torn down the ministry doors.
Time was moving with an accelerating, breathless momentum for everyone on the planet. But for the global population of Lucid users, time was moving even faster.
The ten thousand new Lucid device holders who had won the sub-second pre-order lottery during the Month 7 Nova Night had all taken delivery of their hardware via Nova Express.
For those ten thousand "Digital Aristocrats," life transformed instantly. They plunged into the twenty-four-hour day made possible by sleep integration, established their studio dashboards, and began exploring the vast expanse of LucidNet.
To make their good fortune even sweeter, several thousand among them had also managed to secure a Lucid Air pre-order, seamlessly linking their households into the off-world network.
Naturally, the global discourse across LucidNet burned with intense, relentless curiosity.
Millions of threads, livestreams, and analytical video essays were dedicated to dissecting the upcoming space city at Lagrange 5. Millions of users debated what a fifty-five-kilometer artificial habitat would actually look like from the inside.
Speculative artists used LucidNet Studio to render breathtaking 3D concept models—visualizing sprawling, domed cities bathed in simulated sunlight, floating agricultural rings, multi-tiered commercial districts, and pristine, engineered parks suspended in the void.
Yet, beyond the architectural aesthetics, the most heated discussions centered on operational logistics: how was Nova Technologies going to run a city that size?
Would they rely entirely on automated Synth bodies and AGI subroutines, or would they recruit a massive human workforce?
"Look at how they handled the clinical trial staff," a viral essay on LucidNet pointed out, accumulating tens of millions of reads. "The staff hired for the clinical trial were paid astronomical, life-changing salaries in USD, granted direct access to high-tier health optimization, and treated with absolute, uncompromising dignity. If Nova opens human job applications for the Lagrange 5 Space Station—for station maintenance, commercial district management, hospitality, recreation, and research support—it will be the most sought-after employment opportunity in human history."
Comment sections beneath the post erupted as millions expressed a desperate desire to apply:
*If Nova opens applications for station staff, I don’t care if it’s cleaning windows fifty-five kilometers out in space—sign me up immediately! Working for Nova means guaranteed health, zero corporate exploitation, and living on the frontier of human civilization!*
*Imagine living in the Residential District at Lagrange 5 while working in the Commercial District, surrounded by engineered green spaces and looking out the window at the Earth and Moon floating in the dark. It makes terrestrial living look like staying in a cave.*
*They’re definitely going to need human staff. An AGI can run the station’s core reactor and life support, but a real city needs human culture, human service, and human life to thrive. The hiring announcement is going to break the internet when it drops.*
As the days rolled by, the global speculation grew increasingly intense. The world was standing on its tiptoes, staring up at the night sky through high-end telescopes, watching the glowing swarm of construction drones build the titanium frame of the space city against the stars.
No one expected that Nova Technologies was about to answer their questions far sooner than anyone had dared to guess.
Before the week was out, another official announcement dropped.