Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2080: Sunrise in Jalun

Naysha ran it until the hour was up.

<Emulation time expired. Remaining emulation time today: 0:00:00>

The asteroid field faded, and the dim walls of her room returned.

Naysha pulled off her helmet and sat there for a moment in the darkness, breathing hard. Her hands were trembling slightly and her shoulders ached, and she felt more tired than she had after any real simulation she had ever done.

Then she lay back on her bed, pulled the blanket over herself, and closed her eyes.

She fell asleep almost at once, exhausted and happy, with a faint smile still on her face.

The final site day began in darkness.

The long Jalun night had not yet ended when the cadets gathered at the assembly point, and the transport craft carried them away from the station through a sky that was still black and scattered with stars.

Most of the cadets dozed in their seats for the first part of the flight, and even the instructors seemed more relaxed than they had been on any of the previous days.

After the battlefield, the old carrier, and the quiet evening that had followed Lorna’s account of the crew’s last moments, there was a shared, unspoken sense among everyone aboard that the hardest parts of the trip were behind them.

The craft flew toward the highest mountain on Jalun, a towering peak that rose far above the surrounding ranges, its upper slopes capped with ice that gleamed faintly in the starlight. Near its summit, built into a narrow shelf of rock just below the very top, sat the last site on the agenda.

It was an observation station, small compared to the outpost they had visited the day before, consisting of little more than a cluster of pressurized domes linked by short corridors.

The largest dome was made almost entirely of a thick, transparent material that curved overhead like a bubble, offering an unbroken view in every direction.

The guide led them inside once the craft had landed.

"This station was built for one purpose," she said, as the cadets spread out beneath the great transparent dome. "This is the highest point on Jalun. The planet’s atmosphere is thin everywhere, but up here, there’s almost nothing left of it at all. That means there’s nothing to blur or scatter the light, and on a clear night, you can see farther from this spot than from anywhere else on the planet."

She pointed out through the dome toward a particular region of the sky.

"Look there."

The cadets followed her finger, and after a moment, someone gasped.

Among the scattered stars hung a single bright point of light, steadier than the stars around it and faintly tinged with the same gray-orange color as the sky over the academy.

"That’s Truimal," the guide said. "Home."

Several of the cadets pressed closer to the curved wall of the dome, staring out at the small, bright point. Ning watched their faces and saw something there he had not seen on any of them before, a quiet sort of wonder, as though the planet they had spent their whole lives on had never seemed quite so small or so far away.

"There’s one more thing to see," the guide said. "You’ll want to stay close to the eastern side of the dome."

They waited.

It took some time, and the cadets talked quietly among themselves as they did, pointing out other planets and familiar stars and arguing good-naturedly about which bright points were which.

Jason had found a spot beside Ning and was explaining the station’s old observation equipment to anyone who would listen. Naysha stood a little apart from the others with her arms folded, looking out toward Truimal.

Then a faint glow began to spread along the eastern horizon.

It started as a thin line of pale light against the black, barely visible at first, and over the next several minutes, it grew slowly brighter. The darkness above the mountains began to lighten into deep blue, then into violet, and finally into the same soft pink that Ning had seen from the station window on their first evening.

Then the sun rose.

It came up over the distant edge of the world after the long, fifty-two-hour night, and as its light spilled across Jalun’s surface, the landscape below the mountain caught fire with color.

The deep reds and pale yellows of the plains blazed in the early light, the twisting bands of blue and violet between them shone like rivers, and the ice on the surrounding peaks flared bright white.

The cadets fell completely silent.

For a long while, nobody said anything at all. They simply stood together beneath the dome and watched the sunrise spread across the planet below them.

Eventually, the guide broke the silence with a small smile and announced their final test.

It was the easiest of the trip. The questions appeared on their helmets as they stood beneath the dome, asking about the station’s purpose, the length of Jalun’s day, and the reason the view was clearer here than anywhere else.

Every answer had been given to them within the last hour, and most of the cadets finished in less than a minute, chatting cheerfully with one another as they did.

The mood remained light for the rest of the morning. The cadets wandered through the station’s small domes, took turns looking through the old observation equipment, and lingered beneath the great dome long after there was any reason to, watching the colors of the landscape shift as the sun climbed higher.

By the time they returned to the station that afternoon, the final points for the trip had been tallied.

Lorna sent the results to every helmet, and the cadets crowded together in the communal area to look through them.

Ning found his own name in eighth place.

It was a respectable position, comfortably within the top third of the class, and he did not mind it in the slightest. His dodgeball score had given him a strong start on the first day, but he had held back so carefully during every test that followed that the rest of the class had steadily caught up with him.