Not A God

Chapter 60

In the previous life, in the time before the appearance of the nameless ancient gods, the human race, shrouded in the clouds of nuclear war and psychic outbreaks once encountered an advanced civilization called the Vols.

The people of this civilisation possessed magic and advanced technology, and at first, everyone was bewildered by the friendly demeanour of these ET-like aliens, believing that the distant stars, which had never found aliens, had finally gotten their ticket to the interstellar age and were giving the Vols what they wanted. Both the Federation and the Empire have made the Vols their guests, even using all sorts of tactics to compete with each other, with cold and hot wars breaking out on a small scale.

The only reason was to get the plans for the warp engine of the starship that the Vols were talking about, to enter the interstellar era and to get rid of the frequent paranormal incidents on the Far Star. At that time, both the Federation and the Empire had already started their research on starships, and once the plans were obtained, they could significantly advance the research progress and even have the hope of flying off the planet and into the universe in five years' time.

Seemingly moved by the distant humans, the Vols gave the plans to the Federation and the Empire in exchange for a modest trade request. Naturally, the humans were overjoyed to agree, and this was the beginning of their nightmare. Since then, they have been the inferior race in the Universe, a pathetic species to which any civilisation can come and take a bite.

On the one hand, the plans given by the Vols were indeed the correct ones, but they were the latest high-tech products, not the primary engines that they wanted most. Even if they had been given the plans, they would not have been able to build them within a few years. Instead, they would have had to buy the relevant experimental materials from the Vols, and the government would have been bleeding, taxes would have been higher, welfare would have been reduced, and the people would have complained.

This is not the most terrible thing, but the most terrible thing is that the Vols have never treated human beings as an equal intelligent race, they think that humans who have not left the planet are just goods and that having a soul and intelligence is just a higher grade of goods. Not only have they crushed the human's economy by dumping all sorts of cheap goods on humans through the open trade treaties, but they have also begun to market holographic immersion games and human trafficking in an unthinkable way.

The immersion game promoted by the Vols is ostensibly a game, but in reality, it has the ability to imprison brainwave data, allowing human soul data to be uploaded to StarNet through the game and sold to the game officials at an explicit price. The humans whose soul data was taken away would fall into a vegetative state, and when they died in the game, their bodies would die with them. At the time, although holographic games had already existed on the Far Star, the Vols billed the possibility of communicating with another advanced civilisation, drawing countless humans into the game with curiosity. As many became addicted, the people on the distant planets gradually found themselves becoming NPCs in the game, unable to detach themselves from the game on their own and having to suffer in the game, becoming an artificial intelligence that had no human rights in the eyes of the aliens, a disposable expendable item that would be killed at any time in a copy.

As the game was revealed for what it was, humanity saw the Vols for what they really were. But, even so, they still had no way to tear themselves away from the Vols and had to urgently take the game down, leaving even those of their compatriots who had been turned into plants with no money to save them. After all, the Vols' mother ship is parked off the Far Star and could bring about the end of humanity at any moment.

With its economy and technology lagging behind, Far Star was left to languish in the shadow of aliens and domestic paranormal events. The Far Star has since opened up trade routes with several other advanced civilisations, and with these advanced civilisations checking and balancing each other for the sake of profit, humanity has finally gained some breathing space.