After lying at home for a few more days, the holiday ended.
Cen Yemeng returned to the exiled star for work.
Jiang Ye traveled to Birong Star on official business. His work location essentially involved hopping back and forth between Jiang Ye Star and Birong Star, with him stationed on each planet for a period of time.
Birong Star's development speed was twice that of Jiang Ye Star. In just a few years, Birong Star, which was once poor and blank, was now several times wealthier in total wealth and per capita income than Jiang Ye Star. The entire planet was like a treasure trove, attracting continuous foreign investment from all directions. Along with the money came a massive influx of alien immigrants, who, like animals migrating to follow food, sniffed out job opportunities and flocked to Birong Star.
Of course, the explosive growth in wealth was not purely a stroke of luck. According to employment statistics, over 60% of people on Birong Star held multiple jobs, especially the urban population, where the vast majority worked one job during the day and another at night.
The entire planet's subway stations operated 24 hours a day, as there were multiple peak commuting periods throughout the day.
The earliest peak period was around six in the morning, typically consisting of people rushing from the city outskirts or suburbs to the city center for work. These were generally poor alien immigrants who couldn't afford housing in the city center and had to live in the wild suburbs. Lacking sleep, they would often wake up at five in the morning, wash up, and rush to the subway station. Once on the subway, they would sleep soundly in their seats, often slumped in awkward positions, with many strangers leaning against each other, looking as weary as soldiers in a trench.
Following this were the peak periods at seven and eight o'clock.
Those boarding the subway at seven were the earlier native residents of Birong Star, whose homes were within the city, requiring only a slightly earlier wake-up call to get to work. This group was quite leisurely, mostly middle-class. Many would read on the subway, using either physical books or e-readers. Some would bring breakfast to eat on the subway, such as bread, burgers, or steamed buns and fried dough sticks, taking them out of paper bags to nibble on, and then drinking a beverage before leaving the subway with a rosy complexion.
Around eight o'clock, it was mainly students, with various school uniforms filling the carriages. Girls from elite schools wore skirts, revealing their beautiful legs, while boys wore neat formal attire, their expressions and demeanor already possessing the ease and arrogance of offspring from wealthy families. However, their parents were far from being old money; they were merely small businesspeople who had gotten rich early on Birong Star. Students from ordinary schools wore plain sportswear, clutching bulging backpacks, playing games on their phones, or copying homework from classmates while hunched over their seats.
Birong Star was currently implementing a workload reduction policy, with documents signed by Cen Yemeng. Most primary and secondary schools now started classes at eight-thirty or even nine o'clock. Classes typically ended around four in the afternoon, so the student traffic peak, besides the morning rush at eight, was also at four-thirty in the afternoon.
There was a peak period around noon, for local office workers who could go home for meals. The peak period at six in the afternoon was not for people getting off work, but for those heading to night shifts. The peak period at seven o'clock was for office workers finishing their day shifts.
Finally, the peak periods at ten and twelve o'clock at night belonged to the crowds of people returning home after working overtime.
At two or three in the morning, there were still people in every subway car, but they did not constitute a peak.
The subway lines in every city on Birong Star were extremely developed, like a spiderweb or a vascular system, continuously transporting people from various locations to the central areas and then continuously sending them out. This cycle occurred once a day, so the city's pulse beat once a day, or the city's breath was taken once a day. The sunflowers in the city parks followed the sun, and the subways beneath the parks flowed with the rise and fall of the sun.
After Jiang Ye arrived on Birong Star, he immediately began reviewing the subway line expansion proposals submitted by 89 cities.
After repeated deliberation, Jiang Ye only approved the subway expansions for 11 cities, rejecting all others.
The approved ones were for smaller cities. The cities had expanded rapidly during this period, and building a few more subway lines was appropriate; otherwise, traffic on the outskirts of the cities would become too congested.
The rejected ones were for large cities with populations of over four million, and even megacities with populations of tens of millions.
These cities had already grown large enough. Further unchecked expansion would turn them into bloated monsters, exacerbating urban ailments until they became incurable.
The solution was simple.
In suitable locations tens of kilometers away from these large cities, new small cities would be built.
Some facilities and economic centers from the original large cities would be relocated to the new small cities.
This practice was already very mature within the Galactic Empire and was known as "urban birthing."
The academic term was very vivid, as from satellite imagery, the original large cities resembled a greatly expanded and mature animal, which then gave birth to a small offspring. Some old established planets even had large cities that gave birth to four or five surrounding small cities.
Such mother-child cities could effectively alleviate urban ailments, provided that the initial city planning involved reasonable site selection. Not only did the mother city need to be appropriately located, but space for the child city also had to be reserved, meaning that planning for at least a century was necessary. Fortunately, at the establishment of Birong Star, Jiang Ye had set the development plan with the foresight of several centuries of development in mind. Now was precisely the time for the first batch of large cities to finally mature and give birth to small cities.
In addition to urban birthing, the desert transformation on Birong Star had also achieved phased results.
Previously, to alleviate unemployment, Jiang Ye had invested heavily in establishing Desert Reclamation Corps, recruiting large numbers of people and sending them to deserts and Gobi regions to improve soil and plant trees.
Birong Star had a Desert Reclamation Corps of up to three million people, scattered across various wild locations globally.
After years of effort, with hundreds of thousands of people enduring wind and sand, they had successfully transformed 1.8 million square kilometers of desert into grasslands and forests.
During the process of desert transformation, the prototypes of cities had also emerged in various places.
What Jiang Ye needed to do was to inspect the suitability of these nascent city locations, then allocate additional investment to construct the necessary urban infrastructure. Following that, various entrepreneurs would be invited to establish themselves, allowing the cities to be nurtured by market forces and begin to grow independently.
Although a large number of experts submitted various data analyses and reports to Jiang Ye, detailing the situations of the new desert cities, Jiang Ye still chose to visit the places himself.
For several consecutive months, traveling around became Jiang Ye's daily routine.
In the vicinity of many new desert cities, although they had been transformed into grasslands, the wind and sand were still quite strong.
Sometimes, halfway through Jiang Ye's inspection, rolling yellow sand would sweep up from the streets.
Each time he returned home and lay in the bathtub, a thin layer of sand would be found in the tub at the end. His clothes were the same; the washing machine often spoke, "Master, there's so much sand in your clothes."