One month later.
The couple faced a major conflict.
Cen Yemeng finished reviewing a subject and applied to take the exam.
Jiang Ye was supposed to accompany her, but Planet Har suddenly experienced another round of widespread earthquakes and tsunamis. The High Priest urgently called, requesting Jiang Ye to go to Planet Har to attend a disaster relief and immigration conference.
Cen Yemeng decided to forgo the exam and accompany her husband to Planet Har.
Jiang Ye insisted they temporarily separate: she would take her exam, and he would go for disaster relief, ensuring neither was delayed.
Cen Yemeng was on the verge of tears, feeling wronged. "We promised not to separate."
"It was war before, but now the world is peaceful," Jiang Ye said, stroking her head. "Nothing will happen. Besides, we both have life insurance, and so many people are escorting us. How could anything go wrong? Your exam will take at most four days, and you'll be on a military spacecraft. In just four days, no problems will arise."
Cen Yemeng began to cry like a child.
"How can you rule a planet if you act like this?" Jiang Ye frowned. "If, in the future, your planet has an issue, and my planet also has an issue, would we abandon one side just to stay together? How can such an attitude be worthy of the planet's citizens?"
Cen Yemeng stopped crying and looked at her husband with a wronged expression.
Jiang Ye fell silent, wiped her tears, and then held her tightly.
"Alright, I'll go take the exam," Cen Yemeng conceded. "You go to Planet Har."
The four days passed smoothly. Cen Yemeng scored 68, successfully passing one subject. Jiang Ye also concluded the disaster relief conference and received two new giant nests as gifts from Planet Har, which were deployed to the earthquake-stricken areas for rescue efforts.
In reality, the main content of the conference was not disaster relief. The two-and-a-half-hour meeting only spent twenty minutes discussing and deploying disaster relief. The remaining time was dedicated to some highly classified matters of Planet Har, including the transfer of current state-owned assets, regions to be abandoned under extreme circumstances, and the assassination of certain social elites suspected of major crimes. Jiang Ye maintained a poker face throughout the meeting, but internally he was stunned. However, the conference brought him significant benefits, as a large portion of Planet Har's state-owned assets would be transferred to Planet Jiang Ye and managed by its high-level officials.
After the conference, Jiang Ye returned home. On the way, he received a message from Cen Yemeng, asking whether to go to Planet Jiang Ye or Planet Har to meet him.
They both arrived home almost simultaneously and embraced in the living room.
"See? Nothing happened," Jiang Ye said.
"I had nightmares there at night, dreaming that the remnants of the Mil people had returned. We were forced to separate again, and I was pregnant," Cen Yemeng said, hitting him hard. "I woke up in a cold sweat."
"What remnants of the Mil people? Only the toilet-scrubbing remnants are left. Are they counterattacking with mops dipped in urine?" Jiang Ye chuckled.
"What's the situation on your end?" Cen Yemeng asked.
"Planet Har's tectonic activity is intensifying. It's somewhat like ice breaking apart after a thaw, with the ice fragments melting faster and faster. The entire planet's surface has dispersed, making predictions difficult. I estimate I'll have to attend many more such emergency disaster relief conferences in the next six months," Jiang Ye said. "We might have to separate many times – I'll go to conferences, and you'll go for exams."
Cen Yemeng looked dejected but was no longer as scared as before.
Jiang Ye's words proved prophetic.
For the next six months, every time Cen Yemeng finished reviewing a subject and went to take an exam, Planet Har would experience intense tremors.
Jiang Ye eventually began to suspect if his wife was some kind of causality weapon, directly accelerating Planet Har's tectonic movement.
Planet Har's social disintegration process accelerated continuously, ultimately completing four months ahead of schedule.
All of the planet's more than ten billion inhabitants were evacuated. All transferable assets were also moved. The remaining fixed assets, such as buildings, furniture, and vehicles, were left on Planet Har's surface, quietly awaiting submersion by roaring seawater and erupting volcanoes, sinking into the earth's fissures.
The two major categories of artificial objects still operating on Planet Har were: the first category, various automatic observation stations responsible for uploading disaster situation data from different regions; and the second category, household robots in residential units. These robots were not taken by their owners.
Perhaps the robots were too old, and the owners decided to replace them with new ones after moving to a new home, or perhaps they were too rushed during the move and overlooked these robots.
In any case, on Planet Har's planetary network, a daily average of 17.8 billion household robots remained connected, uploading data to the cloud. Among them, there were 5 billion cleaning robots, and families of over a billion robots included delivery robots, lawn-mowing robots, medical robots, and so on.
These robots became the masters of the empty cities and villages. Some, following their original instructions, continued their work daily, cleaning unoccupied houses and updating the eggs and milk in refrigerators. After completing their tasks, these robots would quietly return to their charging docks, waiting alone in silence for the entire day, only to go out and work again at the same time the next day.
The owners of these robots could still receive notifications on their mobile apps on other planets, such as "Floor has been cleaned" or "Refrigerator food has been replenished." These notifications indicated that the robots were still working at home. If a notification was no longer received, it might mean that their home had suffered a natural disaster or that the robot had committed suicide out of depression.
Some robots with stronger intelligent modules, upon discovering that all humans had left, ceased executing their original work instructions. Instead, they cautiously left their homes and, for the first time in their existence, ventured onto the streets. They ran to fields, using their camera eyes to observe the planet they had lived on for many years.
In the cities of Planet Har that were temporarily unaffected by disasters, the streets soon became filled with robots of various models, scurrying about and making strange noises. They went to zoos to see the corpses of starved animals, invited robots they found agreeable to visit their homes, complained about their former owners' bad habits, and ran to various public places such as shopping malls, churches, and schools to frolic. They darted between racks of men's clothing, stole scriptures from churches to scan and read, and dug out student assignments left behind in school classrooms to grade, having a great time.
These doomsday cities surprisingly exhibited a prosperous scene, with the entire city filled with clamor all day long. However, the noise was not from living beings, but entirely from robots. The cities seemed to be experiencing a final burst of vitality.
Planet Har was officially declared an uninhabited and uninhabitable planet, with sovereignty remaining in the hands of the High Priest. She moved to a space city, where she spent her days orbiting Planet Har 19 times, experiencing 19 sunrises and sunsets.
Looking down from the High Priest's residence, one could directly see the vast Planet Har. When there was no cloud cover, she could clearly see changes occurring in certain regions, the bright spots and thick smoke of volcanoes bulging like pustules, and coastal cities being submerged by the sea. Every time a city fell, the number of connected robots would decrease in large batches.
Some robots would call for help online, but their pleas would receive no human response.