Chapter 61: My Lord, the Times Have Changed!

Chapter 61: My Lord, the Times Have Changed!

The three days passed in the blink of an eye.

Three days ago, when everyone left, they had travelled alone. Three days later, as they once again stepped onto the dedicated transport vehicles heading toward the top-secret base in the Great Northwest, each of them was accompanied by a large group, an entire family.

Take Ye Fan, for instance. This time, he brought along his parents and his still-living paternal and maternal grandparents, as well as Pang Bo.

Although Pang Bo was the only outsider in the private transport, he and Ye Fan were college classmates with a very close relationship. He had visited Ye Fan’s home more than once, so he was well-acquainted with Ye Fan’s parents and grandparents. There was no sense of unfamiliarity, and consequently, the atmosphere inside the vehicle remained quite relaxed.

"To be honest, Yezi, even now, it feels as if I'm dreaming. I still can't quite believe it," Pang Bo muttered, gazing at the motorcade escorting them both in front and behind.

Not only were they provided with dedicated transport, but the vehicles leading and trailing them were specialized security units meant for protection. What kind of treatment was this?

Was this not the treatment typically reserved for the male protagonists or villains in urban web novels?

Could it be that this was not a normal, mundane reality, but rather a story about some retired king of soldiers returning to the urban jungle?

"You'll get used to it once you see it often enough..."

Recalling the tremendous changes he had experienced over the past few days, Ye Fan felt that mere words were simply inadequate to describe them. Therefore, he found Pang Bo's astonishment entirely natural.

After all, he had been just as shocked when he first went through it.

While Ye Fan was still on the road, Xiong Yan and Chu Xuan had already arrived. Stepping down from their transport, Xiong Yan could not help but stretch lazily.

"How remote, how desolate. The further we travel in this direction, the more desolate it becomes, with hardly a soul in sight for thousands of miles. In the past, looking only at the paperwork, one merely felt that the Great Northwest was barren. But now, seeing it with my own eyes, I finally understand just how truly desolate this place is!"

The total area of the Great Northwest started at three million square kilometers, yet its total population was less than one hundred million people.

A tiny speck of a place like Hong Kong boasted a population of over seven million.

Central Province covered 167,000 square kilometers and held a population of one hundred million, surpassing the entire Great Northwest combined.

Putting these three figures together and making a simple comparison made it immediately clear just how desolate the Great Northwest was!

In the past, Xiong Yan had only ever made such comparisons on paper.

Yet today, after traveling successively by car, train, and car once more, everything he saw and heard along the way fundamentally refreshed his understanding of the Great Northwest.

The population of the Great Northwest was not evenly distributed; rather, it was densely concentrated in just a few areas. In other words, the vast majority of the Great Northwest consisted of massive, uninhabited tracts of land that remained largely undeveloped.

In fact, many regions still retained a completely primitive landscape.

The most primitive Gobi deserts!

The most primitive saline-alkali flats!

The most primitive swamps!

The most primitive woodlands (relatively few)!

The most primitive deserts!

In short, anything associated with living human beings was quite rare here!

"This is done for the sake of confidentiality, while concurrently developing the Great Northwest and carrying out large-scale infrastructure construction. In short, the benefits are manifold."

"This isn't decades ago. Back then, the Great Xia and foreign economies had very little contact. In many places, not a single foreigner would be seen from the beginning of the year to the end, and countless commoners never had any contact with a foreigner in their entire lives."

"But things are different now. With economic development, our country's economic ties with foreign nations are growing increasingly close. More and more people have seen foreigners or traveled abroad, making comprehensive surveillance impossible."

Even Chu Xuan had no ideal solution to this.

However, Great Xia simply did not have the boundless manpower required to vet every single person who went abroad to study or travel, nor did it have the capacity to investigate everyone who had ever laid eyes on a foreigner.

Especially in mega-cities like Beijing and Shanghai, the number of people who had never seen a foreigner or had zero contact with one was exceedingly small.

Of course, that wasn't all!

There was still the internet!

In the age of the internet, you never truly knew whether the entity on the other side of the screen was a human being or a dog, nor could you tell whether they were a citizen of Great Xia or a foreigner.

Consequently, within certain departments of Great Xia, anyone who had ever traveled abroad personally was categorically rejected, and anyone whose immediate family members had a history of going abroad was strictly excluded as well.

"If this project were controlled nuclear fusion, they could directly verify the movements of our country's experts in that field, review our latest petroleum policies, or even track policy shifts over the past year."

"If the project were aerospace-related, they could similarly search for the whereabouts of the corresponding experts."

"In short, the establishment of any project leaves behind traces. They only need to make bold hypotheses, combine them with Great Xia's recent policy shifts and anomalies, and conduct a bit of research to figure out seventy or eighty percent of the truth."

If Great Xia had truly invented controlled nuclear fusion, could there possibly be zero changes in its petroleum policies?

Policies regarding infrastructure and even carbon emissions would inevitably shift. Even if official policies remained unchanged, wouldn't it be possible to uncover clues by examining the recent transformations within certain large state-owned enterprises?

And all the information mentioned above was entirely public!

Any ordinary citizen could find it simply by browsing the internet!

"Yet, no matter how hard they try, they could never imagine that this time the project is the study of the resurgence of spiritual energy. Therefore, no matter how boldly they hypothesize, gather information, or verify their assumptions, their final conclusions are bound to be inaccurate."

Hearing this, Xiong Yan nodded and then shook his head. "The Beautiful Country certainly knows. Once other countries become aware of the secret of the spiritual energy resurgence, they will be able to guess it as well."

"And what if they guess it? Even if the entire world knows that a research base for the resurgence of spiritual energy is hidden within the secret base in the Great Northwest, what of it?"

"Great Xia is not some minor nation that can be bullied with a tube of washing powder under the pretext of weapons of mass destruction. Even if Great Xia laid everything out in the open, what could other countries possibly do? The times are different now; more than a hundred years have passed since an era when any random imperialist power could dispatch a fleet of warships to force unequal treaties upon others!"

My lord, the times have changed!