“Wait, Tim,” Koharu called after me.

“The lid of your wooden tube is open, I’ll close it for you,” Koharu ran up to me, reached for my back and closed the lid on the tube again. For a moment, I considered leaving the tube with her, but then I decided to take it with me as it wasn’t very heavy, anyway.

“It’s best that you take it,” Koharu replied, having read my thoughts.

I took the opportunity to embrace her with both of my arms, as I wasn’t sure when I would see her again.

“I love you,” I whispered softly in her ear, clinging to her warm soft scent. “I love you too, my darling, and I’ll always be by your side,” she replied, hugging me tightly in return.

“I know, my love,” I replied, fighting my tears back.

I could feel that she was deeply moved, as she was holding me so tightly as if she never wanted to let me go.

“Alright, it’s time now,” said Kyran, gently interrupting us.

I broke our embrace, said a final goodbye to her and the others again, and started to walk up the stairs to the residence. I looked back from time to time and saw all of them still standing where I had left them, waving me on.

The stairway up to the residence was made of large granite blocks, and judging by the size of them, each cube must have weighed several tons. They were stacked on top of each other, with small steps carved into the surface, perfectly adjusted to the normal pace of a person. The stairway was about two meters wide, and its borders were artistically carved with patterns that depicted various kinds of fruits and plants.

All along the way, I saw beautiful flower gardens on both sides of the stairs, with every tree carefully placed. The plants looked healthy, with strong green branches and colourful petals. The plants were not arranged like in a typical flower garden, but more of a creative mix of plant and floral species which looked spectacularly beautiful, especially when the sunlight was shining gently on them like right now.

The stairway went on, following the slope of the mountain. I must have walked a few hundred meters in the flower garden and felt that I had only made little progress with my climb. Looking up, I estimated the height of the mountain and deduced that I was still somewhere around its foot. The flower gardens gradually changed into a forest area. The stone stairway was now almost hidden by massive trees that must have taken them some thousands of years to grow to this gigantic size. Their huge tree trunks reminded me of Roman temple pillars, lined up in perfect rows. As I walked through the forest, the air felt cool and humid.

I spent about an hour walking through the forest when the landscape gradually changed to a grassy meadow. I looked up the mountain and estimated that I must have covered one-fourth of the total distance. I decided to take a rest, and as I looked back, I could see the whole city below, stretching as far as my eyes could see. Up here, the weather had turned quite windy and a bit cold.

“Welcome!” a voice suddenly said behind me.

I turned around quickly and saw a thin tall man wearing a long coat that almost touched the earth and a cone-shaped hat, both items glistening in gold. Several large pieces of jewelry adorned his middle forehead, as well as his neck and chest. His handsome face featured a prominent nose and was framed by long wavy black hair that fell along the sides. Based on his appearance, he could have been somewhere in his thirties on Earth, but here he would probably be around 700,000 years old (his eyebrows were quite long on both sides – the telltale sign that revealed his age).

Judging by his outfit, he struck me as someone very special and unique. I didn’t know how long he had been standing there, or how he had made his sudden appearance because there was no hiding place in this open meadow, and I was absolutely sure that nobody had been here when I had arrived earlier at this spot.

“Hello, who are you?” I asked respectfully.

“My name is Ruthorn and I’m the person you are supposed to meet,” he replied.

“So, you are the highly evolved being!?” I exclaimed, excitedly.

“Why are you so surprised?” he asked me.

“I thought we would meet in a more official way,” I said.

“Why would that be?” Ruthorn asked me.

“I had imagined I would meet you at a great temple where you would be sitting on a throne, summoning me to approach, or something like that.”

“Ha ha ha … you mean it would be like meeting a king?” he said with a laugh.

“Are you now disappointed that you haven’t been granted a royal audience?” Ruthorn asked with an ironic twinkle in his eye.

“Oh no, I wasn’t expecting that. It’s just that your sudden appearance out of the blue was rather unexpected,” I replied.

“So, tell me, how has your experience been so far on this planet?” he asked as he came closer and stood next to me, looking down at the city below us.

“To be honest, it’s the most wonderful experience of my life,” I replied.

“So, do you like it?” Ruthorn inquired.

“I think what I feel is far more than just liking it.”

“Tell me, what do you like specifically?” he asked.

“Well, I have to say that so far I like everything I’ve seen here; it’s such a perfect place and I haven’t found a single aspect I don’t like. Although the life of the people here seems so simple, everything is perfect, like it was intended to be,” I replied.

“To you, life may seem simple here,” Ruthorn said, “but in fact it has gone through a thorough screening process in every aspect, weighing all the pros and the cons from all dimensions of society, ranging from the lowest to the highest level. All variables relating to physics, including energy, have been carefully tabulated and calculated until we reached the ultimate model of perfection. This is the normality that you see now.”

“All philosophers who have ever lived on your planet and who were considered to be the wisest of the wise, went through the most complex thinking processes, and, at the end, they all decided to return to here and live this simple life,” he added.