The next time Perseus and Father Black stepped through the portal, the world that greeted them was no longer the sealed chamber—it was the expanse of the heavens. Cold void stretched endlessly, but their focus was fixed on the horizon beyond Earth.
There it was.
From afar, what first seemed like a rogue planet revealed itself in staggering detail. It was nearly the size of the moon, its surface a jagged scape of metal plates and crystalline protrusions. A luminous ring of fractured spheres rotated around it, shimmering with shifting lights that bent gravity and space, like a halo built of broken stars. The deeper Perseus looked, the more he noticed—streams of energy weaving in and out of its hull like arteries, conduits glowing with unnatural life.
It was not a planet. It was a vessel.
