Facing the empty plinth, Cortana immediately began to simulate multiple possibilities:
"Based on analysis of the dissipation pattern of residual energy on the plinth, scenarios for the Marker's removal include: the Tavorantins themselves relocating it to a safer site for some reason;
being swallowed and merged by rampaging corpse-mutants or a not-yet-fully-formed blood moon in the early phase of the disaster;
or…"
"Speculation is still speculation, child." Halsey cut off Cortana's list. She trusts empiricism more. "We can list dozens of possibilities, but there's only one truth.
Instead of daydreaming here, let's see what clues this civilization left us at the height of its glory."
Her eyes swept the entire plaza. An archaeologist's instinct drove her to listen for the vanished echoes of a civilization through these frozen structures and symbols.
Halsey walked slowly, fingers brushing in the air above the finely carved balustrades and the grand arches edging the square.
"Look at the scale of this architecture, the detail of the carvings—everything exudes an extreme confidence, pride, and a disdain for all else."
Her tone weighed the splendor of the ancient past. "When this plaza was built, the Tavorantis civilization had no doubt reached its pinnacle. They believed they held the key to eternal prosperity."
Her gaze then fell to certain partial engravings on the plaza floor and several towering, monument-like stone pillars in the distance.
Cortana immediately projected high-resolution scans and began attempting to decipher the text.
"Doctor, these inscriptions say… they didn't just study the Primordial Marker. They successfully replicated large numbers of devices called 'secondary resonators'—what we call the red Markers.
They appear to have built, earlier than humanity in this universe and in a more systematic, mature fashion, a network to convert energy using these Markers."
Halsey leaned in to examine the depicted energy-flow schematics and large-scale Marker array diagrams. A flash of understanding—and regret—touched her eyes:
"Just as I thought. They established a global 'free' energy network—endless and inexhaustible.
This completely solved the fundamental bottlenecks of survival and development for them as interstellar migrants. An abundance of energy catalyzed explosive growth in technology, the arts, and social structures, propelling them into a golden age of civilization.
A classic 'Marker trap.'"
Her appraisal held a cold clarity. "First, it gives you irresistible honey—breeds absolute dependence—binds the foundations of your civilization to it—then, at your brightest moment… it snaps the net shut."
At that moment, a member of the Xianzhen Honor Guard noticed, via his armor's sensors, a massive building on the plaza's perimeter—its style particularly solemn and austere.
It had a grand, stepped base and a lofty dome. Huge but weathered bas-reliefs framed the entrance.
The guard pushed the façade and preliminary scan data to Sui Meng's helm display, tagging distinctive structural features.
Sui Meng studied the feed, then turned to Halsey, who was still examining the monuments:
"Doctor, the structure to our right front—internal analysis shows a vast space with a layout clearly intended for display and curation. It doesn't match residential or industrial functions. It's likely a memorial hall or… a museum."
At that, Halsey raised her head toward the building, deep interest on her face:
"A museum? The place where a civilization's essence and memory are kept? Come. We need to see it. There may be crucial insight there into how they viewed themselves—and the Marker."
They changed course at once and, under the Xianzhen's guard, headed toward the massive structure.
The tall stone doors were long broken. Inside was pitch black, scattered only by the light from their powered armor and lamps, which pushed back the ancient dark.
They stepped into a scene of wreck and stillness.
The floor was littered with fully calcified bones that turned to powder at a touch.
These skeletons were unlike human frameworks—limbs longer, skulls oddly shaped, different phalange counts—
They belonged to Tavorantins—last physical remnants of a lost civilization.
More chilling still, many bones were twisted to impossible angles, limbs bent backward, as if frozen at the instant of a frantic dance under unbearable pain;
others showed clear skeletal adaptations for attack or climbing—features faintly echoing corpse-mutants they had faced before.
Plainly, these were Tavorantins who failed to flee—or were converted—and the corpse-mutants born of their own people.
A hall that should have celebrated splendor had become a tomb of madness and death, pitilessly freezing the final act of a civilization's end for all time.
Looking at the museum floor—this instant of the apocalypse congealed—Halsey fell silent for a moment before speaking, with a touch of wonder at the contrivance and regret for a civilization's tragedy:
"The Marker's mechanism takes the malice of the universe to its limit.
It precisely exploits sapient hunger for energy and progress—even spiritual needs like art and inspiration—as bait, step by step luring entire civilizations into an abyss of self-destruction."
A faint ripple seemed to cross Cortana's face. Her words held rational reproach:
"The creative logic behind it rests on absolute self-interest and total disregard for other sapient forms. It does not seek symbiosis, nor communication. Its sole purpose appears to be inducing civilizations to self-sacrifice to fulfill some 'harvest' or 'aggregation' process we do not yet fully understand.
By ethics and order, it is the essence of evil."
"Indeed."
Sui Meng's voice was low. His eyes passed over the twisted Tavorantin corpse-mutant remains. His tone was iron:
"Whatever its creators or aims, such acts are no different from chaos-demons. With the Empire, it is war to the knife."
He agreed with Cortana. A systemic tool for civilizational annihilation is, by its nature, the greatest threat to order.
Halsey steadied herself and turned back to the murals and inscriptions on the museum walls—those preserved relatively well.
With Cortana's translation support, she began to read more of what the Tavorantins left at the height of their civilization.
"Here," she pointed at a panel exalting social prosperity, "they sing of energy's boundless promise—leaps in technology—brilliance in the arts… But note the corners."
Her finger shifted to overlooked marginal inscriptions and side notes. "Some scholars raised warnings—calling out unknown risks from overreliance on this power. They dubbed it the 'deep perturbation.'
Some records mention workers stationed long-term at Marker energy nodes—who reported explosive artistic inspiration—but also severe insomnia, auditory hallucinations, and extreme mood swings. Their mental evaluations were bleak."
"Overall, though, such warnings were paltry in an age that seemed to be flourishing."
Halsey pressed on and found a key entry. "And they did not forgo contingency.
Here it explicitly states they designed an 'extreme-environment stabilization protocol'—core measure: if an energy node goes out of control, trigger a global rapid-freeze system to 'isolate' and 'hibernate' the Marker and avoid catastrophic outcomes."
She paused. The pieces slotted into place in her mind with puzzle-like clarity.
"I see it. Everything fits."
Her voice carried the weight of a grim truth uncovered. "The Tavorantins were not ignorant of the risk—but they underestimated the Marker's infiltration and cascade speed.
Abuse of the Marker-energy network ultimately crossed a threshold at some moment, triggering a large-scale, uncontrollable conversion into corpse-mutants.
And the Tavorantins who remained lucid, in the last moments of their civilization, activated what had been conceived for local failures: the 'extreme-environment stabilization protocol.'
But they stretched it across the globe. They chose self-sacrifice—freezing their homeworld entirely to seal an unformed blood moon and all corpse-mutants with it—stopping the catastrophe from spreading to other corners of the universe."
At this, Sui Meng felt a genuine respect—born of understanding—for a civilization long gone.
They were not fools. They weighed their own continuance against a greater threat—and made a choice of staggering difficulty, shining with moral light.
"They merit a warrior's honor," Sui Meng said softly. "With a civilization's death, they staved off extermination beyond—worthy indeed."
Just then, Halsey's gaze fixed on a huge star-map mural deep within the museum.
Beside it clustered complex formulae and observational logs.
"Wait, here—" her pace quickened. "The Tavorantins were not merely passive recipients and users of the Marker. They actively pursued it. These records show they spent immense resources trying to reverse-track the Marker's true source and find its creators."
The mural and text showed long-term deep-space monitoring and signal analysis, ending with an apparently pinned but indistinct direction.
"There's a coordinate remnant here—refined through multiple cross-checks." Halsey indicated a particularly complex symbol string below the star map.
"Let me run precision calculations."
Cortana took over at once. Her prosthetic linked directly to the scanner as she parsed the ancient coordinate at full burn.
She pulled every star-map database for cross-fix, filtered probable Tavorantin observation error, and handled coordinate-system transforms.
Moments later, Cortana raised her head and reported: "Coordinate resolved. Calibrated to current cosmological models, the target region lies outside this Galaxy."
She paused and projected a new, grander galactic chart—a giant spiral galaxy flared into highlight.
"Target location: within the Andromeda Galaxy (M31), approximately 2.54 million light-years from the Milky Way—and thus from Earth."
In an instant, the Marker's threat had been elevated from a galactic disaster to an intergalactic scale.
The hidden hand's shadow fell into deeper, more distant cosmic abysses.
Halsey stared at the ancient coordinate pointing to Andromeda and continued to read the adjacent inscriptions, trying to reconstruct the Tavorantins' thinking at the time.
"Judging by the tone and the subsequent research directions," she said, "the Tavorantins were excited—full of expectation after pinning this extragalactic target.
They likely imagined the Marker's creators as generous, advanced beings—worthy of 'pilgrimage'—seeking contact with a higher civilization. They dreamed of a historic meeting.
But…"
Her voice turned with a hint of regret. "Reality was cruel.
Records show they soon realized a chasm in their own interstellar propulsion—an insurmountable bottleneck.
With their then-current FTL, they could never cross 2.5 million light-years in any acceptable time.
So they pivoted—concentrated resources—pushed for more advanced drives—hoping that someday they could set out to that galaxy to meet their imagined 'creators.'"
"Sadly, they didn't live to see the breakthrough," Cortana added coolly. "The disaster arrived far faster—and far more violently—than they expected."
Halsey nodded and broadened the context:
"This is no anomaly. Even in other universes, civilizations whose tech beggars imagination are bound by constraints.
Take the Forerunners of Universe 08 (Halo). Their science could shape star systems—build Halos, the Ark, shield worlds—yet they did not massively extend their reach beyond the Milky Way. In the end, crushed between civil strife and the Flood, they fell.
Intergalactic travel has never been easy."
Sui Meng listened, eyes narrowing.
He knew well the limits of star travel. He turned to Halsey with a critical question:
"Doctor, conventional jump drives and portal tech clearly can't handle such distance. Portals are scaled-up short-range tech at heart—requiring absurdly precise coordinates or the consequences are unthinkable—
just like with our Terminator armor: a tiny perturbation, and even a mighty Astartes can end up permanently 'clipped' into a wall.
Scale that to the interstellar, and a hair's deviation might toss a fleet into sheer turbulence or worse. Andromeda holds too many unknown spatial parameters and gravitational interferences for us."
He paused, then posed a bold idea built on the strongest tech at hand:
"Can we leverage Grand Device 01? Use its startup—the shock strong enough to wrench spacetime— to force open a relatively stable 'corridor' or 'bridge' from here to Andromeda for the Renwei Yonggu—or for a fleet?
Use that to achieve rapid, safe intergalactic travel?"
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