Just as Sui Meng prepared to turn back and regroup with Halsey and the others, a sudden change erupted.
All light seemed to be yanked from the space around him in an instant, plunging him into an absolute darkness that would make ordinary hearts seize.
Nor was this ordinary shadow. Even the multi-spectrum observation suite built into his power armor failed at once, sensors returning a complete blank—an ultimate black.
?
Sui Meng tensed at once, combat instincts spiking to the limit.
Without hesitation, he brought his guandao-shaped power warspear across his body, and the vast, pure psionics within him thundered out.
Boom—!
Scalding golden psionic fire surged up from the spear's tip and blade, like a miniature sun igniting in the absolute dark. It drove back part of the night and cast his imposing form like a war god descended to the mortal world.
The psionic fire brought not only light; it also carried a powerful purifying and repellent effect against all filth and chaos.
If anything from the Warp, or anything akin to the Marker's evil, drew near, it would first be seared by this golden flame.
But the expected attack did not come.
There was no nauseating chaotic whispering, none of the Marker's distinctive reek of warped life and mind-seduction, and no assault by any entity or energy-form.
There was only dead silence all around, and a…
cold, indescribable emptiness.
Though he sensed no direct malice, Sui Meng did not relax in the least.
He kept the psionic fire burning. Joints in the armor hummed faintly. His whole body was a bowstring drawn to its limit, ready to explode with annihilating force at any instant.
In that grave standoff, the scene shifted again.
Countless particles, glimmering milky-white, swarmed from the void like fireflies guided by an unseen force, and began to gather, weave, and unfold at speed in the space around him.
The particles rapidly formed a clear, continuous moving image, as if a silent holo-film had begun to play before his eyes—
He saw a thriving, bustling planet utterly unlike Tavorantis—likely the Tavorantins' original homeworld.
Then came decline, and the stirring spectacle of a species emigrating through the stars with a vast fleet;
followed by their arrival at Tavorantis and the rise of brilliant undersea cities in the oceans;
then, in the deep, the discovery of a glowing double-helix Marker, whereupon their civilization entered a golden age of explosive technological growth;
and at last…
the sudden disaster—twisted corpse-mutants raging through cities, a vast flesh-moon beginning to congeal in orbit, and that despairing global freeze rolling over all.
Even without Dr. Halsey or Cortana to explain, Sui Meng—battle-seasoned and no stranger to the rise and fall of civilizations—quickly grasped the tale behind these scenes: a high civilization, from ascent to total annihilation at the Marker's hands.
When the scroll of history ended, the light-particles gathered again and sketched, not far before Sui Meng, the figure of a slender being with three-fingered hands and a distinctive crown-shaped head—
a Tavorantin.
The projection was lifelike. It faced Sui Meng and spoke, voicing a language of complex syllables and trills that Sui Meng could not understand at all.
He reacted instantly, using his helm's shared-view function to stream everything he saw and heard in real time back to Cortana.
"Receiving live A/V datastream from the Primarch."
Cortana's voice came almost immediately over Sui Meng's secure channel. "Unknown language detected. Invoking the established language model for real-time matching and translation…
Translation module online."
In the next moment, translated captions began to scroll line by line across the inside display of his helm.
Some lines read a little stiffly, not entirely smooth due to the model's early stage and cultural gaps, but the core message was clear:
[Those who come after… heed us, the people of Tavorantis.],
[With bodies undone… we bear the warning.],
[Beware: the helix-seal is no gift… it is a trap.],
[Prosperity from energy is a mirage… it will devour in the end.],
[We misjudged… and paid everything.], and so on.
Sui Meng read with focused care, listening to the Tavorantin's voice, its tone full of grief and urgency. He understood this was the last warning a dead civilization had left for any sapients who might find this place.
The Tavorantin raised its long arm, then pointed toward a part of the cavern.
Sui Meng followed the gesture, and there the light-particles gathered again, quickly forming a star chart he had just seen—Andromeda's (M31) spiral arms, clearly marked.
Cortana's captions kept pace:
[The source of the marks points beyond the light of the extragalactic.],
[There may be makers.],
[But… we counsel you not to go.],
[We could not stand against the dead moons—the corpses—of their making.],
[How, then, against their master?],
[To go forward is only destruction.].
At this point, the Tavorantin seemed to look "deeply" at Sui Meng. In that gaze was a fatigue, a plea, and a boundless warning, all carried across a million years.
Then it flickered, as did the surrounding star map, like candles in a wind, and blew apart into a drift of light, gone to nothing.
The absolute darkness around him retreated like a tide, and the blue-lit geode returned as before. Only the black information core hung in the center, quiet, as if none of this had happened.
Silence fell again in the cavern, but Sui Meng's heart surged.
Even after its own utter extinction, the Tavorantis civilization, by means beyond understanding, had done everything possible to deliver the most straightforward warning to those who came after:
The Marker is a trap. Its source is likely beyond the Milky Way. And that source is a far more terrible being—one they felt unable to stand against, even at their height.
This blood-won warning, bought with a civilization's life, weighed enough to crush the lungs.
At once, without a breath of hesitation, he recovered the so-called core and turned on his heel. The heavy footfalls of his armor rang again along the empty corridors as he moved quickly to rejoin Halsey and the others.
He delivered a terse command to withdraw at once.
There was no delay. The Xianzhen Honor Guard held maximum alert, guarding the core personnel as they retraced their steps at speed.
They passed through the museum that recorded splendor and warning, crossed the bare plinth of the central plaza, and at last reached the long slope to the surface.
Above, the cold was unrelenting. The four Viking fighters, transformed into mechs, stood guard like loyal sentries around the Thunderhawk.
They boarded quickly. The hatch sealed. Engines lit. The gunship rose, knifing through Tavorantis's thin, frigid air, arrowing for the Renwei Yonggu waiting in orbit.
Back on the Renwei Yonggu's austere, familiar bridge, Sui Meng handed the core to the technical teams, then issued a chain of orders.
"Navigator, set course. Destination: the Proxima sector where Grand Device 01 is stationed. Ahead at full speed."
"Order the Tavorantis orbital detachment to continue the original recon and recovery mission. Priority unchanged. Recover every item and scrap of information of value."
"Wu Ji, signal the 6th Company garrisoned in Universe 20's (Dead Space) solar system. They are to break anchor at once and rendezvous with Grand Device 01 and the flagship. No errors."
"Order acknowledged and transmitted." Wu Ji's projection flickered as she executed.
Soon—
By Proxima's dim red glow, the Grand Device 01's majestic ring still hung in the void.
But the space around it was no longer empty.
A vast fleet of more than a hundred Imperial warships had assembled—like a pack of loyal wolves circling their alpha and core.
Cruisers, destroyers, frigates, and many auxiliaries formed a tight battle array—this was the Diwuzu 6th Company fleet, arrived at speed on receiving the order.
At that moment, the Renwei Yonggu's greater, more imposing silhouette tore space to reach the rendezvous point, then slid into the fleet's heart without suspense—becoming the flagship of this "expedition" beyond dispute.
On the Renwei Yonggu's bridge the air was taut and focused.
Halsey and Cortana stood at the central console, before a spread of hard-light holos cascading with complex datastreams and dizzying multi-dimensional models.
At the models' center was Grand Device 01's structural map. Countless energy pathways were replanned and adjusted for a feat without precedent—
to use the ring's vast energy to rip open a stable corridor to the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.54 million light-years away.
"Final checks on Carson–Riemann… bring in micro-adjusts for local gravitational constant…"
"We need another 0.3 percent on dark-matter draw efficiency or the far-end stability won't hold…"
Halsey's words came fast, trading efficiently with Cortana, who drove mountains of live computation.
Time ticked away.
At last, Halsey's knit brow smoothed. She turned with the pure excitement of a scientist at breakthrough and spoke to Sui Meng, who had stood waiting:
"All parameters are tuned. Model validation passed. The energy guidance matrix has been rewired. The cross-galaxy corridor protocol is primed. All we lack is the star to 'ignite' it.
Child, we can begin this unprecedented voyage whenever you command."
Sui Meng's eyes passed over the final-confirmed energy-flow schema on the main screen—complex to the limit. Without hesitation, he said, low:
"Execute."
Hearing this, Halsey drew a deep breath and nodded to Cortana.
Cortana immediately pushed the final command packet to Grand Device 01's control core.
"Initiate Voyager Protocol. Target: preset coordinate system G-7. Execute stellar-matter draw."
In the next instant, the ring awoke once more—but this time its energy flow differed completely from the purgation pulse.
It did not release destructive waves. It breathed—like a waking giant—hungry.
The fleet followed the Grand Device through a first, rapid "short hop."
When they dropped from the hop, they were in an unfamiliar system.
A robust, blazing G-type star stood at the center like a heart, lighting planets in its care.
Grand Device 01 did not pause. It moved straight toward the star.
As it drew near, the ring's central void birthed a gravitational field beyond imagination—then came a more shocking "devouring."
The stellar plasma at the surface, pulled like noodles by an invisible hand, became a river of matter spanning millions of kilometers—roaring and racing,
though the vacuum carried no sound—
stripped from the star and poured, ceaselessly, into the "bottomless" center of the ring.
Before their eyes, the star dimmed and shrank at speed, its light consumed by an invisible maw.
The process lasted only two hours. At the end, the once-splendid star was gone, leaving behind a planetary system suddenly out of gravitational balance and falling into chaos and collapse.
On the ring's skin, the energy tracery flared brighter, fuller.
This shocking, ruthless act repeated eleven more times over the next twenty-some hours, each in a different system.
Twelve stars that once shone over their domains vanished. All their mass and energy were converted to fuel this unprecedented voyage.
When the last devouring ended, Grand Device 01's massive ring—like an ancient giant, sated—ran with an excess of power that seemed about to spill over. Even the space around it showed distortions the naked eye could see, twisted by its mass and energy.
Cortana's update rang over the bridge: "All pre-charge energy programs complete. Cross-galaxy jump… final readiness achieved."
Every eye fixed on the seething ring—and beyond it, the deep extragalactic night leading to danger and the unknown.
On the bridge, Dr. Halsey's fingertip traced the final arc of command over the interface. Cortana's prosthetic body glowed with a cool blue of completion.
All the datastreams converged, in that instant, into a perfect execution signal and poured into the ring's core.
Suddenly, the energy torrents coursing along the ring's outer face reversed, like a hundred rivers to the sea. Endless power rushed toward the void-point at the center.
Space itself gave an "anguished" groan under the load.
The ring's central void twisted and collapsed—then erupted in a supernova-bright white.
The light did not scatter. Under strictures that surpassed current physical law, it condensed inward—stretched—and at last formed a shining gate across the void, wide enough for the whole fleet to pass.
Inside was a shifting, multicolored vortex, as if all the Milky Way's starlight had been condensed behind that energy curtain—the road to the unknown Andromeda, 2.54 million light-years away.
Sui Meng stared at this human-forged cosmic wonder, play of light bright in his eyes, then sent the order across the fleet:
"All hands—hold formation. Heading—extragalactic!"
The Renwei Yonggu turned first, engines casting ghost-blue tails—like a great whale leading a school—and drove, without a backward glance, into the gate linking two galaxies.
Behind it, the hundred-plus ships of the 6th Company followed in order. The iron tide slid into the corridor, drawing a thousand brilliant trails through warped spacetime, and launched an "expedition" into the unknown deep.
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