[Sentry Array] Main Control Room.
A year of dead silence made it feel as though time itself had frozen here.
The young operator leaned back in his chair, bored out of his mind. His feet were propped up on the console, and he was chewing the latest "Martian flavor" gum while his consciousness surfed the entertainment zone of the Psionic Network, playing a retro 3D game with a few of his gaming buddies.
Real-life work?
Nonexistent.
Ever since the entire empire entered the "Final Dormancy" state a year ago, the power of the [Sentry Array] had been reduced to the absolute minimum required to maintain its own existence. The Eye of the Galaxy was now only monitoring the presence of various stars.
Let alone monitoring the Milky Way, it would currently struggle to even detect a large meteorite flying past the Solar System.
This job had gone from "Cosmic Watcher" to "Gatekeeper"—and one guarding an abandoned gate that no one would ever visit, at that.
"Beep—! Beep—! Beep—!"
An ear-piercing alarm, loud enough to tear through the soul, shattered the frozen silence without warning!
"Holy shit!"
Startled by the sudden blare, the young operator sprang right out of his chair, dropping the gum from his mouth onto the floor.
He scrambled to the console. Staring at the continuously enlarging, blood-red warning symbol that represented the highest threat level on the screen, his mind went completely blank.
"What's going on? A system bug? Or is some bastard running a drill?"
His fingers typed frantically across the console, attempting to pull up the source of the alarm.
However, as the data stream cascaded before him like a waterfall, his sliver of hopeful luck and lackadaisical attitude instantly froze, replaced by a fury deep within his soul.
The alarm did not originate from within the Milky Way.
But from... outside the Milky Way.
The distant Andromeda Galaxy.
A real-time image, restored via ultra-distance gravitational lensing and psionic algorithms, was forcibly pinned to the main screen.
It was a fleet.
A... massive fleet!
Every warship was a black, twisted biological entity, surging with ominous dark red energy veins across its hull. They were not traveling via conventional curvature navigation, but were instead executing a brutal, barbaric series of jumps that continuously tore through space itself!
With every jump, the spatial ripples they left behind were enough to disrupt the gravitational field of a star.
And there were tens of thousands of such ships in this fleet, densely packed together like a spreading, all-consuming cosmic cancer.
What sent chills down the operator's spine even more was the comparison report automatically generated by the system.
Energy signature... 90% match with the projected model of the Qu.
Biological appearance... 99.9% match.
The Qu!
It was the Qu!
"Reporting to the Marshal! Traces of the Qu fleet discovered!"
The young operator's voice transmitted through the highest-authority emergency channel directly into the mind of Imperial Marshal Li Wei.
"The Qu are traversing the Andromeda Galaxy via continuous spatial jumps! They are estimated... estimated to arrive in the Milky Way in one year!"
...
Supreme Imperial Council Room.
Marshal Li Wei and all the top brass of the PDC—these living fossils who had lived for a millennium and witnessed humanity's rise from mere ants to gods—now all wore grave expressions, treating this as a deadly crisis.
A deathly silence filled the conference room.
An invisible pressure permeated the air, stemming from the hellish tableaus previously branded deep into their souls.
That kind of evil, which treated life as a toy and found its sole amusement in inflicting eternal suffering.
Even though the current Imperium of Man was powerful enough to annihilate a galaxy with a snap of their fingers, that memory—that sense of powerlessness and despair when facing the Qu—remained an indelible shadow in their hearts.
Just then, Luo Ji's holographic projection appeared at the head of the table.
He was reviewing the final charging data of the [Aetherophasic Engine], seemingly turning a deaf ear to the alarm that was enough to suffocate the empire's entire upper echelon.
When Li Wei struggled to state the timeframe, Luo Ji finally raised his head slowly.
His face remained dead silent, as placid as an ancient well.
But a second later, the corners of his mouth curled up.
It was a cold smile, mixed with endless cruelty and gratification.
"One year?"
"Just right."
"No more, no less."
He waved his hand, sending a command throughout the entire imperial territory via the Psionic Network.
"Notify the entire military."
"Cancel the silence protocol."
The air in the conference room suddenly tightened.
Luo Ji then brought up a star map and lightly tapped it with his finger.
It was a coordinate located on the inevitable path of the Qu fleet—a barren, worthless, uninhabited resource planet.
"Activate the [Causality Modifier]."
"Target: this planet."
"Modification requirements:"
"Make it so that at some point in the 'past', it birthed a primitive intelligent civilization that has just mastered nuclear weapons and is preparing to step into space."
"I want the Qu's detectors to discover a vibrant 'cradle' full of hope and dreams."
The entire conference room was dead silent.
Everyone stared at Luo Ji.
Use the [Causality Modifier]?
Use that ultimate forbidden weapon capable of completely erasing or creating a sequence of causality from the very root of time—a weapon that would make even gods tremble...
Just to...
Fabricate a 'newborn civilization' to serve as bait?!
This... was simply a catastrophic waste!
"Chairman!" A director from the Academy of Sciences couldn't help but stand up, his thought waves trembling. "This... this is too much of a waste! Every activation of the [Causality Modifier]..."
"I have a premonition that humanity will soon no longer need these."
Luo Ji completely ignored his protest, simply speaking his mind.
He stared at the cluster of red dots on the star map representing the rapidly approaching Qu fleet, his gaze terrifyingly profound.
"Let them step into our galaxy with the highest arrogance and the strongest sense of pleasure."
"I want them to clearly feel the butcher's knife hanging over their necks just as they taste the sweetest dessert."
One year later.
At the edge of the Milky Way, space was brutally torn open like a shattered mirror by an overwhelmingly tyrannical force.
A living fleet constructed of flesh and nightmares slowly squeezed out from the rift.
They had no cold metal shells; instead, their hulls resembled muscle tissue surging with dark red veins. Countless thick biological conduits squirmed across the surfaces of the ships like the blood vessels of a living creature. With every pulsation, they leaked nauseating, chaotic, and evil psionic fluctuations into the surrounding cosmic space.
The fleet's numbers were densely packed, obscuring the starry sky behind them.
They were the Qu.