In the deep, cold starry sky, civilizations were like lone lanterns sailing through the darkness. Everywhere they looked lay vast night and surging undercurrents—immature peoples huddled within the safety of their cabins, unaware of the endless ocean beneath the night. Warm lamplight and thin wooden walls created a shelter where they could sleep peacefully. Yet there would always come a day when they crawled out of the cabin, a stage when they had to take the helm themselves. By then, the fear and loneliness they felt before the boundless stars would become a journey of the heart every civilization had to undergo.
In that respect, both Loren and Noi had been fortunate. Four light-years might have been an insurmountable gulf for both sides at their current stage, but on an astronomical scale, they were practically neighbors. To find friends who could help one another at such a distance was probably a stroke of luck with odds in the hundreds of millions to one.
And it required more than just a perfectly suitable distance in space—it also required perfect timing. The lights of civilization could vanish in an instant, and beneath the Magic Tide, all things were overturned. On the Noi people's planet, there had once been many seasonal civilizations just like Loren's. These were two worlds full of life, yet only today had these two thriving planets truly established contact. Over the millions of years past, or perhaps even longer, the peoples of both planets might have sent signals to each other before. But why had those attempts never succeeded?
Simply because when one side had developed to a certain height, the other might still have been farming with blades and fire. By the time the other side reached the stage of interstellar communication, this side might already have returned