Side Story—Boundary Wanderer
In the age when the stars shone once more, a distant wanderer discovered a glimmer of life at the edge of her people's perception.
In the profound, boundless depths of space, distant starlight had maintained its silence in eternal darkness for billions of years. Across distances measured in light-years, even the fiercest stars could send only a cold point of light into this region. Then, within this dark expanse illuminated by chilly starlight, a ripple suddenly broke the long-standing silence.
Ripples spread through the universe. The stable Spacetime Structure was instantly twisted and rearranged, and a disturbance that surpassed the speed of light abruptly arrived at its designated coordinates. Then, the disturbance emerged from its deep-sea state and rapidly condensed into its original form within the material universe—
A nimble starcraft barely a hundred meters long. Its streamlined, rounded silver-white hull gleamed beneath the starlight, shaped like an elegant, slender arc. Faint lights slowly rose and drifted along the edges of its alloy shell, reflecting one another with the distant stars.
This beautiful craft had wandered through the vast sea of stars for who knew how long. The passage of time had left few marks on its specially made hull, while inside the vessel, every piece of equipment and every compartment still maintained their most basic silent operation.
Within the core control chamber of the Wanderer starcraft, extremely dim lights faintly illuminated the many terminals operating in automatic mode. The fairly spacious chamber was devoid of human voices. This utterly lifeless state seemed to have lasted for a thousand years, while on a protruding platform at the front of the chamber, a hemispherical crystal container gradually lit up with the awakening sequence.
Under the faint glow, the crystal container could be seen filled with thick, translucent Biomass