This meant one of two things: they had either entered the Event Horizon of Destruction of the target Star System, or the Cosmic Disaster Zone had spread into the region between the three Great Voyage Organizations and the target Star System.
Ordinarily, Cosmic Disasters spread at the speed of light. So after determining that this was a Cosmic Disaster, no one panicked too much. After all, it was only light speed. Every civilization could escape using Warp.
What truly sank everyone into despair was the destruction of the target Star System.
The 515 civilizations had painstakingly traveled at sublight speed for over ten million years. Just as they were about to reach their destination and find new life, the target Star System had been destroyed—by a Cosmic Disaster none of them could solve.
The destruction of the forward probes had already made the situation clear. The Disaster Zone had expanded into this region of space.
Subsequent observations confirmed that judgment. The target Star System's brightness had been plummeting continuously, and its optical image was vanishing at the speed of light.
Every civilization knew what this phenomenon meant. The Cosmic Disaster had spread to the target Star System and was destroying it at light speed. Based on the distance between the target Star System and themselves, the Disaster Zone had expanded there two million years ago.
As for what type of Cosmic Disaster it was, the civilizations that had only just encountered it could not yet determine. They only knew that there was not even light within that Catastrophe Zone.
Based on the civilizations' current understanding of Cosmic Disasters, only two possibilities could produce such a sight: Vacuum Decay or the Fourth Cosmic Phase Transition.
Vacuum Decay would lower the universe's energy level to its absolute bottom. Naturally, photons carrying energy