After so long without experiencing the radiance of the stars, simply drawing close to them now filled the people of all four civilizations with a long-lost sense of familiarity.
The Silver Heart Civilization's ships took the lead, deploying many Probe Spaceships around the Great Fleet to stand guard and scan the surroundings.
The Silver Heart Civilization had truly come into its own now. Not only had they mastered Fast World Collapse as a means of attack, their detection technology had also achieved breakthroughs over many years of research. Their current detection radius was thirty thousand light-years. Within that range, they could detect Vacuum Zero-Point Energy reactions and the Warp fluctuations of Cosmic Civilizations, which meant they could sense Cosmic Civilization activity across a diameter of sixty thousand light-years.
The situational awareness of Human Civilization's and Awakener Huan's Third-Person Piloting Mode was even clearer, but it could not reach that far. Thus, general detection intelligence was usually led by the Silver Heart Civilization.
So why abandon a perfectly good void route and insist on coming over to take the galaxy route? After all, the Void was the place where they were least likely to be discovered by other civilizations.
Naturally, it was because the universe was far too vast.
With the four civilizations' current Warp capabilities, if they truly kept taking the Void route the whole way, reaching the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall would require them to travel continuously for roughly three million years.
As for reaching the edge of the observable universe, that went without saying. It would take until the end of time. Cosmic Civilizations might be called cosmic, but before the vast universe, they were still as insignificant as dust.
And the reason they had to keep running was undoubtedly because they feared the Void Returners.
The Void