This caught the four civilizations by surprise, because all of them had felt that something unexpected would happen during this journey through the Super Star Gate. After all, whether it was their earlier wartime actions or their later borrowing of another's prestige, none of it could really be called friendly or seamless.
Yet the Great Virtue Civilization had actually provided the correct parameters for the Star Gate transit.
But before anyone could rejoice, something unforeseen happened.
The exit of the Super Star Gate was still somewhere in the Void, though it was not exactly that empty, because the nearest Star System was only a few tens of thousands of light-years away.
It could be said to be bathed in the light of the galaxy.
In an environment like this, everyone should have seen specks of starlight against a pitch-black backdrop. But under the probes' scans, they saw a scene that made their scalps crawl.
There, in the distant deep space, was an inexplicable existence. It was only about 15 Astronomical Units from the Super Star Gate—in other words, fifteen times the average distance from Earth to the Sun.
To everyone here, that distance was absolutely right in their faces. It was no different from when the Dream Lyra had hung beside the Paper Civilization Flagship.
The four civilizations could see it clearly through optical means. It was not huge, roughly the size of a normal Yellow Dwarf Star, though no one knew whether that was its maximum-volume form.
Overall, that existence displayed layer upon layer of spatial structures. It looked like something piled up from transparent crystal, except these so-called transparent crystals were not all three-dimensional polyhedrons seen in everyday life, but crystals of many different spatial-dimensional structures.
With just a casual scan, everyone could see the existence of many