Something that had happened long ago, something I had nearly tossed into the scrap heap of forgotten memories, flashed through my mind like lightning. I hurriedly poked the Sandora ball floating in midair. "Sandora, do you remember the time the God Race got hit by a Star Ring Fragment?"
Sandora had clearly nearly forgotten it too, but the moment I reminded her, she reacted. "Oh! I remember now! That was two or three years ago, right? Near the end of when we were collecting Star Ring Fragments, the God Race said they'd found something strange in their territory... I remember the Abyss Reaction on that fragment was inert. Back then, we didn't know much about the Inert Abyss, so we scratched our heads over it with the God Race for ages."
Then we both looked up at the drab, unremarkable artificial planet in space: the God Forging Furnace.
Back then, the God Race and the Empire had jointly studied it for a long time. We had even each dispatched several Void patrol teams to investigate the origin of that strange fragment, but found absolutely nothing. After so much time had passed, the matter had been shelved as an unsolved mystery—yet now the truth and the culprit had suddenly jumped right out at us! Could fate get any more miraculous than this?
"What? You two got a problem with this ship?" That unrestrained AI had no idea why Sandora and I were staring at it. Though we were only doing so through Holographic Projections, it still seemed to make it uncomfortable. "Did that fragment hit someone? Let it be known in advance that this ship isn't paying compensation. Do you know how hard it is to throw Drift Bottles out through a contaminated zone? Accidents are inevitable—and besides, that thing was