The fleet had been away from the Empire Zone for three days.
Of course, since there was no concept of time in the Void, these "three days" were calculated according to the Empire's standard Timeline. No matter how far we traveled from the Empire Zone, we kept the time scale aboard our warships synchronized with it.
For warships in the Void, traveling meant continuously "jumping." Each time the Void engines altered their own information identification codes, it was equivalent to transferring the entire fleet once. This was a nonlinear method of movement, and every jump was extremely fast. Without an "absolute route" standing in the way, the only thing affecting the fleet's speed was the computational power of the Void engines. Three days had already been enough for us to cover an extremely, extremely great distance—but it seemed we still had even farther to go before reaching our destination.
After all, a fleet's speed could not compare with that of the Void Shuttle. Before departure, Tawell had installed modification modules on every ship to increase travel speed as much as possible, but the improvement was limited. It would probably take us over half a month to reach the first suspected coordinate.
The fleet had now traveled far beyond the border, though we were still within the barely reachable range of the Garden of Departure system. The Empire had launched scattered outposts and automated observation posts into this region, along with several self-replicating, self-evolving autonomous bases. They could be considered the outer limit of the Empire's influence. Relayed through border outpost development stations, we could still receive a few indistinct civilian channels here. Although no civilian exploration ships would ever appear in this area, those civilian channels still declared the Empire's presence through their faint signals.
What a desolate, lifeless place.