In the vastness of space, cold and silent, the endless darkness had only starlight for company. A bright silver arc suddenly tore through the darkness as the Giant Turtle Rock Platform jumped out of a spatial rift, carrying out routine calibration during its sequence of continuous jumps.
The Giant Turtle Rock Platform was currently heading toward Io along a rough course, alternating between superluminal jumps and conventional travel. The voyage was nearing its end. Two days earlier, the ship's navigation system had recalibrated its starlight lens and input the star map from Nathatone into the navigation program. After comparing the data, the shipboard mainframe had located a star region suspected to contain the Sirens' home star system. The ship was now heading there.
Because the Sirens' star map was indeed insufficiently accurate, and the celestial drift caused by ten thousand years had also seriously affected the reliability of superluminal teleportation, the ship had no way to reach those coordinates directly. For safety, and to gather as much scattered information about this universe as possible, the navigation assistant program had recommended that the ship make its way there through successive jumps like this. It consumed a little more time, but did not delay anything important.
The ship was currently passing through a monotonous and dreary region. There was nothing here but cold, empty space and the extremely thin radioactive clouds it occasionally encountered. Aside from the starlight in the far distance and a bright band of star-forming nebulae, there was nothing worth seeing. Hao Ren sat in his captain's seat, bored as he looked through documents, while also dealing with Lily's occasional hysterical calls from beside him.
He was no longer the rookie who had first encountered the sea of stars a year ago. The unchanging starlight of this place could