The first batch of images sent back from within the Bronze Gate projection was fragmented.
So fragmented that the vast majority of low-level Mechanical Lifeforms could not even determine at once whether those images belonged to a starry sky, a Time-Space Rift, or the inside of some kind of Law Tide.
Saine did not rush.
The more it was a moment like this, the less he could allow the Sky Net Central Hub to force them into a conventional Star Map model.
He divided all the images into seventeen groups according to Time Flow Rate, spatial bending, law spectrum, and Destruction Factor concentration.
Then he sealed away the three most chaotic groups separately.
In those images, the Metal Scout Spheres seemed to be drifting through a desolate river channel with no up, down, left, or right.
There were no stars in the normal sense around them.
There were only countless gray-white fragments whose edges had been worn smooth by Time-Space Power, like the remains of dead continents, and also like scraps of skin peeled from some ancient passage.
Occasionally, a dark red arc of destruction light swept across from afar, and the entire image would shake violently.
One scout sphere, after sending back data from the thirty-first hourglass, suddenly developed large-scale melting corrosion across the surface of its shell.
It had not been attacked.
It had merely been scoured by the omnipresent time-space currents in that passage, its outer layer of Mechanical Rules forcibly ground away.
"It's not ordinary starry sky."
Saine stared at the light screen and spoke in a low voice.
Wall-E stood beside him, streams of data constantly flashing through his mechanical eyes.
"It doesn't look like a normal border region inside a Higher Dimensional Plane either," Wall-E said.
Saine nodded.
Of course he had seen that