Yang Yu's Hunch

Yang Yu stubbed out his half-smoked cigar on a passing asteroid. The heat made the stone's surface hiss and steam.

Little White gripped her skirt with both hands and returned to her place just behind Yang Yu, cheeks puffed in anger. Her heels clacked against the Void.

"Come on, Little White. Don't give a calculator with a freshly reinstalled system such a hard time."

Yang Yu flicked his wrist.

He turned toward the endless Star River, his earlier flippancy gone.

"The locals don't want to move, so they've pooled their money to buy a butcher's knife and stab me with it. That's only natural."

Yang Yu brushed ash from his hands. "We're planning to swallow the entire Great Universe. That would wipe them out. If those High Gods who've hogged the resources of countless worlds washed their necks and waited for us to chop them off, now that would be a miracle."

Little White tipped her head back, and her Cat Ear Headband twitched twice.

"But Master, your Status Rank has already surpassed the limits of their understanding. Even if all those parasites blew themselves up together, they couldn't break the skin of your Abyss True Body. This warning makes no sense."

Yang Yu rubbed his right eyelid, which was still twitching wildly.

"This world is enormous. Didn't Moro say this was an abandoned test site for Sequence Number Seven?"

He pointed into the emptiness overhead.

"The people above use this place as a petri dish. If they were running experiments, who knows where they might've left a few scalpels lying around? Or maybe something tough enough to survive the Great Purges of previous Eras ended up as a relic, and those natives dug it up."

Lucifer stood nearby, playing with her empty wineglass.

"I agree with Yang Yu. The