At this very moment.
In the endless heights of the sky.
Amid that vast sea of stars, the dazzling stars remained silent. Only one planet drifted through the lonely universe.
Its trajectory followed none of the known or unknown laws of astronomy. Its own mass warped space, altering the fates of countless planets.
When it passed by the outer edges of galaxies with stable structures, its immense gravity altered the orbits of the planets revolving around their stars. Some planets were pulled apart and collapsed, while others deviated from their original orbits, becoming colder or hotter.
Some binary and trinary star systems that had always been extremely chaotic also underwent tremendous changes because of its arrival. They either grew stable or were destroyed outright.
Yet the planet merely passed by in silence.
It did not care about the birth or destruction of the civilizations on any of the planets connected to it.
Seen from space, it had a rust-red exterior. The planet seemed to consist largely of deserts, and towering hills beyond imagination stood across those brown-red wastelands.
Those deserts shifted from time to time, like cocoa powder floating on coffee. They drifted about chaotically, colliding and re-forming. Only then could one glimpse what lay beneath that enormous landmass.
It was a pale, glowing sea of ash.
Beneath the ash was searing liquid iron, rolling and flowing.
That flowing iron surged beneath the continent. At times, it formed the shape of a gigantic eye. Even in the boundless depths of space, it was conspicuous enough to exert a tremendous sense of oppression.
The longer one stared at it, the more one felt that it was not a planet at all, but a living creature.
And that was indeed the case.
Star of Judgment, harbinger of destruction, the one abandoned by