"Demon of Terminus..."
At last hearing this most important term, Ian shook his head and forced himself to calm down. "Life living within an event horizon? That's simply unbelievable..."
A terminus star was a black hole.
At the end of a massive star's life, when the force of its own nuclear fusion could no longer resist its gravity, most of its matter collapsed inward. While causing a supernova explosion, it formed a black hole at its core.
A black hole possessed most of that star's mass, and at its Schwarzschild radius, with the black hole as its origin, a "layer" isolated from the outside universe formed. That was the event horizon.
Even light, once it entered the event horizon, could never escape.
For beings like the Star Gods, incarnations of light, aside from choosing death themselves, only a black hole could grant them Terminus in the ordinary sense.
In short, by common sense, nothing within the horizon could exert any influence on anything beyond it. The inside and outside of a black hole's event horizon were fundamentally two different universes.
Not even "prophets" could foresee things within an event horizon. They could not be observed at all, let alone predicted.
But True Aether did not follow common sense.
As a universe-level civilization, the Star Gods had surpassed light speed and time itself. Their creation, True Aether, transcended the gravity and event horizons of black holes and reached deep into their interiors.
And then... disaster struck.
"What exactly is the Demon of Terminus?"
Ian asked, unable to restrain his curiosity. "For a massive star, its event horizon is only a few kilometers across—though ten or even dozens of kilometers aren't impossible. The Schwarzschild radius of a galactic supermassive black hole might even exceed some planetary orbits."
"But generally speaking, that space