Just as the Empire launched its full-scale attack on the Commonwealth and the entire Dawnstar Expanse descended into chaos, as if it had become the Abyss Nebula, Queen Tomitaili and her collaborators bore witness to a battle of ambushes and counterattacks. Allies and sworn enemies could switch places completely in the blink of an eye.
Queen Tomitaili and Captain Plank both agreed that the reason they couldn't become big shots in the respectable world was, as expected, that their hearts weren't dirty enough.
Then, at the end of the Dawn Route, Tomitaili activated the coordinates they'd obtained from some unknown ruins. She led everyone through a new route their civilization had never explored and into a new star system.
The closest point of this star system was only 2.7 light-years from the Dawn Route, which was extremely close by cosmic standards. In theory, even if they couldn't find the route, they should have been able to observe the star with probes and estimate its outline, size, mass, and even most of its elemental composition. Yet after a year of exploration along this route, the explorers of every nation had come up empty-handed.
Miss Fantine had known then that there was something supernatural about this star system.
Of course, the vast Dawnstar Expanse was full of star systems with something supernatural about them. Compared to the more than ten thousand continents strung through space like a necklace, a hidden star system that was difficult to find was nothing special.
In fact, when they first arrived, the star system seemed perfectly ordinary.
A warm, stable main-sequence star, eight planets, four terrestrial worlds—including one naturally habitable planet—and an unusually dense belt of icy asteroids.
And that was all.
For ordinary adventurers, this would have been a discovery enough to set them up for