Of course, it wasn't that these two routes had actually disappeared.
In theory, only the death of a star could cause a gravity well to collapse or even dissipate. Before the advent of colossus weapons, that process took hundreds of millions of years—far longer than the oldest civilizations' legends.
So, once you set aside all the impossibilities, there could only be one truth.
Perhaps His Majesty the Emperor possessed some special treasure that could turn the routes into the Dragon Domain into a subtle quantum state, allowing him to establish this private domain known as the "Dragon Domain."
After all, given that they already had a starry canopy capable of covering the entire Dawn Star Sector, it was easy enough to believe that the Enlighteners had left behind a quantumized route.
And that was indeed the case.
Whether there was a treasure involved was unknown, but the gravity wells had indeed been quantumized—and made mobile.
No ship could use its own instruments to determine the location of a gravity well. Even the finest navigator couldn't possibly extend their senses across an entire star system to search for a tiny point of gravitational entanglement.
Only a handful of people knew the cycle governing the gravity wells' changes. Naturally, they were the Emperor himself and his confidants. Even the navigators and captains of ships entering and leaving the Dragon Domain only received the coordinates from the Celestial Domain on the day they arrived in the entry system.
And those coordinates were always current. Under the influence of that strange, mysterious force, the gravity wells' coordinates changed every twelve hours, without any discernible pattern.
...At least, that was what most people believed.
With such a treasure, the twelve star systems that made up the "Dragon's Nest" truly seemed impregnable. It was rather like