It all began with some strange developments in the Blackgate Sector.
It was an imperial frontier sector close to the galactic core, neighboring the Far Frontier Sector where Yu Lian and his friends were now. Apart from the two jump routes connecting it to the Far Frontier Sector and the Gateway of Glory Sector, its border systems generally lay close to the galactic core, while the other half faced the Abyss Nebula, the most mysterious and vast nebula in the entire galaxy. Its geographical situation was easy to imagine.
If a stargate leading directly to the "New World" hadn't opened in the sector fifty years ago, it would have been destined to remain a remote sector filled with penal colonies and labor camps.
Being close to the galactic core, the sector was naturally a target for raiding by the Reavers. However, most of the jump routes between the Blackgate Sector and the core passed through a stellar isolation belt made up of extremely unstable dwarf stars, giants, and variable stars. As everyone knew, the gravity wells between these unstable stars were unstable too, and were marked with dashed lines on standard star charts. It was easy to imagine how difficult they were to cross.
The isolated region, made up of hundreds of star systems, was known as "Prince Norius's Wall of Sighs," or simply "Norius's Sigh." It had nothing to do with Greek mythology on Earth. Before Duke Norius, a famous Imperial explorer, led an expedition into this region, he had gazed at the impassable stars and the galactic core "within arm's reach," realizing that the Empire's territory ended in this direction. All he could do was sigh.
Duke Norius was a member of the Imperial royal family, and so the isolation belt in this part of space was given