Gathering of the Star Sea

The light of the teleportation array left a brief afterimage on his retinas, then faded.

Wayne steadied himself and instinctively narrowed his eyes.

But what greeted him was not the dazzling sunlight he had imagined. Before him lay only an endless Star Sea.

The old wizard froze.

In nearly two hundred years of life, he had witnessed countless awe-inspiring sights:

The black mist writhing like a living thing in the depths of the abyss;

The eternal instant frozen within a rift in time;

He had even personally witnessed the celebration that shook half the Main World when Cassandra Shengmanzhi became a top Archwizard...

Yet at this moment, standing beneath this "starry sky," he felt, for the first time, a shock so profound it nearly suffocated him.

Wayne could clearly sense that every one of the glittering points of light above him was emanating the gravity of a real star.

The multicolored nebulae floating in the air might truly be celestial fragments "plucked" from the depths of the universe.

"This..."

A cry of surprise came from beside him.

Wayne turned his head and saw a witch standing there with her mouth open, gazing up at the river of stars overhead.

She looked to be only in her twenties, and the expression on her face was like that of a child entering a candy shop for the first time.

"You are?"

"Ei... Eileen Hopkins."

The witch struggled to tear her gaze away and gave Wayne a somewhat unpracticed salute.

"A newly appointed researcher at the observatory. I was just promoted to official wizard three years ago."

"You are Director Wayne, right? A senior researcher from the Abyss Observatory?"

"Your information is in the observatory's roster, and I've read your papers in the archives..."

Wayne nodded, then shook his head, correcting her:

"I'm