When Song Chen returned to the Celestial Pivot Defense Line, his first reaction was that he had come to the wrong place.
The last time he had left the Tianshu Main Defense Line, it had still been a steel Great Wall stretching across seven light-years, energy grids flowing between countless Fortresses like veins.
Tens of thousands of warships had shuttled back and forth along fixed routes, and the entire starfield had been filled with order and strength.
But what appeared before his eyes now was a ruin gnawed apart by war.
Heavenly Pivot was still there, but it was already battered and broken.
Beneath Song Chen's feet was a hastily assembled transfer platform, its edges still marked with charred black traces left by searing heat.
He raised his head and saw enormous chunks of metal wreckage drifting through the distant starry sky.
They were fragments of Fortresses. Some were still half the size of a city, slowly rotating like the corpses of colossal beasts that had only just died.
Farther away, several war Fortresses that remained operational were riddled with craters. Their armor plates looked as though something had torn them open from within, exposing energy conduits that were still smoking.
Even the color of the entire starry sky had changed. The once clean and crystal-clear deep space had become unbearably murky, with embers left behind by psychic explosions everywhere, hanging above the defense line like a thin ash-white mist.
Most eye-catching of all were the shattered spaces.
Song Chen saw that a region to the east of the defense line had gone completely black.
Those were scars left behind after space itself had been smashed apart. Faint blue arcs of light still flickered endlessly along their edges, like cracked glass struck by a hammer, with unknown light shining through