At the deepest point of the star map, a massive dark-red shadow lay motionless. Its energy density far surpassed the sum of every surrounding red dot, like the heart of the entire star map.
François.
Xu Wuyi withdrew his gaze, turned, and walked onto the teleportation platform deep within the hall. Dark-gold patterns lit up beneath his feet, enveloping him in an even glow. The familiar sensation of space twisting surged in from all directions and lasted roughly a dozen seconds before the light suddenly scattered.
He stood in an unfamiliar void.
Beneath his feet was a small asteroid less than a hundred kilometers across, its surface covered in gray-brown rock and fine crystalline energy particles. The starfield overhead was entirely different from the Second Astral Battlefield—not a dark-gold Firmament, but deep space steeped in a scarlet halo, as though vast quantities of highly concentrated energy had evaporated from distant stellar surfaces and diffused throughout the region.
Three dark-red dwarf stars rotated slowly in the distance. They were extremely far apart, yet beneath that scarlet halo, they appeared unusually close, as if jointly guarding something at the heart of this starfield. Countless small meteor fragments and chunks of energy crystal floated through the surrounding space. Some still bore tooth marks left by Star Beasts.
François was ahead. Three light-years away. A distance that would require a starship to travel for a long time, but for the physical body of a third-rank Celestial Being, it was merely a string of continuous passages through spatial rifts.
He raised his right fist. Without gathering strength, he simply gave it a gentle push forward. The air before his fist split open in a smooth gash, revealing a dim deep-gray radiance within—nearly twice as large as the tear he had opened at the Linjiang villa,