About 0.3 light-years beyond the Northern Boundary Line, Jiang raised his head beneath the edge of his dark gray hood and looked into the empty expanse of dark space ahead. There were no visible celestial bodies in sight—no stars, no planets, no nebulae. Only a few faint points of light lay scattered at an extreme distance, like tiny pinpricks forgotten on a black curtain. But he sensed far more than he could see.
He had remained in that void for nearly an entire day. He checked the spatial coordinate data he had brought from the territory six times, and every result pointed to the same location—within a region of space ahead was a structural anomaly with a density slightly higher than the background. The anomaly was extremely slight. If he had not deliberately extended his senses in that specific direction and continually filtered out the background noise of space, it would have been easy to overlook. But once he focused on that area and observed it for a while, the minute anomalous data began piling up into a recognizable outline.
He lowered his gaze to the Data Pad secured to his left wrist. Several energy reading curves flickered across the screen, their forms showing a clear resemblance in waveform framework to the probing signal he had once sent to the territory. They were like different dialects of the same language: the pronunciation had changed, but the grammatical structure remained the same. He tapped the screen a few times, switching the Data Pad's detection mode from passive reception to active scanning, then slowly moved forward.
As he moved, he sensed a more refined organizational hierarchy within that spatial structural anomaly. It was unlike a naturally formed spatial fold, with blurred edges and a loose structure. Its boundaries were distinct, and its