As the fleet passed through the wormhole, the starlight beyond the portholes did not condense back into clear points of light as usual. Most of it was swallowed by a dark-purple vortex stretching across the entire starfield, while the few remaining faint rays struggled desperately at its edge like the last fingers of a drowning man breaking the surface. The Void Scar had widened several times over since they had last seen it. Dark-purple particles of light constantly flaked off from its edges; with every ring that peeled away, another ring of surrounding starlight was consumed. The swallowed starlight did not vanish completely. It was drawn into hair-thin strands, twisted into the depths of the vortex, briefly flashing gold within the dark-purple core before going out entirely. The flagship's navigation system kept rebooting, while the gravity field silently fluctuated between lighter and heavier. The monitoring data Bulma had sent from West City was red across the board—the rift was expanding far faster than any model the Grand Priest had predicted.
Ji Ming stood before the captain's chair, the Crimson-Gold Light Core within him shaking violently like an arrow nocked against a bowstring. He still gripped the gray-white fossil brought back from the Vertebra Battlefield, while Chi-Chi's cloth pouch hung at his waist, already weighted with three Guardian God relic bones. Whis's voice came through the communications channel. For once, there was no background noise of Beerus and Champa arguing—only the Grand Priest's faint, steady breathing.
The Grand Priest said the final relic bone lay at the center of the Void Scar, its energy signature surpassing the combined total of the first three. On the holographic star map he had unfolded, the center of the vortex was marked as that heart—it was still beating. Whis added that entering the Void Scar