Sotha was a very distant world.
Compared to Macragge, Sotha lay closer to the eastern fringe of the galaxy.
This was the Empire's frontier, remote even by the standards of Warp routes.
Here, the light of the Astronomican could still be seen, but farther out lay the edge of the galaxy and a truly silent realm of death.
There were no stars, no planets, and scarcely even any cosmic dust. It was close to an absolute vacuum. The bitter cold and scarcity of resources made exploring this region exceptionally dangerous.
Even bold rogue traders rarely dared to venture into this black starfield of death.
Perhaps in the distant past, before the Age of Strife and the Dark Age of Technology, humanity's brave and fearless ancestors had once left the galaxy, but all of them had vanished into the void.
No one knew their fate, whether they had lived or died.
Precisely because it was so isolated, Sotha had become a pearl of the Far East.
It stood utterly apart from its surroundings. No one knew why a planet on the fringe of the Ultima Segmentum possessed an ecosystem so strikingly similar to humanity's homeworld, Terra.
After several months of Warp jumps, Lox piloted the Red Alert through the Ruinstorm and arrived at this remote edge of the galaxy.
"This was far too dangerous. We nearly lost our bearings and ended up going in circles in the Warp forever."
Lox broke out in a cold sweat. Even with a Cogitator serving as its navigation system, the Red Alert's passage through the Ruinstorm had been exceptionally perilous.
Had it been an Imperial warship, the surging Warp tides would probably have torn apart its Geller field within seconds.
Beyond that, the monsters and fiends of the Warp had been unusually active. During this