The instant the Ark entered the Silent Corridor, the entire ship felt as though it had been stuffed into a vacuum-sealed coffin.
All hyperspace communications, gravitational-wave radar, and even basic vital-sign synchronization pulses dropped to zero in the same millisecond. The dense streams of star-chart data vanished from the main screen, leaving only a scarlet error message refreshing over and over: Information field stripped. Absolute silence in effect.
Lin Ye stood on the bridge and removed his disabled neural-interface helmet. Without the intelligent system's announcements, it was so quiet he could hear his own blood flowing past his eardrums. That was what made the Silent Corridor terrifying-it was not a physical blind spot, but an advanced form of contamination evolved by the Void Devourer: it erased every possibility of being "observed," leaving civilizations to slaughter one another in a deathly silence where they could neither see nor call out to each other.
The corridor itself was a dark-matter canyon without stars. What floated within it was not wreckage, but clusters of black obelisk-shaped buildings with their edges shaved away. They stood in orderly rows like gravestones, their surfaces gleaming silver-gray, utterly unlike Altheimia-that was pure, uncontaminated Watchers military alloy. Yet now, the alloy was filled with dark-purple fluid, making the entire complex appear to breathe slowly when viewed from afar.
Lin Ye did not try to force a call through to the Ark. He knew that in void silence of this magnitude, actively releasing any scanning wave was tantamount to handing the hunter a knife. Alone, he transferred to an old, manually operated shuttle with no electronic fire-control system, severed the main link to the Ark, and took only the Purification Prism and Altheimia's resonance crystal.
As the shuttle slipped between the buildings, the obelisks on either side suddenly lit