Three days passed in a frantic race to repair and prepare, with everyone keeping an anxious watch.
The Dawnbringer lay docked at the Quiet Sea Star outpost, its appearance markedly changed from three days earlier. A new layer of matte armor plating, shimmering with a dark silver sheen, covered its hull. Elder Mochen and the Stargazers' engineers had worked day and night to forge it from the outpost's stock of stardust alloy mixed with ancient resistant materials salvaged from the Ancient Compass. It could withstand direct impacts from high-energy radiation and spatial turbulence to a certain degree. Several additional rows of attitude-control thrusters and energy-deflection arrays had been installed along the ship's sides and underside to maintain stability in chaotic gravitational fields. Most striking of all was the constantly rotating silver-gray device mounted on the bow, resembling an enlarged Myriad Stars Compass. This was the Rift Stabilizer, hastily built by combining compass technology, Stargazer navigation techniques, and fragments of information obtained from the Ring of Oaths. In theory, it could help the ship find relatively safe routes and temporary anchor points within the Forgotten Corridor, where the fabric of space was extremely unstable.
The atmosphere on the bridge was grave and solemn. Everyone was at their station. Lin Ye sat in the captain's chair, still pale and weak, but his gaze was as sharp as ever. He had changed into a black combat suit that allowed easy movement, with a short silver-gray cloak bearing the Stargazers' star patterns draped over it. A specially made headband that could block some energy fluctuations lightly covered the origin starmark on his forehead. Sakura and Karin stood just behind his chair, one on either side, ready to respond to any sudden change in his condition.
Sasuke stood at the tactical station, his silvery-white Jōgan