Earth Calendar year 15580.
According to the data transmitted by the Self-Replicating Probes, more than five hundred thousand fleets had gathered around the Boötes Void so far.
Most of them consisted of the Gardener Faction's dimensional beings.
They had set out first, and those four-dimensional beings also possessed the most powerful wormhole transit technology. With both advantages, it was only natural that they arrived first.
The rest were starships from the Cleaners Civilization and the Neutral Faction Civilization.
The Neutral Faction had the fewest starships, and they were also the farthest from the Boötes Void.
The atmosphere around the Boötes Void was unbearably tense. In just these few decades, the Cleaners and the Gardener Faction had fought no fewer than a hundred small-scale clashes-at least a hundred galaxies had been reduced to interstellar dust and fundamental particles scattered through the boundless universe.
As for the reason behind these clashes...
The Gardener Faction's strategic objective of surrounding the Boötes Void was already out in the open.
How could the Cleaners stand for that?
Although they did not know why the Gardener Faction was doing this, they understood one thing: whatever the Gardener Faction wanted to do, they simply had to do their utmost to stop it.
And so...
As those dimensional beings made their way toward the Boötes Void, one "minor skirmish" after another had already begun to break out.
As time passed, anomalous spacetime fluctuations around the Boötes Void grew increasingly frequent. Every so often, the light of a supernova explosion would even illuminate the surrounding dim stars.
Yet the Boötes Void itself, the very center of the storm, had become the calmest and safest place of all.
This was merely the brief calm before the storm truly arrived.
Inside the Boötes Void.
More than thirty years of breathing