The Abyss was like a ruthless agent of change, slowly ushering humanity's era into its next act. Yet the marks humanity had carved into time could never be erased.
Though those marks were hardly grand amid the vast universe and the long river of time—perhaps they could even be called "tiny"—they had indeed been left behind...
The spaceship sailed through the sea of stars, slowly passing the Orion Arm and drawing ever closer to that dim star. At last, the mechanical savior saw up close the "sun" it had only seen in the Database.
Though it was merely an inconspicuous Light Spot when viewed from above the entire Silver Disk Belt, once the scale narrowed, it still radiated incomparable brilliance.
Absolute heat enveloped the entire Solar System, while its tempered light shone upon the third planet in this small planetary system centered around it.
Planets did not shine on their own. They could only be considered "grains of sand" in the universe, bound tightly around the sun by gravity as they revolved around it.
And humanity had been born upon this utterly ordinary grain of sand. As one of its countless races, they had evolved for hundreds of millions of years, yet still knew nothing of the universe as a whole.
This inconspicuous grain of sand had also become the homeland humanity refused to destroy.
They seemed never to have looked up at the star-filled sky. At the brink of destruction brought by the Abyss's invasion, they had still clung stubbornly to this featureless grain of sand, abandoning the savior's plan and hesitantly making another choice.
With their heads bowed, they gazed at this homeland they could not abandon. Even after traveling infinitely far away, they still missed the home they had seen countless times, separated from it by the