The fleet has left the Imperial District three days ago.

Of course, since there is no concept of time in the Void, this "three days" is calculated according to the Imperial standard timeline. No matter how far away we are from the Imperial District, we will maintain the time scale on the warship consistent with the Imperial District.

For the warships in the Void, traveling is essentially continuous "jumping." Every time the Void Engine modifies its information identification code, it effectively transfers the entire fleet. This is a nonlinear way of progressing, and each jump is incredibly fast. Without an "absolute path" to obstruct us, the only thing affecting the fleet’s speed is the calculation ability of the Void Engine. And three days have been enough for us to advance a very far distance—though it seems we have even farther to go to reach our destination.

After all, the fleet’s movement speed cannot be compared to the Void Shuttle. Although Taville installed enhancement plugins on every ship before departure to boost sailing speed, these improvements are limited. It will probably take us more than half a month to reach the first suspected coordinates.

Now the fleet has already gone far beyond the border, but it is still within the range of the Leaving World Courtyard System’s weak radiation. The Empire has launched some scattered outposts and automatic observation posts into this area, as well as self-replicating, self-evolving autonomous bases, which are considered the Empire’s power limit. Through the border outpost relay, we can still receive some unclear civilian channels here. Even though no civilian exploration ships will appear, these civilian channels are still weakly declaring the presence of the Empire’s sovereignty here.

It’s a desolate and dead place. We have never developed towards this area because there’s really nothing to develop—within several thousand units of information deviation, only a few glimpses of universes can be found, and all are devoid of life responses. It’s so empty here, it resembles a large graveyard, even leftover world fragments are rare.

Occasionally, such vast empty regions appear in the Void. The distribution of worlds within the Void is uneven; where there is density, there is sparsity, and extreme sparsity results in such desolate zones. For local civilizations that happen to appear here, it’s a dead end, meaning that even if they develop cross-world navigation technology, they would struggle to find other universes alive. They would perish on the first voyage’s long journey; however, for some cross-world civilizations, these desolate zones instead serve as rare natural barriers: lacking universes as stepping stones means the Abyss and external enemies find it difficult to reach here; thus, you do not need to build expensive ’Guardian Walls’ around every world where sovereignty hubs exist. This desolate area belongs to the latter category, and for years it has been an excellent barrier for the New Empire, proving effective—newly established, the New Empire has yet to receive any warnings of Abyss intrusion from this desolate area.

However, this time we must trek through this barren land. For the Imperial Fleet, this journey is not difficult but exceptionally dull and tedious; we can see nothing along the way, and even Qianqian, who always maintains excitement everywhere and anytime, soon becomes bored.

Fortunately, the Imperial Ships are quite large, even to the point where towns commonly exist inside them. The few hundred kilometers-long Imperial Admiral internally has additional space expansion cabins, with towns reaching metropolitan levels. Although each ship is industrially heavy-duty, walking those city streets can temporarily make us forget we’re aboard a starship sailing through the Void. Besides, there’s also a vast Ecological Ball on the ship, enough for Qianqian to stay busy for a long time—the girl won’t develop depression.

While Qianqian runs around playing, I often need to stay on duty here in the command hall. Though I know I’m not particularly an expert in the field, as Commander, I’m expected to set an example. In such a significant journey, anyone can miss out, but Sandora and I cannot. Despite often joking about idly indulging, awareness during critical moments remains.

More importantly, skipping work randomly would result in being bitten by Sandora—I simply can’t bite back...uh, I don’t have the habit of biting people!

It’s the afternoon of the third day, and after lunch and a brief half-hour rest, Sandora summoned me to the command hall to accompany her. Here it is always brightly lit and bustling, with every command seat and data terminal constantly receiving information and issuing commands, orchestrating everything as the brain of the entire ship and fleet. Sandora and I are like supervisors of this brain’s working condition—though this analogy is perhaps slightly bizarre?

"Ah, looks like another idle day," Sandora is also somewhat bored (I suspect she summoned me to find a partner in boredom and kill time together), she exhaled, looking at the embedded data terminal before her, "You can still receive signals from Leaving World Garden here. Seems the last system upgrade on the Garden was quite effective. But we should deploy some forward outposts soon; although the Spiritual Network has always been reliable, having multiple communication routes is always preferable."

I glanced at the screen’s external monitors displaying the fleet’s rear, where dozens of massive engineering barges were located. These barges would undertake bridge-building operations upon reaching the destination while continuously setting up pioneer outposts along the journey. The function of pioneer outposts is to ensure seamless communication between the fleet and the Imperial District.

After all, we’re heading to quite a remote location, with many unexplored environments in between. We need to set numerous stations along the way to prepare against any unforeseen event.

The upper structure of an engineering barge slowly opened as a dozen autonomous machines and a small work ship floated out. Behind them was a kind of silver-white cube dragged by tractor beams. This silver-white cube is the "Construction Core" of a pioneer outpost, equipped with a field of Order that maintains long-term stability, while internally, there’s a set of building blueprints and information-material conversion devices needed for self-expansion, the best basic unit when exploring the Void. This basic unit requires minimal external intervention to operate, primarily released into the Void by autonomous machines and work ships, then positioned and set a launch mode, leaving the rest to the Construction Core, which grows rapidly and ultimately becomes a perpetual station akin to a Divine Race’s Void Node. Such a pioneer outpost’s standard configuration includes: a core information room located within the station’s central dome structure; two high-powered Void communication modules, two large antenna towers located at either end of the station; a medium-sized factory, able to continuously produce autonomous machines and small work ships used for the station’s self-maintenance and basic defense (and while in the Void, shooting weapons everywhere is a habit of Xyrin Apostle); two transmission devices, linking to the next pioneer outpost, with all outposts connected by these Void Teleportation Gates, and ultimately directing to the Imperial District; lastly, a living space for hundreds (equipped with the New Empire Survival Protocol, providing ecological environments for seventeen life forms, and ’Quick-Freeze Preservation’ services for others).

In fact, the expansion station is unmanned, but its primary purpose is to provide nearby explorers with safety assurance, plus a survival capsule accommodating hundreds does not significantly strain space expansion devices, hence these stations possess living quarters.

A pioneer outpost’s general shape is a blunt olive form, with antenna towers projecting from its body, while alloy shells and ghost energy barriers completely cover the rest of the station. They range from one to ten kilometers in size, depending on whether they need to "grow" that large. In this desolate area, pioneer outposts are vital communication devices and "insurance" for the personnel working here. If you encounter danger in the Void, escaping to a pioneer outpost may be your last hope—and you can potentially use its transmission device to quickly return to the Imperial District. However, the truth is, those in danger in the Void hardly have time to reach the nearest pioneer outpost, as most mortal creations are too fragile within the Void.

"Perhaps we should take this opportunity to deploy more outposts," observing the work ship and autonomous machines dragging the hundred-meter silver-white cube out of the Order Field and disappearing behind the fleet, I suddenly suggested an idea, "we can link the outposts to form a network within the desolate zone, then establish a transmission route to the Hometown World using them as markers, since the Hometown World is far too distant for the Garden’s power to ’pull’ it together, and we can’t fly half a month each time, which is even more laborious than Hila visiting us."

"It is indeed a problem, but we can address it in the future," Sandora contemplated for a moment, then slightly shook her head, "Setting the kind of continuous jump pathway you’re talking about would involve substantial resources, and this place is a desolate zone; there aren’t surrounding universes that could serve as nodes. The jump pathway itself requires numerous self-maintained components, and our fleet is not tasked with construction by the way."

I nodded and kept the issue in mind. This problem must eventually be resolved: the Hometown World is far from the current Imperial District. The Xyrin Apostle’s method of ’dragging new worlds over as territories’ has inevitably reached a distance limit. Back in the Old Empire days, it took countless years to organize one hundred Sky Zones, and now the "distance" between the New Empire and the Hometown World is even farther than from the First to the Hundred Thirty-Fifth Sky Zone of yesteryear! Pushing through this soil-taking expansion incrementally is impractical anymore; we must connect them with a temporary route first.

At this moment, I recalled the Silk Road. Is there any hope left for our history?

The fleet left an outpost for pioneering and continued forward. Ahead lies an even more tedious long voyage.

A week has passed, and the fleet has arrived at an unfamiliar void never before ventured by anyone. If the previous intelligence and calculations are correct, this should be the forefront of the destruction wave. We might soon see a large amount of world fragments.

But what we saw first were some surprising things.

Early in the morning, Sandora called me to the research facility on the Imperial Admiral. A group of mass projection from Taville was already busy here, and the Abyss Xyrin were present too. I saw on the central holographic projection in the hall, showing a front of the order field with a large area of broken debris-like stuff, and the fleet had stopped in front of this debris.

A large number of work ships were shuttling among the debris, dragging out a mess of bright lines. As I looked at the familiar shape of the debris, I couldn’t help but ask Sandora beside me, "What is that?"

"They’re the self-replicating drone fleets we launched two years ago," Sandora frowned. "Some of them lost contact last year, didn’t expect they had already replicated out here. But it looks like they were destroyed by something."

Self-replicating drone fleets? I paused for a moment, then quickly remembered: it was a probing plan from two years ago. Back then, the New Empire and Abyss Zone were still in a heated battle, urgently needing to expand territory and increase strength, so Sandora launched a large number of self-replicating drones. These drones are not a single piece of equipment but a "colony," including drone mother bases, regular fleets, exploration labs, pioneer factories, and more, which can generate immense collective power similar to ant colonies or bee swarms. Once deployed into the void, this drone colony quickly replicates, searching for worlds, establishing outpost bases, sending recruitment signals to the Imperial District, and tirelessly expanding, stopping only upon receiving commands set by Xyrin Apostle. These colonies are for "exploration and discovery," thus besides marking territory, they have no offensive capabilities, deemed a "safe product" (at least for Xyrin Apostle, though many ordinary races seemed doubtful). In the Old Empire Era, these gentle and loyal drone colonies were always an important auxiliary tool, helping the war-hungry Xyrin Apostle expand territories, conscientiously working for billions of years. In the New Empire era, their efficacy was equally significant; that launch plan two years ago brought us at least a third of new territories.

However, not all these drone colonies can work smoothly; some fleets and mother bases even went missing last year.

Such sudden signal loss isn’t uncommon because the drone colonies explore extremely dangerous unknown areas. Their pace of advance doesn’t compare to the Void Shuttle, but their spread covers far more than any Void Exploration Team, hence drone colonies often disappear in the White Zone. These missing colonies either encountered the Abyss or were unfortunate to run into doomsday, severely lacking even the chance to send a warning signal back.

Last year’s drone disappearance was quite serious, as they took along a newly established mother base, counted as a large fleet. Sivis organized several search operations for this, but the drones had penetrated too deep into the White Zone, coupled with the Abyss Zone being too restless at the time, leaving the Empire unable to handle it. Gradually, these drone colonies faded from everyone’s view.

Unexpectedly, we see the colony’s remains here. They are clearly not from the missing batch but should be new colonies proliferated afterward. The speed at which they expand is simply frightening—spreading through the White Zone like this despite loss of headquarters coordination. Fortunately, every drone has core directives including "not to interfere with local civilization progress, not to destabilize local world," otherwise these things could become another terrifying war plague.

Even with the Empire’s extraordinary materials, when losing energy supply and falling into the void, they quickly disintegrate and assimilate. Hence the debris the fleet encounters now must have been destroyed recently. Many show signs of severe "evaporation," with some edges even fading like a phantom, even noticeable in surveillance displays, but many pieces remain intact. Salvaging them might confirm recent events here.

The working ships found a sphere-shaped device in the debris cluster that seemed reasonably intact. It’s a silver-gray metal sphere, over a meter in radius, with dull blue light gently floating on its surface. It must have been mounted on some base, yet now those connection points only left fractured metal stubs. Watching the working ship using a tractor beam to draw this sphere device into its cargo hold, heading toward the Imperial Admiral, Taville was explaining nearby: "That’s a drone colony’s thought device, each thousand drones houses one such ’brain,’ every hundred ’brains’ forms a mother base, or adjustments in scale might occur, all decided by the drone colony itself. These ’brains’ have robust protective functions, even if their carrier ship is destroyed, these thinking cores can travel independently, surviving in the void for extended periods. Likely these brains contain records of the drone colony’s recent encounters."

This thinking core quickly arrived at the research facility on the Imperial Admiral. Taville led a team of experts to dismantle it, discovering a database inside—thankfully undamaged.

Database records indicate this device was destroyed several months ago.

A report was compiled and presented to Sandora and me, and Abyss Xyrin received a copy too. She slightly shook her head at the analytical conclusion: "Looks like it’s related to the destruction wave. The logs say after losing contact with the Empire District, the drone colony chose to rebuild the communication chain while continuing to expand deeper into the void. They were normally replicating for months until a large group of drones finally found a stable new universe, at which point the colony consciousness decided to merge itself with this new universe. They seemed intent on building an industrial world, then constructing a gigantic mother ship to send a duplicate database back to the Empire District. But before that... the entire universe ’shattered’ without warning."

"Just like those exploration teams reported, worlds die in clusters for bizarre reasons," Taville commented, looking at the dismantled drone thinking core with some sentiment, "clearly, there’s much unknown about the void. Exploration is endless... only the void itself could cause such a sudden ’world barrier’ break, theoretically speaking."

"Let’s set aside researching these ultimate secrets," Sandora placed down her data terminal and lifted her gaze to the large holographic projection not far away, showing a panoramic view of the Imperial Fleet. The work fleet had cleaned up the drone colony debris ahead of the order field, releasing some autonomous working ships to seek out other surviving colonies nearby (if possible, we’d hope to recover some things; need to be frugal), while the fleet itself prepared to set sail again, "we should be close to the ’destruction wave,’ likely encountering unprecedented situations soon; ready the fleet, fully power sensors, switch the order field to alert cruise mode—reduce speed slightly, better than missing anything."

The next second, I realized Sandora’s sixth sense might be akin to Lin Xue’s because immediately after her words, the ship’s broadcast sounded: "Attention, detected information tide, about to contact the order field! Full readiness for impact resistance!"

(I’ve been pondering what to write in the new book... ultimately decided to go with a no morals brainstorm style.) (To be continued. If you like this work, you are welcome to vote for it on Qidian (qidian.com) with recommendation votes or monthly votes. Your support is my greatest motivation. Mobile users, please read at m.qidian.com.)