Chapter 213. A Graveyard of Stars
The spatial currents were a violent, invisible ocean, tossing Noah through the fabric of reality like a leaf in a gale. When he finally tore his way out of the shimmering, unstable flow, he didn't find the familiar warmth of a sun-drenched system. Instead, he emerged into a haunting, silent expanse—a new stellar sector that felt as though life itself had been drained from it.
Nausea tugged at his gut, a lingering gift from the chaotic transit, but he ignored it. He focused his senses, straining to catch the oily, discordant hum of the Void energy Corvus had left behind. The trail was faint, a dying echo of corruption, but it was enough to steer by. Like a hound on a scent, Noah plunged forward, leaping through the jagged holes in space that he tore open with a thought.
One final lunge through a wormhole spat him out into the heart of an unknown galaxy.
Where am I? he wondered, his mind racing as fast as his pulse. Before even looking at the stars, he reached out with his consciousness, feeling for that specific, sickening vibration of the Void. But the signature was gone, swallowed by the immense, oppressive silence of this new region.
Only then did he look up.
The sector was drowned in an absolute, suffocating darkness. Even for the vacuum of space, it felt wrong—mortal and heavy. As his eyes adjusted to the starlight of distant galaxies, the reason for this chilling atmosphere became clear: the system was missing its heart. There was no star.
Or rather, the star that should have been there was nothing more than a ghost. In the center of the system, where a celestial furnace should have roared with nuclear fire, sat a cold, dark ember.
Has it reached the end of its life? Noah pondered, floating in the void. He remembered the lessons of Earth's astronomers: every star was a living thing with a beginning, an evolution, and an inevitable end. Sol, the sun of his home, was a middle-aged titan, five billion years into a ten-billion-year reign. It had eons of light left to give.
But this star hadn't died of old age. A natural death would have seen it swell into a bloated red giant, consuming its children in a final, fiery embrace before collapsing. This star looked as if it had been snuffed out by a giant's hand. It was an unnatural extinction, a sudden theft of light that had likely occurred within the last few decades. The planets were still caught in their rhythmic dances, their orbits not yet decayed, proving that the star's gravitational ghost still held some sway.
Eventually, without the anchor of a sun, these worlds would drift away, becoming rogue planets wandering the frozen dark, or be snatched up by some passing, hungrier system.
Noah scanned the dark horizons. Did anyone live here? he mused. Was a whole civilization extinguished when the lights went out?
Deep in the recesses of his memory, a fragment of lore surfaced. This sector had once been a jewel in the crown of the Kree Empire—one of the three great powers of the cosmos. But the Kree had fallen into a bitter, grinding decline. Rumor had it that internal strife, a civil war of devastating proportions, had somehow led to the death of their sun. Deprived of its warmth, the home planet had gasped its last, its oceans freezing and its atmosphere bleeding away into the void.
Noah shook his head, clearing the thoughts. He hadn't watched the later Earth movies like The Marvels; he didn't know the specifics of the Kree's tragedy, and frankly, it didn't matter. What mattered was that Corvus was gone.
"Tch. I missed him," Noah muttered, his voice sounding thin and small in the vastness. His face tightened with a flicker of annoyance. Navigating spatial flows wasn't like using a GPS; it was a desperate gamble. Without a stable jump point, the exit he'd used had been frayed and broken. Even for him, pinpointing a target in that chaos was like trying to catch a specific drop of rain in a hurricane.
"Fine. Let him think he's lucky," Noah said with a cold, sharp smirk that didn't reach his eyes. "I hope he brings me something more interesting than a headache next time we meet."
Since the trail had gone cold, Noah saw no reason to exhaust himself in a blind chase. His primary objectives were achieved. Corvus, though tainted by the Void, was little more than a stray bacterium in the grand immune system of this dimension. He wasn't a threat to the Void itself; he was just a carrier.
Noah felt no fear that the creature would "control" the Void. To do that required a will and a resonance that Corvus simply lacked. Perhaps, in some distant future, the creature might ascend to the level of a Dimension Demon like Dormammu, but even then, the true depths of the Void would remain out of reach.
The Void was an entity of such primordial power that it drew the gaze of the universe's most ancient titans. They watched it with a mixture of greed and terror, sensing its presence but unable to find the key to its gates. They were like beggars looking through the windows of a palace, unable to even touch the glass.
Noah, however, was the only one with the key. He didn't know the machinations of the higher demons, nor did he realize just how unique his connection truly was. He wasn't worried about Corvus causing "trouble." In fact, he found himself hoping the creature would survive long enough to trigger more system quests.
With the changes in the Void, the panel should be lighting up soon, he thought. He decided to collect the rewards for his two completed A-rank missions before deciding his next move. The corruption back home still needed cleaning, but that could wait for a fresh set of instructions.
He opened his mental interface, and the glowing text of the system materialized before his eyes.
[A-Rank Quest: Protect the Earth! (Completed)]
[A-Rank Quest: The Infinity Stones! (Completed)]
A surge of satisfaction warmed him. Both tasks were checked off, their icons pulsing with a golden light, waiting for his command.
[Quest Completed. Summoner receives 4,000 Essence.]
[Quest Completed. Summoner receives 5,000 Essence.]
"Incredible!" Noah's eyes widened. "The reward for just one of these is nearly enough for a full ten-pull!"
He watched the numbers on his display tick upward, climbing higher than they had ever been. It was a digital fortune, a hoard of power ready to be spent.
[Current Essence: 14,800 units]
"That's two full ten-pulls," he calculated, his heart thumping against his ribs. "And with the bonus chests, I could probably squeeze out a third series."
Before this windfall, he'd been sitting on a modest 5,800 units, scraping by on C-rank scraps. But the invasion of New York and the dance with the Infinity Stones had paid out like a jackpot.
He closed the reward screen, but his gaze was immediately snatched by two new notifications sitting at the very top of his task list—the headers glowing with the sinister purple hue of the Void.
[B-Rank Void Chain Quest: Purify the Infected Territories!]
[B-Rank Void Chain Quest: The Pests!]
"Wait... two at once?"
Noah stared at the screen, a slow, predatory grin spreading across his face. The game was far from over.
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