The flagship kept jumping through teleportations, but even after the energy powering the grand array was exhausted, it still hadn’t managed to reach that star.
Without teleportation power, the flagship could only travel the way it had at the beginning—flying through the void.
Bao Gu stared at the endless sea of stars ahead, waves of despair welling up in her chest.
Out here in space, time was the thing she could least afford to waste. If she hadn’t been a cultivator and was just a mortal, even if she’d lived to a hundred, she would already have died of old age by now.
Her face hadn’t changed, but her heart was covered in the marks of passing years—vast and desolate, like this boundless starry sky. There was a deeper chill in her soul.
During the endless voyage, there was nothing on the flagship that really needed her attention, so she poured all her time into cultivation, into comprehending the Xuantian Sword. As she continued to merge with the sword, she realized it was even more profound than she’d imagined. Every time she immersed herself in it, it felt like entering another immense world.
She sank her mind fully into the Xuantian Sword, deducing and practicing its techniques again and again. Using its power to temper her divine soul, she actually found her cultivation realm rising steadily.
Bao Gu didn’t actually like being submerged in cultivation all the time. Once she sat down and entered meditation, it meant months, years, sometimes more than a decade of nothing but insight into the sword and the Dao. Aside from increasing her strength, that state brought her no joy whatsoever. But she couldn’t find anything else to kill the time. And the terrifying speed at which time slipped by only made her panic. If she didn’t pour all her time and thoughts into cultivation, she was afraid she’d go mad, that she wouldn’t be able to endure.
She couldn’t find the road home. She’d lost her direction. All she could do was stubbornly press on, clinging to a persistence even she could no longer see hope in—heading forward with dogged obstinacy, perhaps farther and farther away with every step. Her chances of ever seeing Yu Mi again grew thinner and thinner.
She was almost forgetting what Yu Mi’s face looked like. All she remembered were those bright, dazzling eyes; that heroic, spirited figure, and that unrestrained, wandering aura. Her senior sister never stopped for anything, always chasing forward on the path to power. That hazy silhouette, along with scattered fragments of the past, would surface before Bao Gu’s eyes when she least expected it. The features were blurred now, but the longing, and that craving for the sense of security she’d had with Yu Mi, filled her chest. Without Yu Mi, she felt like a large piece of herself was missing, leaving her always lonely, lost, and without anchor.
She just wanted to hug Yu Mi one more time—or be hugged by her one more time.
Ba shuffled nervously into Bao Gu’s courtyard, only to see Bao Gu sitting at the jade table, staring blankly at the floral tea in front of her. Her expression was cool and quiet, but there were tear tracks on her cheeks. Curious, Ba leaned in close to look her over.
“What’s wrong?”
Her cheap master really was strange sometimes. Like this courtyard—everything was fully furnished, yet every time she saw Bao Gu, Bao Gu was always sitting outside. She had never once seen Bao Gu actually walk into the house.
And now? She was drinking tea and somehow ended up crying into it.
Bao Gu pulled her thoughts back, lifted a finger to wipe away the tears on her face, and gave Ba a faint glance.
“It’s nothing.”
She felt the sound-transmission jade slip in her sleeve stir. She took it out, connected the message, and heard an excited voice burst out:
“Commander, look outside! The moon—there’s a huge moon!”
A huge moon?
Ba slanted a look at the jade slip and gave a disgruntled snort, her face full of annoyance. Then curiosity won out and she asked:
“Master, why were you crying at your tea? Are you that heartbroken over wasting it?”
Bao Gu ignored her entirely and went straight to the control room.
One look at the array’s projection and she saw it: a massive, perfectly round white sphere hanging in the distant starry sky. The flagship was heading straight toward that white ball. Not only that, but light was streaming in from even farther away, shining on that white spherical star—and on the flagship itself.
Bao Gu’s eyes flew wide. Her long-silent heart hammered uncontrollably in her chest.
“It really is a moon!”
Ba rolled her eyes so hard it was a wonder they didn’t fall out.
Ignorance really was terrifying. See one star reflecting sunlight and you call it a moon?
In the control room, every cultivator operating the flagship was so excited they were practically shaking. More than a few had tears in their eyes; they were overwhelmed.
Someone shouted, voice cracking with excitement:
“Commander, look, look! Farther out—there’s more! Commander, look at the projection, farther away there’s another star, not far at all, all red and huge!”
A fire-attribute cultivator yelled, eyes shining:
“There must be unimaginable fire energy in there!”
Bao Gu looked over at another projection from a secondary array. Sure enough, far off in the distance burned a gigantic, blazing star. The distance was enormous—but after such a long voyage, to Bao Gu it didn’t feel far at all. At least it looked much bigger than a plate; it definitely wasn’t one of those tiny points of light you could only see as a sparkle.
The flagship was incredibly fast. While everyone was shouting, it was already flying toward the white star. That star was swelling quickly in their view.
A cultivator screamed:
“The ship’s accelerating! Slow down, don’t crash! Don’t crash into it!”
“I didn’t accelerate it—the ship’s doing it by itself!”
“How’s that possible?!”
Amid the cries, Bao Gu noticed the flagship was diving toward that white sphere at a steep angle. It was so fast that what had just been the size of two cupped hands instantly swelled to the size of a basin, and it kept getting larger, closer. The dive speed grew faster and faster.
Bao Gu gave a decisive order.
“Cut propulsion! Stop moving forward, or we’ll smash into it!”
A cultivator replied immediately:
“Commander, it’s already shut down!”
If it’s shut down, why are we still plunging ahead—and even faster?
In the time it took for that thought to flash by, the white star ahead had grown so large they could no longer see it as a whole. All that filled the projection was an endless white world, like a realm carved entirely from ice.
“The flagship’s out of control! We’re about to crash! Start the teleportation right now—”
“The teleportation gate isn’t responding!”
They were getting closer and closer. Bao Gu could even clearly see the traces of wind sweeping outside. At the same time, the flagship trembled violently, the entire ship shuddering as it hurled itself toward that icy world with unstoppable momentum, like a warrior charging to his death.
“Commander, what do we do?!” a cultivator shrieked in terror.
“Activate the defensive arrays! Full power—bring every layer online!”
The cultivator in charge of the defensive array finally snapped out of it and rushed to bring the defenses up to maximum.
The navigator shouted:
“Reverse thrust at full power! Pull the bow up and fly in the opposite direction, slow the fall! Hurry—reverse and push the speed to the limit!”
The falling momentum gradually eased, and then the ship began to climb.
The navigator yelled again:
“Control the speed, bring us down slowly. Find a flat place to land.”
As the flagship descended, what appeared in the projection was a vast, white nothingness. The sky was white. Everything the array could cover was white—
Soon, amid a series of thunderous booms, the flagship landed on the white star.
Through the teleportation array, they saw an endless plain outside, white and ice-like, smooth as a mirror polished to perfection.
In the control room, every cultivator stared at Bao Gu, nerves strung tight, hearts pounding.
Bao Gu gave her order.
“Send a team down to scout first.”
Soon, a ten-man team of cultivators donned full armor, cranked their defensive gear to the maximum, and teleported out via a small auxiliary teleportation array.
The moment they appeared outside the ship, they were swept away with a sharp whoosh, tumbling end over end across the ice. Their armor shattered almost instantly, and then flesh and blood blew apart. In less than the time it took to draw a breath, they were shaved into chunks, flesh and gore spinning away through the air until they vanished from view.
The unexpected sight left everyone in the control room stunned.
Ten full Nascent Soul cultivators—living, breathing people—had been shredded in an instant, as if sucked into some invisible gale and sliced to pieces.
One cultivator finally came back to himself, looked out, and said:
“Commander, doesn’t the terrain out there look like it was carved by the wind?”
Bao Gu turned to Ba.
“Your body’s tough. How about you go out and take a look?”
Ba shot her a very unamused glare.
“With winds like that, I’m not going out there to be turned into frozen dust. You people are ridiculous—see a star and rush straight at it! Luckily this place only has strong winds and heavy gravity. If you’d charged straight into that big red star, I guarantee you and my Qingying would be nothing but ash by now.”
The joy of discovering a star vanished completely in the face of what had just happened.
Wind like this was far more than “a bit strong.” Nascent Soul cultivators had been snuffed out the instant they stepped outside. After seeing what was happening out there, every person’s expression turned extremely grim.
There was no point staying where stepping outside meant certain death.
Bao Gu could only order the flagship to continue on.
The flagship pushed its speed to the limit, struggling to claw its way out of the white star’s pull, then flew forward once more.
After that incident—and Ba’s words—they no longer dared to head toward that blazing red star in the distance, much less get close to it.
By this point, the stars were no longer as impossibly distant as before. If the energy for the ship’s grand teleportation array hadn’t been exhausted, traveling from one star to another would have taken only a single jump. Now, they could only fly, and every flight meant another ten-plus years.
After experiencing that deadly gale on the white star, everyone had become cautious. Whenever they neared a star, they would stop far away, then send a single warship ahead. If anything looked wrong, the warship would immediately activate its teleportation and jump back to the flagship waiting in the distance.
Later, they found another star where they could replenish the grand teleportation array’s energy. Once the array could be used again, a few teleportations were enough to bring them near the next star they wanted to investigate, which finally sped up their exploration.
Star after star, Bao Gu discovered that most of them had one thing in common: they were pocked with craters where meteors had struck.
They didn’t encounter another world with such vicious winds, but they did find all sorts of bizarre stars—in fact, every one of them was strange.
On one star, thick yellow cloud layers covered the sky, and beneath them churned sulfurous mists. The entire planet was molten rock and erupting volcanoes. They mined fire spirit stones and refined metals until every cargo hold was crammed full.
On another star, anyone who stepped outside would be frozen solid in an instant. It was endless ice and snow, yet there they found sprawling veins of water spirit stones and more pieces of profound ice jade than they could count.
One star looked like a massive honeycomb. Another seemed to be made of clouds—but the “clouds” were solid, frozen like ice; the flagship could sit on them without sinking.
At first, they still stopped at each world to harvest spirit stones, ores, and so on. Once the flagship’s holds and every warship were packed solid and had no space left, they built dedicated cargo ships just to store supplies.
Then they realized there were still more stars worth mining and decided it wasn’t worth burning so much time on extraction.
Bao Gu’s oversized storage pouch could have fit everything they’d taken so far, but they’d already charted star maps, marked coordinates, and could return at any time via teleportation to any star they’d visited.
They no longer lacked resources or materials. Among the three hundred thousand cultivators, any random person you picked and threw back into the cultivation world would easily count as rich beyond belief.
The more stars they explored, the more experience they gained. Just by probing from afar with magic tools, they could roughly determine what each star held. There was no longer any need to send a warship and landing party to every single one, which increased their pace greatly.
After confirming that this entire region of bizarre stars held no life, they filled Bao Gu’s massive storage pouch with enough energy to keep the flagship teleporting nonstop for a thousand years, then set course for a more distant cluster of stars.
This time they traveled by teleportation, much faster than flying, but their hope of finding a life-bearing star still felt very faint.
Bao Gu curled back up in her little courtyard to cultivate again. She stopped paying attention to the passage of time altogether, for fear she’d snap under the pressure.
Until one day, her sound-transmission jade stirred. She connected, and an excited voice shouted from the other end:
“Commander! We’ve found a green star! Outside that star, there are tons of broken magic tools! And farther out—farther out we detected traces of battle!”
“…”
Bao Gu froze for a moment, then snapped back to herself and rushed to the control room at top speed.
Far off in the void, a green star hung in space. Farther beyond it, a brilliant sun burned.
When she had the ship’s search array pull the image closer, she saw that the green star was covered in green, with huge swathes of blue mixed in. The whole planet was a blend of blue, green, and white. A layer of mist-like “cloud” wrapped around it, forming a protective shell. Outside that misty shell floated enormous skeletons and all sorts of shattered magic artifacts—there were even fragments that looked like they’d once been part of warships.
The scraps were clearly forged; there was no way a star had produced them naturally. Stars produced meteorites, not manufactured weapons.
Life. They had found a star with life.
And that life could even create warships capable of flying out into space.
Bao Gu’s throat tightened with emotion, but she knew this definitely wasn’t the cultivation world she’d come from. In that world, no one had the slightest idea what lay beyond the gale layer above the sky, much less the ability to build warships and wage war outside it.
She pressed down her excitement and gave her orders.
“Hold the flagship well away from that green star. Send a warship there by teleportation and scout the situation first.”
