Chapter 1 A Glimmer in the Vast Space

A ray of light flashed in the vast space, and a silver-white spaceship leaped out of hyperspace into the universe as if condensed from the light.

"Navigation complete."

Nolan's voice reminded everyone that they had arrived at their destination. Hao Ren immediately looked up from the dazzling data and looked at the picture from the spaceship's external monitor. He saw that the spaceship had arrived at the edge of a bright nebula, and the state of the nebula was obviously very strange.

It was a gaseous cloud structure exhibiting a light purple color. The data showed that its scale exceeded twelve light-years. The entire nebula was radial, and its core was brighter. Judging from its shape, this seemed to be a small part remaining after a star-forming cloud was torn apart. The bright light might be the primordial matter that failed to evolve into a star. In the thinner and darker areas of the nebula, some bright spots could be seen, which were smaller stars shining.

"The shape looks a bit weird…" Lily lay on the holographic projection, wagging her tail. "It's like it's been distorted by a funhouse mirror?"

Hao Ren nodded: "Probably gravitational interference. There's probably a black hole or something in the recessed area."

They were discussing the strange shape of the nebula: the nebula was not regular, and one side of it was obviously "recessed." All the surrounding matter, including the light, was tilting towards the recessed point, making its entire structure look like a stretched and torn canvas, or like a hole in the universe, and this nebula was leaking into another space from the hole. If you look closely, you can see that the entire light purple nebula was affected by this "skew point," as if a huge gravitational source was slowly pulling it in.

At one end of the light purple nebula, that is, the side closer to the "skew point," there were also obvious signs of fracture. All the matter in that area disappeared abruptly, leaving a clearly defined cut strip, as if the originally erratic and invisible cloud had been cut by some invisible power—or it might be some optical phenomenon that blocked the scene there.

"So peculiar…" Lily murmured to herself. Don't look at her being a bit scatterbrained; she was the most educated female scholar in the team. She was looking at the scene in front of her, not just watching the excitement. "The phenomenon of starlight distortion can be explained by black holes, but what about the suddenly broken nebula matter over there?"

"No, even the starlight distortion can't be explained," Hao Ren glanced at the data on the instrument and suddenly frowned. "There's no black hole there."

"No black hole?" Lily's ears twitched. "Then why is the light distorted?"

"It has nothing to do with gravity," Hao Ren hadn't spoken yet, but the data terminal took the initiative to explain, while displaying a set of holographic images. The images showed the spatial structure in which the light purple nebula was located, which was full of wrinkles like a pulled cloth. "Space itself is skewed. Starlight is only distorted in our view, but it is still straight in its own space. This is a weird place. There is no strong gravitational source interfering, but the curvature of space itself has changed."

Izhaks muttered gruffly: "It must be the big bang of the Divine Slaying War that tore apart the spatial structure here."

Hao Ren had the spaceship approach the skew point of the nebula at sub-light speed, while connecting to the communication with the Ginnungagap—Mullu was waiting there: "Mullu, I'll transfer the picture to you. Do you think this is the gate of Surtr?"

He sent the scene of the "skewed nebula" to the guardian giant. The latter's voice came a few seconds later, with a sense of surprise: "This… it does look like a part of the Surtr Gate galaxy, but how did it become like this?"

"We don't know. There are space anomalies in those distorted places. Space itself is curved and out of place with the surrounding universe," Hao Ren explained. "Now we are heading towards the area with the most severe skew. Do you know which celestial body the signal is specifically uploaded from?"

Mullu suppressed the doubts and unease in his heart, while searching his memory and looking for the celestial structures he was familiar with in the severely distorted nebula: "Skew point… a little further past, do you see this place that looks like it has been cut off? There is a lonely light spot here, which is a star. There should be a rocky planet around it. That planet is the fortress of the Surtr Gate, and its name is Surtr. The signal is coming from there."

Hao Ren nodded, and asked Nolan to accelerate towards the planet, while he opened the data link of the detection drone swarm and retrieved the monitoring records of a drone here a few days ago.

A few days ago, a drone had passed through this area and turned its camera towards the nebula in front of Hao Ren. But at that time, there was only nothingness in the image record, and sparse starlight tens of thousands of light-years away dotted this desolate and barren place.

Hao Ren looked up and saw a magnificent, skewed, and strange light purple nebula.

The Surtr Gate appeared suddenly, without warning, and appeared out of thin air in the universe. The key question is why did it appear?

Nolan quickly approached the skew point, and soon the distance was so close that the entire nebula could not be seen with the external monitor. Hao Ren only saw the spaceship approaching an increasingly bright star, and almost clinging to this star, he could see a clear "fracture zone," which extended to both sides of the star with the momentum of almost penetrating the universe (visually).

The fracture zone was the boundary seen when observing the light purple nebula from a distance, a place that seemed to be cut off by a knife. It itself did not emit light nor had a clear color, but because the entire cosmic background was out of place with the background of the nebula itself, and because the starlight from other places was all blocked on the fracture zone, this boundary was very conspicuous.

"It feels like this Surtr Gate was cut off from something bigger," Lily pointed to the fracture zone next to the star. "We are flying towards the cut!"

Nolan's holographic projection suddenly popped out of the air, glaring at Lily with her hands on her hips: "Don't say such scary things. I'm the one flying over there. I'm watching from the first-person perspective!"

Hao Ren subconsciously glanced at Nolan, thinking that as she spent more and more time as a ship, the personality of this once indifferent and alienated "female mercenary" was becoming more and more like a normal person. But this change should have nothing to do with whether she became a spaceship or not. The most important thing was that Nolan had finally come into contact with "reality." Now she didn't have to worry about everything in front of her suddenly disappearing like waking up from a dream, nor did she have to worry about the people around her turning into strangers she didn't know in the blink of an eye. She lived in a truly believable new environment, so what was being released now was probably her true nature.

Just as Hao Ren was letting his imagination run wild and thinking about these irrelevant things, Nolan's face suddenly changed slightly, and then the speed of the Petrified Turtle Rock Platform suddenly decreased, and the shipboard mainframe also sounded an alarm at the same time: "Space-time anomaly, stop thrust detection, space-time anomaly, stop thrust detection…"

Elizabeth immediately jumped up with a yell: "What's going on? What's going on?"

"There is a space-time distortion ahead," Nolan's image suddenly became thin. She was transferring more computing power to the performance of the shipboard mainframe. "... There is a problem with the time flow rate at the skew point."

Elizabeth scratched her horns: "Time flow rate?"

The little demon seemed to have not learned such advanced lessons yet.

The holographic projection on the control panel showed the celestial images within a certain range, and the planet named "Surtr" was located in the center of the image. It was marked with a striking red color, and around Surtr, you could see circles of red halos spreading out, with the color constantly fading. This was a vortex indicating the intensity of a certain phenomenon, and Surtr was in the very center of this vortex.

"Time is distorted along with space, Surtr is in the place with the most severe skew," Nolan pointed to the planet Surtr with her finger, and explained quickly, "From here, the closer you get to Surtr, the slower time passes."

The scene suddenly became quiet, and Hao Ren and the others looked at each other.

They knew this place was weird, but they didn't expect the weirdest part to be the time flow rate—this was very different from any problem they had ever solved.

"Getting close to a black hole will also produce a similar time dilation effect, or performing other forms of faster-than-light travel without space-time stabilization will also produce this phenomenon," Nolan said. She might not have had this knowledge originally, but now she had a database, so she knew everything. "There is neither a black hole nor faster-than-light movement here. The main reason for the change in the time flow rate may be space skew… or some other deeper reason, such as the Divine Slaying War blowing up the cosmic laws here."