Rebirth of the Super Battleship-Chapter 663: Rogue Star

Xiao Yu had now completely left the Milky Way Galaxy and set out on the journey to the Large Magellanic Cloud. During this long voyage, apart from collecting a small amount of gaseous dust from the Magellanic Stream, Xiao Yu would gain no additional resupply.

Over the vast distance of one hundred and sixty thousand light years, Xiao Yu needed to push his speed to the maximum and travel for roughly one thousand six hundred years to reach the target. If humanity still existed, this feat might be recorded in history and Xiao Yu would be hailed as a great figure of an era. Unfortunately, at least within the scope of Xiao Yu’s knowledge, only one human remained in the universe, and that was Xiao Yu himself.

When the last star of the Milky Way Galaxy vanished from the optical instruments Xiao Yu had built to match human visual standards, he knew the Milky Way Galaxy was already very far away. In Xiao Yu’s view at this moment, the Milky Way Galaxy had become a large, blurry halo. Single stars within it could only be resolved with an optical telescope.

At present, Xiao Yu was eight thousand light years from the Milky Way Galaxy. In the empty void of space, he had already traveled for eighty years.

Thanks to more advanced energy utilization methods, over these eighty years Xiao Yu had consumed only 3.7 standard stellar masses. Using the previous energy consumption rate with the current mass of the small universe, this number should have been 5.3 instead of 3.7.

In other words, in just eighty years of travel, nearly four Sun-sized stars had been consumed by Xiao Yu.

Xiao Yu’s journey once again verified a saying. In the universe, places where meteoroids fly chaotically are not the most dangerous. The truly dangerous place is the empty cosmic void where nothing exists. Xiao Yu had stocked as many stars as possible within the small universe, but the more stars in reserve, the greater the mass, and the greater the energy needed to travel a unit distance. If he pushed deeper into the void farther from the Milky Way Galaxy and an accident caused him to lose most of his material reserves, he would be adrift here forever. Even if his warships could return, he would be forced to discard the small universe.

To conserve energy, Xiao Yu placed all his warships into the small universe except those that had to remain in the visible universe. In the visible universe, he kept only a spaceship roughly the size of a Province-Class warship equipped with instruments to tow the small universe, along with necessary positioning and observation devices.

During this protracted voyage, the small universe was engaged in nonstop, large-scale construction. While departing the Milky Way Galaxy, Xiao Yu had already increased his reserve of warships to 150 million. But he still did not think this number was enough. At least 500 million warships would be needed.

With breakthroughs in materials science, Xiao Yu could now manufacture Planet-Class warships using conventional materials. Therefore a large stockpile of Planet-Class warships was also required, the more the better, ideally numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands. After all, Xiao Yu knew almost nothing about the distribution of power or civilization levels within the Large Magellanic Cloud. As an outsider, he could easily be besieged by native civilizations there.

Although the half Four-Dimensional Taihao had said that he could run rampant within the Large Magellanic Cloud, Xiao Yu dared not fully believe that. Prudence was best. If he encountered unexpected and powerful beings in the Large Magellanic Cloud, these stockpiled warships would prove useful. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Time continued to pass slowly. At this point, Xiao Yu had traveled for five hundred years and was fifty thousand light years from the Milky Way Galaxy. At this distance, with an optical instrument equivalent to the naked human eye pointed toward the Milky Way Galaxy, only a slightly flattened spherical shape could be seen. Xiao Yu knew this shape was due to his observing angle. The Milky Way Galaxy he saw was about the size of the Moon, faintly glowing with a milky white light.

By now the brightness of the Large Magellanic Cloud had increased to that of Venus. Xiao Yu was still about one hundred ten thousand light years away from it. At this distance, a naked-eye-strength optical telescope could not discern any detail of the Large Magellanic Cloud. Its roughly one hundred billion stars were condensed into a single point, all their light fused into one.

With a naked-eye-strength optical instrument observing the sky from his current position, the sky appeared extremely empty, with scarcely any stars, and most that did appear were exceedingly dim, requiring careful effort to distinguish them from the black backdrop of space. These ‘stars’ were all far too distant from Xiao Yu, their distances measured in the millions or tens of millions of light years. Moreover, Xiao Yu knew the ‘stars’ he saw were not stars but vast galaxies like the Milky Way Galaxy. Each dim point could be larger than the Milky Way Galaxy. Within them might reside numerous powerful civilizations, even Level 7 or higher. Among and within these civilizations countless stories might be unfolding, glorious or tragic, and innumerable intelligent beings might be living out their joys and sorrows. Yet to Xiao Yu, all of this was invisible. All he could see was a dim point of light.

Even such dim stars were very few. Scanning three hundred sixty degrees, Xiao Yu could see only a few dozen. Here, stars were the scarcest treasure, and emptiness was what existed in abundance.

Among these few dozen dim stars, Xiao Yu focused on one slightly brighter point. To him, its brightness was like a star that took some effort to make out in Earth’s night sky. But he knew it was not a dim star. It was an immense galaxy, larger than the Milky Way Galaxy, bearing a beautiful name, the Andromeda Galaxy.

The Andromeda Galaxy, the largest galaxy in the Local Group, was so vast that even the Milky Way Galaxy must rank second to it. It was also Xiao Yu’s first planned destination once he possessed true intergalactic voyaging capability.

Nine hundred years had passed. Xiao Yu still had about seventy thousand light years to go before reaching his final goal. At this distance, the mass reserves within the small universe had finally fallen to half of what they were when he left the Milky Way Galaxy. Of the more than seventy stars, only a little over thirty remained. The more than thirty that were gone had all been devoured by Xiao Yu’s instruments.

During this process, the planets in the small universe underwent several large-scale relocations. A star being consumed by Xiao Yu was obviously unsuitable for planets to orbit. Therefore, whenever a star was scheduled to be the next consumed target, all planets orbiting it were moved away to other stars. Intelligent beings living within the Divine Ark Civilization had long grown accustomed to such massive migrations.

At this distance marker, the brightness of the Large Magellanic Cloud equaled that of the Milky Way Galaxy for the first time. Both now shone like a crescent Moon in dusky weather. Xiao Yu knew that as he continued forward, the Large Magellanic Cloud would grow ever brighter.

At this moment, Xiao Yu made a most unexpected and astonishing discovery. He found a star here, and it was a very healthy one in its prime.

This star was slightly smaller than the Sun, thus possessing a longer lifespan than the Sun. In Xiao Yu’s observation, it had existed for about five billion years. This discovery greatly interested him. Xiao Yu immediately dispatched the appropriate fleet and used curvature instruments to transport the star before him.

Originally, this star had been speeding with the Magellanic Stream toward the Milky Way Galaxy at a velocity of a little over eight hundred kilometers per second. It had been running for a little more than twenty-five million years already, and in front of it lay another thirty-five million years of journey. Back when Earth was still in the Tertiary period and covered with angiosperms, this star had left the Large Magellanic Cloud and begun its charge. Twenty-five million years later, with humanity already extinct, it was still charging onward.

Xiao Yu knew this was a typical rogue star. Yes, intergalactic space did not necessarily contain nothing at all. There might be such lonely rogue stars shuttling through it. But these stars were too few in number, practically negligible.

Within their original galaxies, perhaps due to gravitational battles among several star clusters, they had gained very high accelerations and broke free of their galaxy’s gravitational binding, thereby leaving and embarking upon a long wandering journey. Intergalactic space was so empty that some might finish their entire lifespans before reaching a new home, ending in a supernova explosion. Yet even then, their remnants would continue the journey.

Behind every rogue star lay a magnificent cosmic epic, a splendid tale.