The sudden glimmer of light that appeared at the corner of his vision instantly snapped Gawain to attention.

He immediately focused with every fiber of his being, staring fixedly at that suddenly appearing radiance. As he concentrated, the playback speed of the footage was slowed several times over, and every detail in the image was rendered with crystal clarity. His first reaction was to confirm the source of that light, then he realized it did not come from the surface, but from somewhere near the top of the planetary atmosphere—it seemed to have appeared there out of nowhere, without any warning, without any trajectory, as though an invisible door had opened at the edge of the atmosphere, and then a high-speed entity shot toward the direction of the orbital facility!

After that, the flying object grew larger and larger in Gawain’s field of view, and within the hazy radiance a clear silhouette gradually emerged.

If his physical body were here right now, Gawain felt he would definitely have his eyes open as wide as they could go—

A holy Giant Stag, shrouded in a faint white glow, emerged in the play of light and shadow. It carried with it the thin gas it had stirred up at the top of the atmosphere, dragging behind it a ray-like trail containing a high-energy reaction, tearing through the cold, dead darkness of space as it charged straight toward the direction of the monitoring vantage point—with unstoppable momentum, with a kind of terrifying, bone-chilling resolve.

In one instant, when the Giant Stag was close enough, Gawain even saw its eyes through the image. Those were not the eyes of a mortal, yet they seemed to hold emotions akin to human feeling. Gawain felt he saw, within them, the complex emotions of facing death unflinchingly and staking one’s life on a single desperate gamble.

Yet that gaze only flashed by for a moment.

In the next instant, the Giant Stag and the radiance wrapped around it erupted into a vast, dazzling "flame" in the image. A powerful blast wave burst out from one corner of the footage, and countless fragments, sparks, and jets of gas spewing from the space station’s modules flooded the entire monitoring view.

The image began to shake violently, various alarm sirens sounded in his mind, and terrifying, continuous booms echoed through the space station’s (if it was indeed a space station) structure. In the rapidly warping and dimming picture, Gawain saw the Giant Stag, covered in wounds, falling from geosynchronous orbit, while some kind of golden-glowing flying apparatus came streaking in from outside the frame—this was perhaps the station’s guardian, awakened, and beginning to carry out the task of eliminating the intruder.

In the flames and explosions that followed, this segment of footage came to an end.

In the darkness, the system prompt sounded from the depths of Gawain’s "mind": "Historical log playback complete—the above comes from the last monitoring record of Zone C-16."

After a brief silence and contemplation, Gawain calmed his violently churning emotions and asked in his mind, "So... it was the God of Nature who rammed into this facility and caused all subsystems to go offline?"

The system prompt gave no reply, answering with silence.

But Gawain no longer needed an answer, because the truth was already quite obvious—the Giant Stag’s form was so distinctive that once seen it could never be mistaken. It now still lies quietly in the deepest part of the defied Fortress, imprisoned in the shadow realm by a heap of ancient wreckage fragments, and the so-called God of Nature the Oblivion Association cultists once created using the divine evils Factor... compared to that truly holy figure, was nothing but a shoddy counterfeit.

"Dealing with the junk this Deicide Fleet left behind really does require nerves of steel..." Gawain muttered to himself with a bitter smile in his consciousness. "What the hell did I just watch... a hard-headed God charging up to geosynchronous orbit to slam into a space station and commit suicide?"

Every word in that sentence was a complaint, yet the biggest punchline was this: from beginning to end, every single word of it was actually true!

Afterward, Gawain tried to use that collision as a key point to search for more records, but aside from that short piece of monitoring footage he had already seen, he found nothing else of value in the facility’s database.

After a while, Gawain gave up on this line of inquiry and instead began using this connection opportunity to dig out more secrets from the facility—considering that he had only managed to establish contact with the facility by relying on a piece of starry-sky heritage, he wasn’t sure whether this connection could be maintained stably. If this was the only chance he’d get, then he definitely couldn’t disconnect lightly.

After a large number of failed attempts or attempts that received no response, he finally obtained a valuable name from the intermittent feedback of the facility’s main control system:

Firmament Station—this was the name of the orbital facility he was currently connected to.

At this moment he could finally be certain that what he had connected to was a large-scale space station, not a small surveillance satellites.

"Firmament Station..." Gawain repeated the name in his mind, then asked without much hope, "What is the function of Firmament Station? What mission does it have on orbit?"

"Error, insufficient query permissions or higher-level database not open. Please check data link. If the issue persists, report this fault to the Supreme Technical Committee."

More or less the expected answer... Firmament Station’s main system was clearly malfunctioning; when faced with most questions it either gave no response or replied with something along those lines.

Gawain was quite curious what this so-called ’Supreme Technical Committee’ was, but questions in that direction received no response—though it didn’t really matter; that ’Supreme Technical Committee’ had most likely vanished into the long river of history by now.

"How many orbital facilities are still operational now? What’s their status?" he asked again.

This time, the main control system finally gave a somewhat useful answer: "Querying connected units... orbital facility list provided."

In the next second, a set of three-dimensional panoramic diagrams of spaceborne facilities appeared "before" Gawain’s eyes—he instantly recalled that he had seen a similar panorama once before, during the time he used a fragment of the Eternal Stone Slate and saw an overview of the orbital facilities. Yet very quickly, he realized that the image he saw this time was different from that previous one—

What he had seen before was a more simplified schematic, with severe gaps in the information; the space facilities were represented only by individual points of light, with no details visible in them. But this time, perhaps because he had gained higher permissions, or perhaps because of Firmament Station’s special nature, what he saw was a scaled-down model. All the space facilities around the planet were rendered as translucent pale-blue holograms—this mode of display brought an astonishing amount of information.

The most jaw-dropping of all was a ring-shaped structure of utterly staggering scale.

That facility was located above the planet’s equator, encircling the entire world in a complete loop!

Just by comparing it with the planet, Gawain could already infer the scale of this ring-shaped facility. He stared in shock at the holographic image "before his eyes," at the position of that ring structure in space, and finally realized that this thing was the very facility he was currently connected to—the space station named "Firmament"!

He had imagined that this thing was huge, but he had never imagined it would be this huge! In the schematic he saw last time via the Eternal Stone Slate, this "Firmament" had clearly just been a point of light running along the equator!

The difference between a schematic and a miniature model was simply world-shattering!

Only after more than ten seconds of stupefaction did Gawain’s mood slowly calm down, and then a sentence kept thundering in his mind: For millions of years... over the skies of the Loren Continent... this thing has been floating there all along?!

"...Firmament... is this orbital ring?"

As if talking to himself, Gawain muttered in his mind, while that cold mechanical prompt voice gave no response at all.

Gawain was not surprised in the slightest.

He regained his composure and focus, his gaze moving over those miniature projections one by one. He tried to pick out the "satellite" that belonged to him, and he felt that he’d found it... Above the Loren Continent, near Firmament Station, there were several flickering "little devices." They seemed to be kept in sync with the massive body of Firmament through some kind of spatial Anchoring technology, monitoring toward the Loren Continent in a fixed direction. One of them might well be the "container" he had inhabited for tens of thousands or even millions of years.

While stabilizing his own connection with Firmament Station, Gawain tried to draw more information from this holographic projection. He focused his attention on some of the orbital facilities, and after several attempts, additional information finally surfaced from those holographic images—

"Glare Station No. One. Status: dormant operation, database offline, main system offline, power failure, backup power: extremely low. Unable to awaken, available operations: ignore/scrap."

"Zenith Satellite No. 7. Status: severely damaged, all systems offline, orbit shifted, backup power: extremely low. Unable to awaken, available operations: ignore/scrap."

"First Starbridge. Status: unknown, all systems offline, spatial anchor invalid, orbit shifted, backup power: none..."

Gawain’s gaze swept over everything. Aside from a few orbital facilities marked as "low-power operation," all he saw were large patches of damage reports and blinding red alerts.

Sure enough... the result was about the same as the panoramic view he’d seen last time, only now the information was more complete, making it easier for one to truly grasp just how bad things were.

The sense of shock brought on by the holographic projection of "Firmament Station" finally faded bit by bit. Gawain sobered and cooled down from his emotional turbulence, and when he looked again at those holographic images orbiting the planet, he suddenly felt that he was not looking at a glorious creation of high technology, but at a vast grave.

This was a graveyard, its tombstones standing for millions of years.

And the Loren Continent, the homeland where countless living beings had thrived and multiplied generation after generation... was the largest tomb in this unimaginably vast cemetery.

This association brought a certain tinge of sorrow to him.

Yet very soon, that sorrow rising in his heart was shattered by a sudden wave of dizziness.

An unbearable exhaustion and vertigo surged up from the depths of his consciousness. Gawain felt all his senses fading and slipping out of place at a pace even more terrifying than when he had first established the connection. He realized he was losing his connection with Firmament Station—an unprecedented feeling of his soul scattering was rapidly stripping him of the ability to think properly!

But just as he felt himself about to sink completely into sleep, a noisy, piercing, practically-able-to-rattle-the-dead voice came from the boundless darkness and yanked him back to the real world in an instant—

"Hey hey old man, wake up! Something’s wrong with you, hey! Oh damn, your shield is smoking! I already called people over! My God, you’re smoking too... Ow damn that’s hot!"

Gawain snapped his eyes open. Through severely blurred and twisted vision, with his head spinning, he saw a petite figure swaying in front of him, and he felt someone vigorously shaking his shoulders.

His vision finally focused, and that blurry petite figure condensed into Amber’s face.

Gawain forced himself to concentrate, and immediately a wave of dizziness washed over his mind, but at least he didn’t actually black out—then he realized there was a shocking heat swirling around him. The surface of the shield of the protector placed on the desk was even glowing red, the part of the desktop in contact with the shield had already been scorched, and the edges of several stacks of documents lying not far away had actually started to curl.

As soon as Gawain opened his eyes, Amber jumped back half a step. She was frantically shaking her hand as she yelled, "Damn... you’re finally awake! Do you know you were smoking just now? I was starting to think your clothes were about to catch fire!"

Only now did Gawain fully regain his ability to think. He realized that he must have just gone through something extremely dangerous—the process of connecting with Firmament Station was completely different from connecting to a satellite, and the "price" it demanded in consumption had almost cost him his life.

It was Amber who had "shaken" him back at the critical moment.

"I just ran into danger," Gawain looked at Amber, who was hopping around shaking her hand. "Thank you. I owe you for that."

"Huh? Danger... I knew it! Anyone smoking like that can’t be fine!" Amber was stunned for a second, then instantly grew excited. "So I did my duty as your guard, huh! Hey, I’ve been your personal guard for years and finally scored a success this once..."

Gawain: "..."