My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 593: The Truth About The Unobservable Part Of The Universe (2)

The first images were of the approach zones, which were the regions at the boundary of where the invasion had entered from the Grand Universe.

What was shown were vessels. Thousands of them, drifting without power at the outer edges of galaxy clusters.

Their scale was not immediately apparent because there was nothing familiar nearby to compare them against, and then the array’s notation provided scale reference and the comparison produced a number that the eye processed and the mind rejected.

The smallest of the drifting vessels was larger than Jupiter.

They were not destroyed or damaged in any visible way. They were simply stopped — floating in the space between galactic structures with no detectable energy output, no drive signature, nothing.

Whatever had operated them had left or died or simply ceased to function, and the vessels had continued in their last trajectory until gravity eventually claimed them. They had been drifting for longer than the Earth had existed. The array had catalogued 4.7 million of them in this region alone.

What came next were the galaxy clusters themselves.

The array’s before imagery showed them as they had been — lit from within by the combined output of hundreds of billions of stars across hundreds of thousands of galaxies, the accumulated light of millions of years of stellar activity visible even at the distances the array was observing from.

The after imagery showed darkness. And it wasn’t the darkness of space with stars at distance, the faint glow of gas clouds, the background radiation that filled every corner of the observable universe.

This was different. The galaxy clusters in the invasion zones had been reduced to something the eye processed as an absence. The stars were gone. Not collapsed, not consumed by their natural cycles, not dimmed by distance. Gone. The array’s emission sensors registered nothing where billions of stars had been.

This was not the aftermath of a recent catastrophe. This was what hundreds of billions of years of darkness looked like. Even the residual heat of former stars had long since dissipated into the surrounding void.

The regions were not cooling. They had finished cooling. What remained was simply what they were now, and had been for longer than the Milky Way had existed in its current form.

The array had recorded this across 847 million galaxies in the primary invasion zone.

847 million galaxies.

The number sat on the display in the array’s notation and neither Lucy, or Liam commented, as they were speechless.

The survey footage from the array’s closer approach passes was worse.

The array had sent drone observation units into the edges of the affected regions, with passive sensors only, no active signatures, moving through space that had not been inhabited for hundreds of billions of years.

What the sensors found at the boundaries of the destroyed zones was a landscape that had no name in any language the array had translated.

Planets drifted in orbits that no longer made sense — the stars they had orbited gone, their orbital mechanics now governed by nothing, slowly bleeding velocity into the void as the gravitational anchor that had defined their path for billions of years had simply ceased to exist.

They had been drifting for so long that even the internal heat of geologically active worlds had nearly exhausted itself. Most were undetectable against the background temperature of space. A few still showed the faintest thermal signatures but it was the last trace of heat from a world that had been cooling for longer than Earth had existed.

Bodies floated between them. The array’s biosensors recorded the composition without interpretation. Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, trace elements. The molecular signatures of biological life, distributed across volumes of space that had once been inhabited.

The molecules had been drifting for hundreds of billions of years, dispersing across the void, growing more diffuse with each passing epoch. The array detected them still because it was built to detect them, but they were ghosts of matter that had once been organized into something living, long since reduced to their components.

The black holes were the most visually disturbing element of the survey footage.