The Record of Unusual Creatures

Lemendusa and Heve were the last guardians on Solenne, but the enemy they had destroyed was not necessarily the last enemy on the planet. Given that there might still be a small group of rebels who had not been evacuated from here, Hao Ren let Petrachelys drop a group of surveillance satellites on the planet’s orbit to search for all the energy responses on the surface of the planet. At the same time, he ordered some armed UAVs to go to Solenne.

But so far, no other response of the rebel forces had been found in any of the search channels. Maybe they really had left this place.

“This place has been abandoned,” said Lemendusa. He was not surprised after hearing the search results. “After the interstellar barrier was broken, almost all the troops were flocking to the Star of Creation—including the guardians and the rebels. And I heard that the guardians of other planets had launched the self-destruct explosion or solar eruption device on the planet before leaving. So it’s impossible to have more living survivors. In fact, if you came a little later, this planet could not escape the explosion too.”

“You don’t seem to know anything about the Umbral Realm?” Hao Ren asked.

Lemendusa shook his head and said, “According to Muru, we were the one who was involved in the explosion. And for me, the big explosion just happened ten hours ago. So I don’t know how those who stayed outside call the battlefield ruins.”

Lily sat on the stone platform (now it had risen to the surface), dangling her legs while looking up at Muru and asked, “You’ve talked about the Umbral Realm several times. What kind of place is that?”

“In fact, we also don’t know.” Muru sighed. “When the last big explosion happened, the other guardians and I had left the divine kingdom. We could only see some strong lights coming from the direction of the Star of Creation. The background radiation of the entire universe was shaking, and then the stars around the divine kingdom begin to wobble, and the galaxy distorted and swirled into a whirlpool and then collapsed in the direction of the divine kingdom. It lasted only a short time, and then all the lights went away. The starlight of the divine kingdom and the starlight of millions of light years around it disappeared as well. The space was so clean as if a piece of it had been dug out. I did return to the battlefield trying to find clues but there was nothing, not even a speck of dust. There’s only boundless darkness. No wreckage, no remains, not even a little bit of temperature and magnetic field was left as if the divine kingdom had never existed. So we call this phenomenon ‘The Umbral Realm’.”

Lemendusa was getting more and more surprised as he was listening to Muru. Though he was on the battlefield, he did not see the unusual phenomenon that Muru had seen. Y’zaks then asked Muru curiously, “What did you see when the Star of Creation exploded?”

“Nothing special. There is only one strong light, and an energy shock that shook the entire galaxy,” Heve said slowly before Lemendusa answered. “I saw the Star of Creation expanded countless times in an instant. Its light occupied almost one-third of the sky, and then in a few seconds, the light began to fade away. I found that the stars in the sky were getting less, and the stars in the distance were gone. That’s probably the time it fell into the ‘Umbral Realm’?”

“I’m afraid so. You could not see the stars in the distance, which meant that you had fallen into a different space,” Muru frowned and said, “but you felt nothing while falling into the Umbral Realm? I thought it would turn this planet… upside down.”

“In fact, we don’t even know what’s going on,” Lemendusa said with a strange expression. “In my time, I just fought for less than a day after the explosion, and then you guys popped up and told me it’s been 10000 years and Solenne just came out of a place called the Umbral Realm.”

Lemendusa thought that it was only ten hours after the explosion of the Star of Creation but Hao Ren did not let go of any details as if he was a professional detective. “Did you see any unusual phenomena or scenes in these ten hours?”

Lemendusa pressed his forehead with his hand, trying to recall what he had seen. “There’s not much change, except for the mass disappearance of starlight and the loss of mental connection with other guardians. Oh, one moment before you came, I saw a flash of light in the east of the sky, which seemed to split the entire universe into two, and then the stars suddenly appeared. If that’s true, that should be the moment when we return to the main universe.”

“A flash of light in the east of the sky?” Hao Ren immediately jumped down from the platform and said, “Show us!”

Except for Heve who still needed some rest, everyone hurriedly ran out of the temple. They came to a platform outside the temple. It was still in the middle of the night, and the sky was still dark. The smoke and clouds brought by the war covered most of the sky, but there were still a lot of stars and some lavender stripes behind the clouds, which was the color of the clouds of Solenne. Lemendusa pointed to the side of the sky and said, “That’s the one.”

Hao Ren looked up and saw that there was a rift across the sky. The color of the night sky was divided into two distinct parts on both sides of the rift as if it were cut off by a knife. It took him a few seconds to realize what it was: it was the fault zone at the edge of the oblique nebula, where all the matter of the nebula was abruptly interrupted. Because Solenne was just on the edge of the oblique nebula, they could see the fault zone from here.

“Only a part of the gate of Solenne returned to the main universe,” Muru told Lemendusa what he knew, “and the flash you saw cut down a piece of the galaxy like a knife. Are you sure you really saw a flash of light?”

“It’s true.” Lemendusa nodded. “It ran through the sky. It’s magnificent. And it just happened just now. It couldn’t be wrong.”

“Then where is the source of the flash?” Lily asked quickly.

“I didn’t see that,” answered Lemendusa, shaking his head with a little regret. “It’s too grand, and it’s likely to be a phenomenon that set out from tens of thousands of light years away and is enough to affect a galaxy. It’s impossible to see the whole picture of the flash from the surface of Solenne, but according to the form the moment it emerged… I guess it’s probably coming from the direction of the Star of Creation.”

Everyone looked at each other at once and there was a long pause before Hao Ren broke the silence. “The Star of Creation had blown up, but it sent a flash of light that cut down a piece of the Gate of Solenne and threw it into the main universe.”

Lily’s eyes were sparkling. “In other words, there must be something in the Star of Creation, right? A particularly powerful one!”

“Is it the Creation’s Engine?” Y’zaks and Hao Ren asked in unison.

In the vicinity of the Star of Creation, there was—or maybe—an unprecedented powerful force that is strong enough to change the rules of the universe or throw a galaxy out of space. It seemed that the only thing that has these attributes is the mysterious Creation’s Engine. Although Hao Ren and Y’zaks did not know what the engine was for, at this point, they still associated the two things together. Lemendusa apparently did not have time to think about it, and he had a different view. “I don’t think so. The Creation’s Engine hasn’t been fully assembled, just completed ¾ of it.”

“But maybe it works,” Hao Ren said.

“Is it possible?” Lemendusa asked with a strange look on his face.

“Anyway, let’s just assume there’s something left around the Star of Creation,” Hao Ren said, rubbing his hands a little excitedly. “And with that flash of light, we can say that the possibility that the Goddess of Creation still survives is even higher. I even suspect that the flash was actually coming from her.”

Everyone nodded. The unexpected progress made them all extremely excited. But now the biggest problem was:

What was the current situation in the Umbral Realm?

Lemendusa only knew the situation of Solenne. The space around the planet was skewed and time was chaotic. However, according to Nolan’s observation, the degree of skewing was not uniform and was diminishing from the center of Solenne. Therefore, they could speculate that other places in the dark realm would not be in the state of stagnation like this the planet, so no one knew what kind of serious changes had taken place around the Star of Creation.

The only thing that could be ascertained was: Something was still active there.