This territory, abandoned by the stars, is not the empty and desolate vacuum commonly found in the universe. It is a stagnant tomb, a vast graveyard composed of coldness and slow decay. A sea of stardust and trash.
The gifts of countless years and catastrophes have settled here: jagged fragments of shattered planets, alloy remains of disintegrated starships, huge engine nozzles hollowed out and twisted like intestines, rivers of liquid metal frozen into eternal poses, and those tangled mounds of waste whose original shapes are long unrecognizable, fused together on a mountain-like scale. They press against one another, embed themselves in one another, and merge, forming an endless "land" floating against the backdrop of a filthy void under the weak weaving of gravity. Light is a meager resource here; the starlight seeping in from the edge of a distant galaxy, almost entirely swallowed by void dust, casts long and twisted shadows between the jagged giants, outlining this "sea" as a surreal print in only shades of black, white, and gray.
Air? Non-existent. But the "space" itself here is permeated with a viscous materiality—metal dust so tiny it transcends the limits of visual perception, floating and spinning like a never-falling snow, drifting into the crevices of anything entering this place, slowly assimilating them too into a part of this dead landscape. Temperature? Infinitely approaching absolute zero; the crisp sound of metal fracturing can travel miles away because no…
Chapter 62