While a group of starship citizens was still holding a meeting inside the museum, Xi Yujin violently forced the doors open and stormed in.

"I know your species' secret. You're descendants of a Zerg branch."

His gaze swept across every humanoid creature in the room.

"What did you do?"

The starship people looked at one another.

They themselves had only just learned the truth of their origins and were still trapped in shock and grief.

Only the elderly Wengla slowly floated forward atop its transport disc, speaking sorrowfully, "We called out to the Queen… but our homeland did not come to take us back…"

At the sight of the culprit, Xi Yujin nearly lashed out in anger. Only sheer rationality forced him to continue piecing things together.

"The key to crossing wormholes for the Zerg must be the armor. Back then, Gano used it to cross all the way to the edge of the universe."

When the Starship Belt called to the Queen, it must have triggered some kind of program or response within the armor, or within Gano himself.

And so Gano left.

"Your partner is a true Zerg," Wengla realized aloud.

It recalled all the differences between itself and Gano.

Gano possessed overwhelming strength and traveled the universe without fear. Compared to the starship people, their physical abilities were worlds apart.

Perhaps Gano could effortlessly read every piece of writing in the museum.

Perhaps he alone could receive the Queen's gentle attention.

That innate advantage lodged in Wengla's throat like a thorn.

Xi Yujin demanded, "How do you know the Zerg homeworld is even worth returning to?"

Wengla replied in return, "Who doesn't long for their homeland?"

Thinking about how hard Gano had struggled to leave the Zerg behind, Xi Yujin nearly lost control.

The other starship people hurriedly separated the two.

"So the Zerg took Gano away…" Xi Yujin forced himself to calm down before instinctively asking, "Then how do I get there?"

"The Starship Belt has no vessel capable of crossing wormholes. And the wormholes themselves are unstable. We have no navigation charts…" the starship scientist answered stiffly. "Without the Zerg's summons, we cannot return home. It should be… impossible to cross."

Xi Yujin froze in place.

For a moment, he couldn't even process what those words meant.

Blue Planet's Wenhuo, or rather Blue Planet's Yujin, had been unexpectedly separated from his partner, and the chances of reunion were vanishingly small.

The news spread throughout the entire starship belt.

Many aliens knew Blue Planet, and many had interacted with Yujin before.

And all of them understood what "parting" meant in the context of interstellar travel.

One after another, they came to comfort him.

For once, the universe's inhabitants displayed the highest possible level of morality.

Soma, with its many eyes, spread its arms toward him.

"Living in this universe means learning to accept separation as the very first lesson.

I often tell you stories about the mentor who trained me. Honestly, I'm very grateful to them. But we can never meet again. They're stationed aboard a Navigator Colossus, drifting farther and farther away from me.

In the future, I'll meet countless different beings across the cosmos. I'll also experience hundreds of farewells. If we clung too tightly every time, our journeys could never begin."

"I'm not from this universe," Xi Yujin said quietly, lowering his arms. "I'm not used to separation."

Soma didn't fully understand, but that didn't stop it from hugging its friend.

"Are you suffering because you never properly said goodbye?"

Different aliens took turns trying to soothe Xi Yujin's emotions.

This time, it was Sulfurstone.

"Throughout our lives, we all make mistakes we regret for countless days afterward. But there is no remedy for what has already passed. The past cannot be retrieved. Time is the greatest medicine."

Xi Yujin replied, "I never planned to say goodbye."

Sulfurstone asked gently, "Then what will you do?"

Xi Yujin paused.

Then, word by word, he answered, "I'm going to find him."

Sulfurstone looked at him with sympathy.

"Then I wish for a miraculous reunion for the two of you."

A miracle?

Xi Yujin rolled the word over in his mind.

At the edge of the universe, in the Pangshi Galaxy, he had met Gano three separate times.

Did he already exhaust every miracle that fate would ever grant him?

Even if he managed to cross the wormholes successfully, that still didn't mean he could find the Zerg homeworld.

The universe was just too vast.

Beyond the wormhole lay endless darkness, followed by countless scattered points of starlight to leap between.

Perhaps he would choose the correct direction and eventually encounter the destined stars.

Or perhaps he would wander aimlessly through one light-year after another until even the stars themselves dimmed.

More importantly, how was he supposed to cross the wormhole at all?

Without the planetary engines of a Navigator Colossus…

Without the mental guidance systems used by astronauts…

The tiny Tidal Peace would simply become lost within the wormhole forever.

Xi Yujin opened his terminal, intending to search the StarNet for information about situations like this.

Instead, countless reader messages flooded onto the screen.

"Yongye! You haven't updated in ages. Did you fall into a black hole again?"

"Qiongtian hasn't updated in forever either. I know they're probably reminiscing with Canghai, but I still need to urge for updates a little."

"@Wenhuo, I want the next chapter of Primordial Myth! The more I read, the more suspicious those saints seem."

"Even though Seed Odyssey is complete, I still want more sweet stories… Or one of the Blue Planet authors should write something new!"

"I really want to visit the real Blue Planet someday, but there's no route there. Visiting the Blue Planet filming base in the starship belt sounds good too. Maybe I could create new stories there."

"Goddess, I'm starving, feed us updates…"

The flood of messages stabbed painfully into Xi Yujin's chest.

The Planetary Art Exhibition.

The Blue Planet Fisherman Cup.

The Intelligent Machines Q&A.

Black market trades.

The Three Courts Writing Competition.

The radio station at the edge of the universe…

All the stories he had left behind suddenly surfaced before him, while Gano drifted farther and farther away.

He had so little time left.

There were still so many traces of Earth that needed to be preserved.

If he left now and never returned, then the universe would lose its only library of Earth forever.

The illusion of Blue Planet that he had painstakingly woven would eventually collapse with time.

Overwhelming confusion and self-doubt crashed through his mind.

There was no perfect choice in this world.

When Xi Yujin had once wished for an ordinary, beautiful life, he never realized that he was already standing within the turning gears of fate.

Several minutes later, Xi Yujin took a deep breath and resolutely closed the Blue Planet homepage.

He already made his choice.

Only the universe knew the turbulent undercurrents hidden inside his heart.

Some small part of him still held hope for the future. He gave no explanation for the long disappearance and halted updates that were about to come. Perhaps one day, in the future, he could stage another performance through his alternate identities…

"I'm going to find Gano."

That was the only announcement Xi Yujin made before calmly arranging everything that he would leave behind.

The scripts he had already completed were entrusted to alien artists so they could continue filming them.

He left the Black Box with the Rust Clan, repeatedly reminding them not to damage it.

All the alien merchandise and cultural artifacts he had collected throughout his journey were placed on Planet Five. Once the Blue Planet Library was completed, those items would become part of its decoration, a memorial to his travels.

"You've gone insane! Forget finding him, you can't even cross the wormhole itself," Soma desperately tried to bring Xi Yujin back to reason.

But Xi Yujin had already thought everything through.

"I have a planet," he replied.

He pointed toward Planet Six of the SYE-1832 system.

He had never decided what kind of artistic project to place there.

Now, the cooled planet would become the sacrificial layer for his voyage.

"I also have enough mental strength."

The spiritual feedback he had accumulated during his journey would preserve his consciousness within the vortex of spacetime.

"But what about propulsion? A planetary engine can't be built overnight," Soma continued arguing. "And even if you finish building one, the wormhole might already drift off course by then… Don't tell me you're planning to use a light sail? There aren't even stars inside a wormhole to power it!"

"Yes," Xi Yujin answered calmly.

"I'm going to travel by light sail."

Because his true form just happened to be a star.

The aliens didn't know the details of Xi Yujin's plan, but they could clearly see his determination.

In the end, all they could do was sigh.

"Even if you're not around to supervise, I'll still finish the buildings properly," the capsule-shaped alien declared while crossing its arms. "And there won't be any hidden fees either. I'm practically doing charity work."

"I know a thing or two about constructing giant ships," the mineral giant said. "We'll probably only need to hollow out about half the planet."

The little Rust Clan members anxiously insisted they had truly been studying hard.

They didn't want Blue Planet's Yujin to disappear, so why was there no way to stop this?

More than sixty thousand starship citizens gathered in near-planet orbit aboard their flyers, silently watching the massive vessel under construction.

Little by little, the starship belt's former pride was erased.

After the Blue Planet incident, the mysterious image that the Starship Belt once held completely collapsed. In the eyes of outsiders, they were merely another race with advanced signal transmission technology.

"So we were just another insignificant species in the universe all along. Our homeland abandoned us long ago, and our technology isn't truly the greatest. We can't even cross the wormholes…" Tula said dejectedly.

Then it asked quietly, "Why is that Blue Planet artist so determined to search for his partner?"

"Wenhuo…" Aila looked worriedly toward the Blue Planet human. "All of us voted to cancel the return-home project. So why are you still doing this?"

The starship people had no concept of romantic love, and Xi Yujin had no intention of explaining it to them.

Then several ships landed on Planet Six of SYE-1832, using unique starship-belt technology to accelerate the vessel's construction.

Some beings looked apologetic.

Some sympathetic.

While others simply wished to honor their friendship with Wenhuo.

One by one, all sixty thousand flyers descended.

Glow particles floated upward from storage compartments, illuminating the entire night sky.

"These glow particles are the ashes of the very first generation of La," Wengla murmured tiredly aboard the starship belt.

It was aging rapidly as the Zerg genes were killing it.

From this point onward, starship-belt technology would likely shift toward medicine until every trace of defective Zerg genetics was removed from their species.

The old being no longer had enough time to properly express its apology.

All it could do was open the museum's reserves.

"Please… use them."

At extraordinary speed, the construction was completed.

A ring of planetary debris orbited around the Tidal Peace like a miniature asteroid belt.

Ancient glow particles served as gravitational links, weaving through the debris like needles and thread.

The heavily armored Tidal Peace finally rose into the sky.

Behind it, Planet Six of SYE-1832 had become shriveled and hollowed out like a dried kiwi fruit, rotating weakly through space.

Xi Yujin unfurled the light sail and finally set sail.

Faintly, he thought he heard the voices of unfamiliar alien lifeforms shouting behind him:

"Farewell, Blue Planet's Yujin!"

In ocean voyages on Earth, humans coat the bottoms of ships with zinc.

The seawater corrodes the zinc first, leaving the iron beneath unharmed.

This method is called sacrificial anode protection.

But inside wormholes, violent fluctuations created unstable magnetic fields through high-energy particles. Those magnetic forces could tear apart spacecraft during transit.

The planetary debris surrounding Tidal Peace existed precisely to serve as the sacrificial layer for this journey.

Xi Yujin transformed into his stellar form and rapidly entered the wormhole.

Inside the wormhole, propulsion engines were unnecessary.

Returning to Tidal Peace, he watched as the planetary debris shattered piece by piece while the glow particles vanished into the strange rippling distortions of space.

Within the violently shaking cabin, Xi Yujin focused entirely on using his mental power.

Imitating the astronauts he had once seen, he compressed his mental force into the shape of a drill and dragged the Tidal Peace toward the calmer center of the wormhole.

Words stretched into endless lines as time spread open before him like pages of a book.

Xi Yujin remembered the final moments of his life on Earth.

The spacecraft heading toward the Moon suddenly began disintegrating, and its silver-white walls peeled away piece by piece. The alarms screamed sharply, then vanished as the atmosphere rapidly escaped.

Blood-red warning lights flashed endlessly.

The pressure inside the cabin changed violently as purple and green halos swam across his vision. It felt as though a massive boulder were crushing his temples, threatening to grind his brain apart.

The cold pierced into his bones.

Every beat of his heart felt ready to explode.

He felt that he was unimaginably close to death.

After surviving and waking up, he had sworn never to place himself in danger again.

Because how would he know if fate would favor him a second time?

So why? Why was he once again throwing himself into the abyss of death?

At this moment, the Black Box containing Blue Planet's archive was no longer beside him.

His accounts had nearly run out of stardust.

The spiritual strength accumulated during his journey was being rapidly consumed.

He arrived alone...

And now he departed alone.

Time flowed through Xi Yujin's body as though it had left no trace behind at all.

In the span of an instant, Tidal Peace crossed oceans of stars.

And within the ship, Xi Yujin fell into a deep sleep.

As though the river plunges downward three thousand feet, yet the lone boat has already passed ten thousand mountains.

No one knew how much time had passed.

Eventually, Tidal Peace surfaced successfully into another region of space and was captured by a barnacle-shaped starship.

Several humanoid beings attempted to break through the windows, but the glass was unexpectedly sturdy.

After some effort, they finally entered Tidal Peace.

Using a glowing soft stone for illumination, they examined Xi Yujin's sleeping face.

Encrypted information was continuously transmitted back to their homeworld.

"A Brood Host has been discovered."

"We will bring him back to camp."