Ubit didn't want to talk to Xi Yujin, and Xi Yujin naturally spared her pride by not mentioning the Intelligent Machines again.

A few seconds later, Ubit's mood improved, and she began drifting through the wormhole as if racing down a mountain road. Inside the Tidal Peace, the passengers were tossed up and down like they were riding an upgraded giant pendulum.

The furniture all slid toward one side of the ship. Xi Yujin, heart aching for his wallet, hurriedly floated over and fastened his seatbelt. Wearing only half his armor, Gano quickly secured everything around him.

Only then did Xi Yujin have time to examine Gano's new armor.

Its main body was silver-white, with a pair of golden balancing floats mounted on the back. Each one curved like a bow, and from a distance they looked like a radiant golden sun.

Compared to the ancient Ers Royal Armor, Ubit's King-class armor shared a much stronger bloodline resonance with Gano, allowing him to wield it effortlessly. It carried no genetic restrictions, and its entire database was unlocked. It even included a high-speed movement function.

Gano silently thought that running away together with Yujinno from now on would be much more convenient.

"Wow!" Xi Yujin hurried over to inspect it closely, tapping here and there in fascination.

Gano had already broken off a fragment of the King-class armor's core, intending to give it to Yujinno as his new planet. But now that the moment had arrived, he hesitated.

Giving it away so directly seemed lacking in ceremony... What should be the right occasion?

While he was thinking about that, Xi Yujin activated another function of the armor to search for biological signals. Gano fell silent, listening to the feedback from the armor.

After a while, he said, "There's a spacecraft nearby. Comparing its language and analyzing the reflected wave patterns, it's identified as the Flute Race..."

Any kind of lifeform could suddenly appear inside a wormhole, so Xi Yujin wasn't surprised by that. Instead, what caught his attention was the alien race itself. "The Flute Race?"

He remembered that the pen name Yujin had first become famous through a Flute race radio station.

He also remembered that, back when the network coverage at the edge of the universe was poor, the Flute people had only managed to send him a single photograph, saying they were separated by four hundred light-years.

After that, Xi Yujin never encountered another member of the Flute Race again. As he traveled farther and farther from the edge of the universe, news from that region arrived more and more slowly until it was drowned out by countless newer events.

Could he really be so lucky that miracles would happen one after another?

"How far away are they?" Xi Yujin asked.

"One hundred and one meters," Gano replied.

At such a close distance, they should have been visible with the naked eye. But when Xi Yujin looked out the window, all he could see were the ever-changing, dazzling sights of the wormhole. There was no other spacecraft in sight.

Gano reported again, "Ten thousand meters now. Should we contact them?"

Xi Yujin hesitated for a moment. By then, the other ship had already passed beyond communication range.

Perhaps the Flute people aboard weren't the ones he had known. Even so, Xi Yujin still felt a sense of melancholy.

He tried to imitate the native inhabitants of this universe, treating even a fleeting brush past each other as a kind of meeting, yet he also realized that he might never truly learn to let go.

"After all... I'm not a creature of this universe." The words slipped out unexpectedly.

Gano stared blankly at him.

"My soul comes from somewhere else. It's called Earth..." Xi Yujin confessed. "The reason I use so many alternate identities is that I'm worried that the beings of this universe might covet a star that possesses a soul."

It was a little embarrassing to admit. He didn't have dissociative identity disorder at all. He just simply enjoyed role-playing multiple personas.

Gano immediately searched the Zerg database and found several relevant entries:

"The Frame Race enjoys consuming the remains of stars as a universal medicine..."

"The Mouth Race believes that once stellar-drive technology is mastered, artificial white holes can be created..."

"The Black Race believes that if a star possesses a soul, performing a living sacrifice to that star will guarantee a hundred years free from mental disorder..."

Xi Yujin frowned. "Please don't mention effects that even I didn't know about."

Sure enough, a sentient star lived a dangerously precarious existence in this universe. He needed to protect himself well.

Gano spent one second thinking rationally about what creature in the universe could possibly defeat both a star and the Zerg together. Then he considered what being could possibly possess stronger mental power than Xi Yujin. His thoughts became unusually agile, and suddenly he realized the perfect answer.

"I'll help maintain Yujinno's secret identities."

Xi Yujin nodded enthusiastically. "Exactly! Exactly!"

Rather than worrying about his safety, Yujinno clearly just wanted an excuse to keep creating more personas. Gano's answer had perfectly hit the point.

One hundred extra points!

The two of them fooled around affectionately for a while before Xi Yujin leaned against the window again, marveling at the miraculous journey home.

At that very moment, aboard a massive passing Navigator Colossus...

"Everyone stay seated! Our course deviation has reached 1.2%! In the best-case scenario, we'll end up only one galaxy away from our destination. In the worst case, we'll miss it entirely! Our astronauts are doing everything they can to stabilize the ship! Please trust us!"

"Waaah... I've never experienced a navigation accident before! This is terrifying... Those ships that go off course always disappear without a trace. Mom, I don't want to die!"

"I heard that all those dreamlike scenes inside wormholes are caused by living souls collapsing into lower dimensions..."

One trembling passenger lay flat inside the cabin. Eight separate seatbelts were strapped around its body, yet it still felt utterly insecure. It desperately prayed for some god to answer its plea and was even willing to change religions from now on. But apparently, its faith wasn't worth very much because no deity had responded.

"Mom..."

The passenger endured a sudden crushing force of gravity, and was so terrified that it had already been flattened into a pancake. Then, all at once, it felt like an enormous hand had lifted the entire ship. The vessel effortlessly broke through the high-pressure layer and continued flying freely through the wormhole like a bird.

The passenger gasped for breath. Its whole body was soaked in cold sweat. It glanced out the window, and what it saw shook its very soul.

A thin veil enveloped hundreds of millions of dancing golden sprites, pouring through the wormhole like flowing sand, while also swirling like an aurora across perilous heights.

Their movements were so graceful. So alive. As though every fragment of beauty and poetry in the universe had gathered into a single form.

The passenger pressed its face against the glass. Even with eight seatbelts holding it back, it refused to miss even the slightest glimpse. After staring for two seconds, blood rushed to its head, and tears streamed uncontrollably down its face.

"So beautiful..."

It seemed as if countless voices echoed the same sentiment.

"So incredibly beautiful!!"

The golden veil vanished in an instant, carrying away a breathtaking dream that would linger in every witness's memory for the rest of their lives.

...

The moment Ubit emerged from the wormhole, she hurried to hide behind a nearby planet. Their landing point was one of the six million stellar regions that made up the Starship Belt.

Ubit's passage could only be used one more time. Once it returned to Zerg territory, the wormhole would collapse completely.

"It should have collapsed a long time ago," Ubit explained, launching into a lengthy discussion of physics that Xi Yujin couldn't understand. "My watchtower simply never shut down, so it kept pulling the passage open. Once the nuclear energy maintaining the Zerg's stability is exhausted, all these passages will collapse into a single point."

"We're back in the Starship Belt!"

Xi Yujin gazed into the distance in disbelief. He couldn't actually see anything, yet the place somehow felt strangely familiar.

Thinking of the Starship Belt's inhabitants, he said to Ubit, "There's a race here called the La."

Ubit responded in astonishment, "Of all possible names, they had to choose that one?"

Xi Yujin laughed awkwardly before continuing, "They're suspected to be descendants of the Zerg's La. According to the Starship Belt's records, a queen once abandoned a clutch of La."

"Something like that happened?" Ubit once again displayed the Zerg's characteristic indifference. "I've already forgotten. So what?"

"They combined the biotechnology left behind by the watchtower with certain mechanical technologies... and developed an entirely new branch of science."

Xi Yujin stopped dwelling on the relationship between the La and the Zerg and briefly explained the Starship Belt's technology, but before he could finish, Ubit interrupted him.

"Ugh. Just hearing that makes me want to throw up."

Ubit looked utterly disgusted.

The Starship Belt was built from the remains of Behemoth Bugs, and those creatures were a subspecies of the Zerg, hatched from the Queen's eggs.

To Ubit, what the La had done was no different from dancing on someone's grave. Especially considering that she wasn't even dead yet.

Ubit spat out a large amount of mucus before rapidly beating her wings, apparently performing some kind of ritual.

After finishing, she addressed Xi Yujin and Gano with the solemn air of a company president giving heartfelt encouragement to new employees. "I'm going back now. The two of you work hard."

For the first time, Gano bowed to a Zerg Queen. Xi Yujin likewise offered a gentleman's salute.

Then he asked one more question. "Do you have any wish?"

"My wish? I don't have one..."

Ubit remembered the exhilarating feeling of soaring freely through the wormhole moments before. She couldn't quite explain why she had carried Xi Yujin all this way, but thinking too deeply had never been her strength.

After a long silence, the youngest queen changed her answer. "Maybe... it was already fulfilled."

...

Starship Belt.

On the third planet of SYE-1832.

A little Rustling wandered gloomily across the surface, leaving behind a trail of rusty footprints.

It knew that Yujin had entered the wormhole alone, and his fate was unknown. It had tried contacting the other Blue Planet novelists as well, but it received no response.

The only thing it could do was post an announcement on Blue Planet's official website:

All Blue Planet novelists are currently traversing a wormhole and have no signal. Updates are temporarily suspended.

Every day afterward was filled with quiet sadness. Its little bristles drooped all day long.

Readers from distant worlds left comments saying they had grown accustomed to waiting for updates. Meanwhile, readers with faster internet connections had stumbled upon an earth-shattering piece of gossip.

"Even though all the Blue Planet authors entered the wormhole, Blue Planet Yujin is even more special... He went straight into Zerg territory!"

"Huh? Why?"

"It seems to have something to do with the Starship Belt. I don't know the details, but apparently, the Blue Planet translator Gano got swept into the wormhole, so Blue Planet Yujin went to rescue him."

"Anyone dragged into a wormhole is basically doomed!"

"Blue Planet authors are so rich, they can even afford a Navigator Colossus."

"That's the terrifying part. They said that the Starship Belt didn't even have a Navigator Colossus... which means Blue Planet Yujin charged into the wormhole completely on his own..."

"Waaah! How am I only hearing about this now? Does that mean my favorite author will never come back?"

"We're all praying."

"Some readers have even started praying to the Intelligent Machines, hoping it can somehow counteract the wormhole disaster."

The little Rustling used a spherical-screen computer. It swiped its tiny bristles across the readers' comment pages, diligently deleting arguments and flame wars as part of its duties.

Then it opened another page labeled Planetary Art Exhibition. Because Blue Planet Wenhuo hadn't updated anything for such a long time, Blue Planet's ranking had dropped again and again. Now it had fallen outside the top one hundred.

"Waaah..."

The little Rustling felt so miserable that it wanted to cry.

Just then, a hand gently picked it up. A familiar voice sounded from above.

"Are you skipping class again?"

The little Rustling: !