A fifty-mile warship did not simply enter a planetary system. It disturbed the gravity of everything around it.
Sovereign Chen Tian stood on the Grand Celestial Bridge of The Void Devourer. His open-air sanctum had been carved into the dead supergiant star at the fortress’s heart. Nine nested rings of condensed stellar fire circled him. Each of the Nine Suns of the Sovereign Dao held the stolen life of a world his ancestors had destroyed during four hundred thousand years of rule.
Beneath his dragon-scale boots, the black-glass deck hummed with the power of sixteen dark-matter thrusters. Each exhaust nozzle was five miles wide.
Through the armored viewport, the Azure Cloud Sphere filled half the forward view. The blue-green planet wore a polished steel ring around its equator. Twelve thousand solar mirrors sparkled around it like diamond dust.
“See the boldness of dust,” Chen Tian murmured. His voice rumbled like an earthquake. “For four hundred thousand years, since the Ancient War of the Nine Empyreans, the Star-Devouring Citadel has ruled the void. We drained three thousand stars. We turned thriving empires into frozen graveyards where not even bacteria survived. Now a tribe of mud-dwelling mortals builds an iron fence around the sky and claims the fire of the stars.”
