The ten-thousand-mile space-folding sky rift didn’t simply remain a jagged wound across the heavens. It began to wildly dilate.
High above the stratosphere, at the very boundary where the world-size high sky touched the cold empty pocket of the sky gulf, the fabric of space groaned under an unbearable, unnatural strain. Visible cracks resembling shattered black glass radiated outward from the main tear, slicing through surrounding starlight and unweaving the ancient world-size barrier runes into flickering embers.
The forty-eight million void locusts that had dropped in the vanguard were merely the advance scouts. The buzzing swarm sent ahead to strip away the sky moisture and test the realm’s life-force. Now, the main body of the Extradimensional Void Armada was forcing its huge bulk through the breach.
Out of the weeping deep pit emerged the true sea monsters of the deep void.
First came the Void Dreadnoughts. These were not ships crafted from wood, iron, or refined spirit jade. But massive stone, three-mile-long crystal-clear fortresses forged from the stone-hard leftovers of dead dwarf stars. Their jagged black glass hulls were fully empty of windows, decks, or sails, covered instead in millions of twitching, light-deleting sharp-angled spines that hummed with a bone-chilling, reality-eroding deep ring. Ten thousand four hundred of these monstrous vessels glided through the tear in silent, terrifying formation, their collective presence creating an unnatural gravity depression that made the world-size mantle shudder beneath the oceans.
