Nearly five months passed during their journey through the intergalactic void.
Throughout that time, they encountered no real danger. There were no mysterious phenomena, no hostile encounters, not even strange spatial disturbances. At most, they occasionally passed drifting asteroid clusters, silent and lifeless. Other than that, the intergalactic void they traveled through was vast, silent, and almost completely empty.
There was little to observe, and nothing to distract them. As a result, most aboard the ship turned their attention inward. After fifteen years of peace and leisure, many realized they had grown complacent. Training resumed in earnest. They sparred, refined their techniques, and reconditioned their bodies and minds, determined to return to peak combat readiness before reaching Andromeda.
The ship's training section became crowded, Domains flared regularly, contained within reinforced chambers.
Adrian, meanwhile, found himself with an unusual abundance of free time. He devoted much of it to researching and analyzing the UNI-OS.
He sequestered himself in a private workspace, projecting the device's interface. The violet token hovered before him, pulsing faintly as streams of his mana threaded through its structure.
The system itself was written entirely in the Language of Mana. Simply reading it allowed Adrian to understand its structure and logic, but the complexity was staggering. The internal code was so dense that even he needed time to carefully dissect it, occasionally relying on the Source to unravel particularly convoluted segments.
Lines upon lines of symbols layered over one another, nested within recursive loops and conditional branches that shifted based on external inputs. Some sections referenced variables Adrian couldn't trace back to their origin. Others contained entire subroutines compressed into single glyphs, their meanings only becoming clear after hours of study.
He spent hours on a single function, tracing its execution path through dozens of interconnected modules.
Through his research, Adrian discovered that the UNI-OS was merely a client-side device. Its true functionality relied on a deeply hidden backbone known as the UNI-Server Network. This network handled nearly everything: device binding, UNI-Bank transactions, network discovery, and even the Auxiliary Systems. The UNI-OS simply acted as an interface, relaying information back and forth.
This did not surprise Adrian. The Nodes used within the Milky Way functioned the same way. They were client devices, while the server of the Origin Net resided within the massive star-system formation in the Origin Capital. The universe, it seemed, followed similar principles, just on a scale far beyond comprehension.
What frustrated Adrian was that even systems he had hoped to study directly were locked behind the server.
The Void Navigation System, for example, did not calculate routes locally. Instead, it transmitted the ship's position to the UNI-Server, which then returned an optimized path. Whatever vast spatial models or datasets the system relied on were entirely inaccessible from the device itself.
Adrian pulled up the navigation module again, isolating the transmission protocol. The data packet sent to the server was encrypted with a compression algorithm, which would take him some time to reverse-engineer the encoding scheme.
And even if he succeeded, all he would learn was how the ship sent its coordinates. Not how the server calculated the route.
The Stage Detection System functioned the same way. When activated, it captured the ambient energy emitted by a being and forwarded that data to the UNI-Server for analysis. Then the server returned an analysis. But due to his research, he also learned the limitations of this stage detection system. To obtain detailed information, he needs to scan when the target uses their domain. Only then could the system record authority fluctuations accurately enough to produce reliable estimates.
From all this, Adrian came to a single conclusion. In his galaxy, Lexaria hoarded knowledge. In the universe, knowledge was hoarded on a scale so vast it defied comprehension.
He dismissed the projection and stood, stretching stiff shoulders.
Since the research yielded no immediate benefit, Adrian gradually set the UNI-OS aside and spent more time simply living among the others aboard the ship.
Time continued to pass.
Before they realized it, only a single month remained before their arrival at the Andromeda Galaxy.
...
Some distance away from Adrian's starship, a mid-sized interstellar vessel drifted silently in the void.
Its hull was scarred and patched together with mismatched alloy plates, evidence of countless skirmishes and hasty repairs. Inside its command deck, a dimly lit chamber reinforced with crude structural supports, a voice broke the monotony.
"Boss, the sensors detected a lone ship traveling through the void."
The speaker was a wiry humanoid with pale grey skin and four arms, each manipulating a different control panel.
Hearing that, the being seated at the central command chair turned.
He was also humanoid in shape, but only vaguely so. His limbs were elongated, with joints bending at slightly unnatural angles. His skin was a dull, mottled blue. Three eyes dominated his face: two positioned where a human's would be, and a third embedded vertically in his forehead, its pupil rotating as it focused.
This was Kraeth, a space pirate.
Such pirates were common throughout the universe. They roamed intergalactic voids, preying on weaker cultivators and isolated travelers. Most operated in small crews, avoiding the attention of the sects whilst extracting what profit they could from the vulnerable. Kraeth had been operating near the Andromeda Galaxy's vicinity for years. Cultivators frequently traveled toward that region, ensuring that suitable targets inevitably appeared.
"A lone ship?" Kraeth repeated, his voice low and gravelled. "Show me the scan reports."
He stepped forward as a projection expanded before him.
The four-armed navigator flicked his wrist, and the holographic display shifted. Columns of data scrolled past, interspersed with spectral analysis and energy readings.
The image resolved into the silhouette of a massive starship, its surface traced with glowing formations unlike anything his crew immediately recognized.
Kraeth's third eye rotated slowly as he analyzed the data. The scan report identified the vessel as a mortal ship. That single detail ignited his interest.
"Mortals?" one of the crew members muttered from a nearby console. "What kind of idiots send mortals through intergalactic void without escorts?"
"Rich idiots," another replied with a harsh laugh, "The kind that pay ransoms."
Kraeth ignored their chatter, his three eyes fixed on the projection. Mortal cultivators traveling through the intergalactic void were not unusual, but they typically traveled with at least a Mid Rule Stage escort. Many civilizations sent their younger generations to minor sects in other galaxies, always protected by veterans capable of deterring opportunists like himself.
In such cases, Kraeth would have ignored them. His crew consisted mostly of Early Rule Stage cultivators, and even their Divine Concepts were only Mid-tier. Kraeth himself was the strongest among them, wielding approximately eighteen percent authority through his fusion of Shadow, Metal, and Corrosion.
If he encountered a Mid Rule Stage cultivator, even one with a Low-tier Divine Concept, that opponent would still wield around thirty percent authority, far exceeding his own. Even if Kraeth's Mid-tier divine concept suppressed theirs slightly, the authority gap would still make the fight dangerous. One wrong move, and his entire crew could be annihilated.
Kraeth avoided such risk at all costs. He survived by bullying the weak, by identifying prey that couldn't fight back. That was how he had lived this long.
And this ship, according to the report, carried nothing but mortals with no escorts.
His third eye focused on a specific section of the data. Energy signatures clustered within the vessel, each one clearly mortal in strength.
More importantly, the sensors detected a juvenile life signature among them. Kraeth's third eye dilated, pupils contracting as excitement flooded through him.
Children's were High-quality slaves. The kind that fetched obscene prices in black markets, especially if they came from wealthy civilizations. They paid fortunes to recover their heirs, and if ransom failed, certain sects purchased talented youth regardless of origin.
"Magnify the energy readings," Kraeth ordered.
The navigator complied. The projection shifted, displaying individual signatures. Some hovered around SSS-rank, and most presences were Stellar among them. Powerful for mortals, certainly, but meaningless against Rule Stage cultivators.
Kraeth's lips curled into a predatory grin.
"Adjust course," he commanded. "Intercept that ship. We can't miss such easy money."
The navigator complied instantly, hands moving across controls, "Estimated intercept in two hours, Boss."
"Good." Kraeth settled back into his chair, "Prepare the boarding crew. I want this clean, with no unnecessary damage to the ship. If they're wealthy enough to afford a vessel like that, we might be able to sell it intact."
"What about resistance?" the four-armed navigator asked.
Kraeth's third eye rotated toward him, "From mortals? Deploy suppression fields the moment we're in range. Their domains won't even manifest."
Laughter rippled through the command deck. Several crew members exchanged knowing glances, already imagining their share of the profits.
The pirate vessel adjusted its trajectory, slipping through the silent void, closing the distance toward Adrian's starship. Its engines hummed quietly, emissions dampened to avoid detection. Kraeth had performed this maneuver countless times. Approach undetected, deploy suppression, board swiftly, and claim the prize before the victims even understood what was happening.