After this, Aurelia proceeded to teach them about the concept of time across the galaxy.
The galaxy had its own rhythm.
"The galaxy runs on Standard," she explained, "Galactic Standard Time. Twenty-five hours to a cycle. Every world connected to the Net follows it. Forget Earth's sun. From now on, this is the rhythm you live by."
Adrian felt the extra hour stretch oddly in his mind.
Everyone felt weird about the extra hour, but they could accept it. Thomas rubbed his temple, already calculating how their sleep cycles would shift.
Time blurred in warp travel. Days into weeks. The stars outside became endless streaks of light, reality itself bending around their passage.
Inside Aurelia's ship, Adrian spent hours buried in rune forums, diving into debates, pulling apart fragments of knowledge.
His fingers moved across the Node's interface, absorbing discussions that had raged for decades. Sometimes, he pushed too far, experimenting with galactic concepts he barely understood until his mana burned dry, leaving him drained and hollow.
Each time Aurelia tossed him a mana crystal. The crystalline shard pulsed with condensed energy.
The moment he held it, mana surged through his body, restoring what he'd lost.
The others had no idea about mana crystals, so she explained to them. Kael picked up one of the crystals, turning it over in his palm with fascination.
"In the void," Aurelia told them, "mana doesn't exist. Without crystals, even the strongest being is just a corpse waiting to happen." Her eyes swept across their faces. "These keep you alive when reality itself offers nothing."
Selena, meanwhile, carved her own path into the galaxy. She haunted rune debates like a predator stalking prey.
Threads where scholars from empires argued endlessly, their words piling for months, sometimes years. Thousands of replies over whether a single stroke curved left or right.
And then she would drop one sentence. A correction sharp as a blade. She had already inherited the entire knowledge Adrian had gifted her in the past years.
Now she was better than most other scholars as she not only understood the language better than them, she even had understood the concepts because of Adrian.
The threads erupted in outrage, demands for proof, accusations of fraud. Selena's lips curved into a predatory smile as notifications flooded her Node. She never answered, only smirked to herself as chaos bloomed in her wake.
Already, her name was beginning to ripple across the Net. A ghost, a voice no one could pin down, Earth's first shadow among the scholars of the stars.
Kael, Thomas, and Elara spent their hours in the ship's training hall, sparring until their bodies ached. The chamber echoed with the clash of manifested weapons, their powers constrained by the ship's dampening fields.
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When not fighting, they watched recordings of SSS-rank duels, silent as moons shattered and planets buckled under blows.
Sometimes Aurelia joined them, as she instructed. "Your techniques are solid for planetary combat," she said, deflecting Thomas's strike with casual ease. "But in the void, everything changes."
Step by step, everyone also adapted to the galactic standard timings. Their internal clocks slowly shifted, Earth's twenty-four-hour rhythm fading like a half-remembered dream.
And through it all, the ship drifted faster than light, its warp runes burning rivers of stars into endless streams. The galaxy waited ahead, vast and unforgiving, ready to test everything they thought they knew.
...
Weeks folded into months.
Adrian's fingers had grown callused from gripping the Node, his mind stretched thin from absorbing galactic knowledge. The runes carved into his consciousness felt heavier now, weighted with concepts that Earth had never dreamed of.
And then, after three long months, the warp runes dimmed. The rivers of light bled back into stars.
The ship slowed.
Adrian pressed against the viewport. What he saw made his stomach drop.
Before them stretched ruin.
A star system broken. Planets cracked in half, their cores bleeding molten light into the void like wounded hearts.
Moons scarred with trenches deep as canyons, their surfaces carved by something that moved with terrible purpose.
Stations drifted past the ship's hull, twisted metal carcasses spinning in the eternal silence. No lights. No movement. Just death wearing the mask of civilization.
The sun still burned in the distance, but its light fell only on graveyards that once held worlds.
"What happened here?" Thomas's voice cracked slightly.
Kael floated beside Adrian, his face pressed to another viewport. The Space affinity user's hands trembled against the glass.
Kael muttered under his breath, "This doesn't look like war… it's too clean. Like they weren't fighting. Just… consuming."
Elara's eyes blazed with horrified understanding. "Those aren't battle scars. Something ate through the planets."
Aurelia's face was hard as carved stone. Her jaw clenched as she studied the devastation through the ship's sensors.
"This was alive when I passed through, not long ago. Now it's gone. Demons."
Her words cut deeper than any blade.
"This system wasn't fully connected to galactic routes. Reinforcements were slow. Demons exploit such gaps. When they pass through, what's left is always the same silence."
The silence of a graveyard that once held billions.
Selena's fingers traced patterns on the viewport, her runic tattoos glowing faintly. "How many lived here?"
"Fourteen billion across seven worlds." Aurelia's voice carried no emotion, but her knuckles whitened. "Three major cities. Countless smaller settlements. All gone in perhaps a few months."
She looked at them, her eyes holding depths of loss they couldn't fathom. "Demons don't conquer, they don't rule, they devour. A star system is only meat to them."
No one spoke. Their chests tightened. Earth had faced monsters, creatures that killed and destroyed.
But this… this was different. Never ruin on the scale of worlds, never silence where billions once laughed and dreamed and lived.
For the first time, each of them saw what would have become of their home if Celestial Eleven and Sentinel hadn't been there.
Adrian's hands pressed flat against the viewport as a chunk of what might have been a city drifted past. The metal was still warm, glowing faintly in the starlight.
"How long ago?" His voice barely carried above a whisper.
"Three months. Maybe four." Aurelia manipulated the ship's controls, steering them through the debris field. "The heat signatures are still fading."
Kael swallowed hard. "We could have been here. Could have helped."
"No." Aurelia's response was immediate and brutal. "You would have died. All of you. The demons that did this are beyond SSS-rank. Even I would have run."
Thomas clenched his fists, "Then who stops them?"
"Stellar Stage warriors. Clans with domain power. Sometimes." Aurelia's smile held no warmth. "Sometimes no one does."
"This isn't rare. You'll see worse. And not all of it will be demons. The galaxy is not only demons. Sometimes, Clans can be worse. You'll learn that soon enough."
None of them understood yet. They thought they did, looking at the broken worlds and imagining the horror.
But soon… they would.