NOVEL NEXT B1 - Lesson 8: "No, Seriously... Run."
Lian Peng stopped a few hundred kilometers from his strange "guest." In the emptiness of the void, such a gap counted for little, but it gave him room to react should the thing stir in an unexpected way. From this range, the scale of the strange fragment loomed clearer — and yet clarity brought no understand. He still could not say what it was. Or rather, what it had once been.
The wreck sprawled across the void like the carcass of a behemoth, twisted and warped by forces he could not name. Even so, the outlines of its original frame clung stubbornly to the ruin, enough to tell him this was no complete vessel but only a fragment torn from some far greater whole.
He sent a sharp pulse of intent through his comm talisman to the lunar base, ordering an expanded sweep of the region where the object first appeared. Scouts had combed that area when the anomaly was first reported, but now they knew what to search for. If this was only a fragment, then where had the rest gone? The one in front of him could be nothing more than the wreckage it appeared, its kin scattered across the dark — or it could be a feint, bait meant to fix their gaze here while survivors or enemies slipped away elsewhere.
Or worse.
The unease sharpened as his Divine Sense poured over the ruin. No answering threads of Path energy brushed his awareness. Stranger still, there was no resistance at all; his perception skimmed across most of the surface and hollowed interior without obstruction. That should have been impossible. It was not simply that he could not detect power — there was no power to detect. No celestial energy. No essence. Not even the faint ripple of psionic force.
The entire colossus felt… mundane.
How could that be? Nothing in the Sisters, the three great Celestial Worlds of the Great Firmament, was untouched by the Divinity Heart at the core of the local star. Its radiance infused every mote of matter that it touched. Only the Mortal Worlds, the six Children, lay veiled within their lesser firmaments, shielded from the flow. The void itself contained no 'mundane' material, either. A few materials might be comparable, true, but those had their own signature and nothing that could be made into something like… this.
A new cloaking art? Some refinement that slipped between known senses?
No. His perception was not clouded or veiled. It returned nothing but the surface truth. The only anomaly was the warped cube at the heart of the wreckage — a presence his sight could not penetrate. It wasn't shielded, per se, either. Rather, whatever the cube was made of was… dense.
Unimaginably dense.
Lian Peng had never encountered anything like it. The rest of the wreck yielded beneath his senses as though he were peering through glass, but the cube resisted him utterly — like trying to press sight through a wall of lead.
Did they truly believe that wouldn't draw suspicion? Or had they left it as bait, a trap to lure him in?
The thought gnawed at him. No matter how he circled it, the wreck refused to make sense. His instincts whispered warnings, alarm bells ringing faintly in the back of his mind. He had learned long ago to trust those instincts. His peers mocked him often enough for being too cautious, yet most of them had ended their paths in unmarked graves. Caution, he reminded himself, was why he still breathed.
He drifted in silence, gaze fixed on the ruin, weighing possibilities. What was its purpose? What did those within intend — if there were even any occupants at all?
The arrays had reported movement earlier, but now that he saw the colossus with his own eyes, nothing stirred.
Nonsense. Someone was there. He could not pierce their veil or sense their energy, but he refused to believe his staff had blundered so badly. Whoever hid within was skilled, but not invisible.
Enough waiting.
Lian Peng drew a slow breath, then let his voice roll out into the void, woven through with the [Truth of Space].
"Attention, occupants of the unknown wreckage! Your presence has been noted. By order of Lunar King Lian Peng, Scion of Midnight, Hand of the Warden — you are commanded to reveal yourselves and submit to questioning! Cooperation will earn leniency and fair judgment under the United Pact of the Celestial Worlds. Resist, and you will be subdued by force. Survivors will answer by whatever means are required!"
The words thundered in Celeti, the shared tongue of the Greater Firmament, carried outward on the fabric of space itself until they shivered across the void.
Silence answered. The stars blinked coldly in their endless watch.
Lian Peng exhaled, his shoulders easing with resignation. So be it. If they would not answer, he would drag them into the light himself. A full scan to strip the ruin of its secrets, then force if necessary. Out here, there was nowhere to run.
He angled forward, but then his Divine Sense stirred. Something moved.
A dozen shapes detached from the far side of the wreck, rising in a silent flock. They swept around the hull in seamless unison, breaking into view like hunters circling prey. With eerie precision, they spread into formation and hovered before the ruin's front, waiting.
No way it would be this easy. What were they playing at?
Lian Peng swept the objects with his Divine Sense, only to find them as lifeless as the rest of the drifting wreck. Yet unlike the broken husk behind them, these… things moved. They glided with eerie precision, pitch-black ovaloids floating in formation like giant eggs left adrift in the void. Their surfaces looked smooth and featureless, broken only by faint protrusions along their backs and flanks that pulsed with a dim blue light whenever one drifted too far from the others.
But when his scan pushed deeper, their simplicity unraveled.
The black "shells" were not shells at all, but countless infinitesimal organisms swarming in unison, too small for mortal eyes to perceive. They writhed together like a living fluid, encasing something far stranger. Where an Essence Slime would have circled around a crystalline core, these beings swirled about nuclei of staggering intricacy.
Within each, Lian Peng glimpsed tens of thousands of components, layered and meshed together — tiny parts built from hundreds of materials, most of which he could not even name. Stranger still, they interlocked in patterns that defied his understanding.
Confusion prickled through him. He stared harder, trying to map the design, and the impression struck him like lightning: it resembled the logic of arrays, yet entirely unlike any array he had studied. Complex beyond imagining. It was as though a grand mage's spell circle had been folded down and compacted to the size of a melon. Even his Divine Sense faltered before the smallest details, unable to resolve some portions at all. Impossible. How could that even be?
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
His eyes widened. Were these creatures alive? Or constructs? Some new breed of esper puppet? A golem refined past reason?
No. That didn't add up either. He found no trace of sigils or rune-script etched anywhere across their forms. Some lines hinted at meaning, true, but they resembled the crude letters of mortal tongues rather than the living geometry of runic language. The only clear mark he could make out sat carved into the metallic framing of each construct, so minuscule it was nearly invisible. An irrationally detailed carving of a flying… duck?
Lian Peng froze. Yes, a duck, wings spread as if mocking him.
WHY?!
Had he lost his mind? Was this some elaborate prank, a petty test dreamed up to humiliate him? Was Fairy Xiàshuō still holding that grudge from the Thousand Fragrance Tea incident? In his defense, how was he supposed to know that blend lured Ivory Wasps like honey? He had spent nearly three years on his knees before her gate before she would even look at him again.
He shook himself. Focus, Lian Peng. Pull yourself together.
The Moonlight Phoenix steadied his breath, forcing the distraction aside. Professionalism first. If it proved to be a prank, he would deal with the guilty parties later, in a manner best left unspoken. For now, he had to assume this was real.
His gaze hardened as he studied the floating ovals. The greater puzzle lay not in their complexity, but in their emptiness. Despite all that intricacy, not a single one radiated an energy signal. To his Divine Sense, they were as mundane as driftwood.
No. Not mundane.
The longer he observed, the more he felt it: something faint, subtle, hiding beneath the noise of nothing. Muted, like a whisper buried in silence, yet undeniable. The flavor of it reminded him of Static Mages… but twisted, altered, as if carrying a resonance his senses could not place.
He pressed deeper, turning his attention to the hidden lattice within the living shells.
Now that he knew what to search for, the patterns revealed themselves. Tiny sparks shimmered within each construct, flitting along their intricate webs like starlight dancing across a constellation. A wider scan of the wreck showed more of these clusters — some intact and ordered, others shattered and bleeding threads of dim light into the void. Faint, muted… but present.
One thing was certain: not a single spark belonged to essence, or to any Path energy he knew.
The Path of Divinity: those who drew directly from the Celestial radiance of the Divinity Heart, reforging body and soul in its light. These called themselves 'cultivators.'
The Path of Magic: those who refined that same light into the Essence of Life, forging in their 'furnaces' into powerful spells, and thus were named 'mages.'
The Path of Dreams: those who turned away from celestial energy entirely, instead wielding psionic force — a mystic power rooted in the dreams and desires of all living things, and who were known as 'Espers.
These were the three major 'Paths to Power' within the Grand Firmament. There were a few minor ones, but those were considered nothing more than subsets of the major paths, as they all used celestial energy, essence, or psionic force.
But this…
This was something else.
And the thought hollowed Lian Peng's core with dread.
Over the ages, Espers had learned to refine and control their power. Psionics grew from a simple curiosity to a genuine threat that reshaped how the Grand Firmament operated. The competition between the mages and cultivators had been fierce for longer than anyone could remember, but it was a stable stalemate. Introducing a third power had thrown every world into chaos.
But this? It was clear whatever he was seeing was something else entirely. The complexity and sophistication displayed here rivaled even the greatest works of runecraft and spellwork he'd ever seen. As one of the direct subordinates of the Warden., Lian Peng was privy to knowledge that armies of Celestials would fight tooth and nail for. So how had he never heard of something like these constructs before?! How had something like this been allowed to develop unnoticed?
Whatever the answer, he would pry those secrets out with force if necessary. Such an unknown could not remain unknown, lest the chaos brought about by the rise of Espers be repeated. Maybe it was fate that had brought this to him, in a way. If it had been any of the other Lunar Kings — those greedy, lazy bastards — they would have swept this all under the rug and kept the secrets for themselves. Then again, one of them might be involved, regardless.
After all, who else could have kept this hidden from him?
If he was lucky, he wouldn't need to use force, though. If everything went as it should, the survivors aboard the wreck would surrender to questioning peacefully, and the Lunar Scouts could find out what they needed without bloodshed.
As one of the 'slimes' moved towards him on pulsing blue light, Lian Peng prayed everything would go according to plan.
But then, when did any plan survive first contact?
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… Yup, that's a chicken, alright…
Alpha wasn't quite sure what he'd been expecting. Maybe it was some kind of chicken-shaped drone. Alpha preferred ducks, personally, but hey, not everyone had good taste like him.
Or maybe it just looked like a chicken from a distance.
Or the damage to Alpha's processor may have been greater than he thought, and he was subconsciously overlaying AR images of chickens on random objects for no reason whatsoever.
But that was not the case, at least according to his short-range scans. The fireball floating in the vacuum of space a few hundred kilometers away was an honest-to-God, flesh and blood, biological chicken… The thing didn't even have any bio-augmentations!
At least then, some of this might have made the slightest bit of sense!
DNA analysis, though somewhat compromised by the distance, confirmed this wasn't a case of convergent evolution, resulting in something that just looked chicken-like. No, this creature shared a distant ancestry with a breed of chicken employed by Federation colonization efforts dating as far back as the First Era and the United Federation of Sol.
There was no carcinization going on here!
Sturdy, adaptable, and quick to multiply, the chickens in question were some of the best early test subjects for evaluating the viability of a new ecosystem.
Colonization and terraforming projects had been so effective during the subsequent Second Federation that even today, it was rare to find a populated planet that didn't show some marks of influence. It was so common that many people argued the Third Federation's 'Unification Project' was more aptly named a reclamation project instead, and they weren't wrong — to an extent.
Almost seven in ten inhabited worlds that Alpha was sent to had some connection to the Second Federation, with most being surviving colony worlds isolated for 25,000 years by the nano-plague that broke it or husk-worlds claimed by other powers. For the Third Galactic Federation wasn't the only player on the board, even if they were the oldest and biggest, and the ones with the most rights to those planets. Of course, convincing the other party of that was often an issue — one Alpha was an expert in solving.
So finding a Federation chicken, or at least a descendant, in a new world wasn't surprising. Except Alpha had absolutely no records of any reclamation worlds — previously visited or scheduled — matching the absurdity that was this system. His star maps couldn't even tell him where he was. What were the chances of finding a chicken in a place the Federation had never been?
Then it talked…
In space…
After flying faster than a fighter drone…
And it appeared to be perpetually on fire?!
Well, at least he thought it spoke. Alpha was totally going to ignore the rest of that for the moment.
Its vocalizations were like the squid creatures, transmitted through space rather than a medium. The Federation had a similar capability, but it was used for point defense rather than communications; the energy requirement was massive, and there were better ways of speaking long distances in the void. Hell, plain old radio was more effective. Yet, there was a definite pattern and intent to the 'words,' even if he didn't understand them.
So, a smart flaming space chicken…
Was he looking at some type of organic drone, then? The Federation had a strong aversion to organic technology in general. After the mess that was the nano-plague, it did pop up every so often in the more isolated corners of old space, though. That would explain some of the strangeness he was seeing, but his scanners couldn't tell him at this range. So, was he talking to the chicken or someone on the moon's surface?
Alpha decided his original plan wouldn't work. There was more going on here than he understood, and not enough time to understand it. It was time to get… creative.
After all, when did any plan survive first contact?