It had been seven days since the Voyager entered FTL, and in that time, they'd covered distances that would have taken conventional spacecraft millennia to traverse. Tens of billions of kilometers had fallen away behind them, the Oort Cloud's inner boundary already passed, its outer edge approaching rapidly.

For Liam, the past week had been simultaneously eventful and monotonous. The paradox of faster-than-light travel meant covering impossible distances while experiencing nothing—no landmarks, no reference points, just the strange warping of space around their warp bubble and the unsettling sensation of motion that his brain couldn't properly process.

He'd spent most of the time training, though not with the brutal intensity of previous weeks. Light exercises, refinement rather than expansion, keeping his skills sharp without pushing his limits. The progress was minimal, barely noticeable, but it kept him occupied during the endless hours of transit.

What he wanted to do—what he'd been considering for days—was visiting the magic and cultivation universe through the Dimensional Space.

But jumping between dimensions while traveling faster than light through a warp bubble seemed like an excellent way to get lost in space-time permanently, or worse—scattered across multiple realities with no way to reassemble.

The same concern applied to him wanting to sign-in. It was overdue. He was sure that the rewards waiting for him would be substantial, potentially game-changing.

But he decided that it was better to wait. The rewards would still be there when they reached normal space. The other universe wasn't going anywhere. Patience now would prevent disaster later.

So he'd waited and continued his light training.

"Master," Lucy's voice cut through his thoughts, pulling him back to the present. "We will be exiting FTL in ten minutes. Our exit point will be approximately 150 astronomical units beyond the Oort Cloud's outer boundary, well into interstellar space."

Liam straightened in the captain's chair, a surge of anticipation cutting through the week's monotony. "Make an announcement on LucidNet. Tell them there will be a livestream soon."

"Acknowledged." Lucy nodded, as she composed and posted the notification. Within seconds, it would reach 2.4 billion users, setting off alerts across the planet.

Liam turned his attention to the viewport. The warp bubble was visible as a faint distortion in space, a shimmer at the edges of perception where contracted and expanded space met normal space-time. Stars were visible beyond it, but they looked wrong—compressed, stretched, their light bent by the gravitational effects of the warp field.

Ten minutes felt simultaneously too long and too short. Long enough that anticipation built into nervous energy. Short enough that he barely had time to prepare mentally for what was coming.

The countdown reached zero and the warp bubble collapsed.

The transition was instantaneous and jarring. One moment, space was warped and wrong around them. The next, it snapped back to normal geometry, and the universe revealed itself in its true form.

Darkness. Absolute, overwhelming darkness.

The viewport showed almost nothing. No planets, no asteroids, no comets, no nebulae. Just endless black punctuated by the faint, distant light of stars so far away they barely registered as anything more than dim points against the void.

Liam stared at the view, feeling something cold settle in his chest. They were beyond everything. Beyond the Sun's gravitational influence, beyond the Oort Cloud's protective shell, beyond the boundary that separated solar space from the interstellar medium.

A smile crossed his face. "I'm the first person to reach interstellar space," he muttered to himself, letting the words settle. It was true. Undeniable. Historic.

But there was no time to dwell on personal achievement. He stood, heading for the elevator. As it descended toward the docking bay, he activated his exosuit.

The docking bay doors were already opening when he arrived. The massive panels slid apart silently, atmosphere venting into space in a brief cloud of crystallized moisture that dispersed instantly.

Beyond the opening lay nothing.

Liam walked to the edge of the bay doors. The view was simultaneously beautiful and terrifying. Beautiful because the stars visible in every direction represented the galaxy itself, billions of distant suns stretching across space. Terrifying because those stars were so far away they provided almost no light, leaving him surrounded by darkness so complete it felt physical.

He pushed off gently, letting zero gravity carry him out of the spacecraft and into the void.

The sensation was immediate and overwhelming. Every sense he possessed suddenly reported nothing.

His vision, enhanced far beyond human normal, could barely pick out the Voyager that was a few metres behind him. The stars ahead were visible but provided no reference points, no way to judge distance or scale. Everything was either infinitely close or infinitely far, with no way to distinguish between the two.

His telekinetic sense, which had grown to encompass a forty-five-meter sphere around him, detected nothing. Just emptiness extending in every direction beyond his range. It was like being blind, but worse—like the universe itself had vanished beyond his immediate vicinity.

His electromagnetic field detection, newly developed and still being refined, picked up nothing. The silence was absolute.

For someone who'd grown accustomed to constant sensory feedback, this was profoundly disturbing.

It felt like being sealed in a sensory deprivation tank, but infinitely worse. At least in a tank, you could feel the water, sense the walls, know that you existed within defined boundaries. Here, there was nothing. No feedback, no confirmation that anything existed beyond his immediate body.

The closest comparison would be waking up in absolute darkness, in a silent room, with no tactile sensation and no sense of space. But even that didn't capture the totality of the void. This was deeper, more complete. The darkness wasn't just absence of light—it was absence of everything.

Liam smiled despite the unsettling sensation. Or perhaps because of it. This was what true space felt like. Not the crowded, cluttered environment of the inner solar system where planets and asteroids and spacecraft filled the void with mass and electromagnetic radiation. This was the real universe—vast, empty, and utterly indifferent to human presence.

He rotated slowly. The Voyager hung in space behind him, its kilometer-long hull barely visible against the star field. And beyond it, somewhere in the darkness...

There. A single point of light, no brighter than the stars around it, distinguishable only because he knew exactly where to look.

The Sun. Sol. Humanity's star, reduced to nothing more than a distant pinprick of light 100,000 astronomical units away. From this distance, it was just another star, unremarkable and forgettable among billions.

Earth was invisible, lost in the glare of that distant point. The entire solar system—all the planets, moons, asteroids, and debris that humanity called home—existed within a sphere so small relative to this distance that it might as well not exist at all.

Liam smiled to himself, as the livestream began.

***

For the 2.39 billion standard viewers, the feed opened on absolute darkness. For a moment, many thought their screens had malfunctioned. Then their eyes adjusted, and they began to pick out the faint stars scattered across the black.

But for the five thousand Lucid users, standing digitally in the void beside him, the experience was something else entirely.

They found themselves floating in space, their avatars rendered perfectly against the backdrop of nothing. Several of them screamed immediately, from the sheer overwhelming emptiness surrounding them.

Because their brains, receiving perfect sensory input from the immersion, reported the same thing Liam's senses did: nothing. No ground beneath them, no walls around them, no reference points anywhere. Just infinite emptiness in every direction.

"Welcome," Liam said, his modulated voice cutting through the shocked silence, "to interstellar space."

He rotated, letting the camera capture the full three-hundred-sixty-degree view. Darkness, stars, more darkness.

"We are currently approximately 100,000 astronomical units from Earth. That's roughly 15 trillion kilometers. One and a half light-years. The furthest any human has ever traveled from home."

He paused, letting that information settle.

"Behind me is the Voyager. Behind that, somewhere in the darkness, is the Sun. From here, it's just another star. Earth is invisible, lost in the glare. The entire solar system occupies less than one degree of arc in the sky."

The Lucid users were beginning to recover from the initial shock, though several remained perfectly still, afraid that any movement would send them tumbling into the infinite void despite knowing they were safe at home.

"This is what space actually looks like. This is the real universe. Empty. Dark. Vast beyond human comprehension," Liam continued.

He rotated again, pointing toward a direction that looked identical to every other direction.

"In that direction, about four light-years away, is Alpha Centauri. The nearest star system to ours. From here, we're actually closer to Alpha Centauri than we are to the Sun. We are approaching the midpoint between stellar neighborhoods."

He turned back toward the camera, toward the billions watching.

"This is humanity's future. Not the crowded planet and orbital stations, but this—the vast emptiness between stars. The dark, lonely reaches where light takes years to cross the distance between anything significant."

Another pause, longer this time, as he let the moment hang, the darkness speaking for itself.

"End of transmission."

The feed cut to black, and across Earth, over two billion people sat in stunned silence, trying to process what they'd just witnessed.

They weren't shown technology this time, or economics or physics or human capability. But emptiness. Pure, absolute emptiness, stretching forever in every direction.

And somewhere in that emptiness, one person floated alone, further from home than any human had ever been.

The implications would take days to fully sink in.

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