168: Spacetime Reversal

The smoke of war in the galaxy had not yet dissipated; the light of order within the Eye of Terror was stubbornly repairing itself amidst the damage, the hostility of the Necron Dynasty hung overhead like cold needles, and the whispers of Slaanesh still lingered in the shadows.

Just as the Human Federation, a scarred yet increasingly frenzied war machine, was operating at full capacity for final settlement preparations and self-repair, an unexpected archaeological discovery—like a giant boulder thrown into a deep pool—stirred up subversive ripples.

The location was not the galactic core or any known ruins of ancient civilizations, but in an Extragalactic system—a desolate star sector approximately twelve thousand light-years from The Other Shore-1 Governor's District—the Silent Graveyard.

This place was once the final battlefield of some ancient Extragalactic civilization war. The spatial structure was extremely fragile, filled with gravity traps and spacetime folds, and had long been listed as a forbidden zone by the Pioneer fleets.

However, during a deep scan of the war debris of the Crystal Hive and the Aidilus Biomass Body, the Archaeologist, a scientific exploration ship belonging to the Star Sea Seeding Project, detected an extremely unusual residual energy signal at the core of a debris belt wrapped in intense spacetime distortion.

The signal characteristics were ancient, stable, and precise, completely different from the chaotic energy spectrum of the surrounding war debris, and even more inconsistent with the technological signatures of the Human Federation, the Empire, the Eldar, the Necrons, or any currently known Extragalactic civilization.

It was faint, yet it seemed inscribed into spacetime itself, having not completely dissipated even after being washed by countless millennia of time.

Taking great risks and aided by the remote navigation of the adjudicator, the Archaeologist struggled through spacetime turbulence to finally reach the source of the signal.

It was not the giant space station or planetary fortress one might imagine, but an ancient shipwreck only a hundred meters long, entirely covered in some kind of self-repairing liquid metal and shaped like a perfectly streamlined teardrop. The wreckage was severely damaged, seemingly pierced by an attack beyond imagination, but its core area was still protected by a faint but indestructible spacetime distortion shield.

"Preliminary scans cannot parse the hull material, the internal structure does not fit any known physical model, and the energy response is near zero, but the spacetime curvature readings are abnormally stable," the ship's science officer's voice trembled with excitement. "The shield principle seems to involve partially decoupling itself from the current time stream, existing in a state of 'non-present'!"

Even more shocking discoveries lay ahead.

When the adjudicator attempted to use its powerful conceptual processing capabilities to cautiously perform minimal information interaction with that spacetime shield, a backup system inside the shield, which had been dormant for an unknown amount of time, was faintly activated. A stream of information, extremely compressed and encoded in a high-dimensional mathematical language completely incomprehensible to humans, was released.

Had the adjudicator not fused the conceptual processing capabilities of the Taotie Prototype with some of the Necron Dynasty's high-dimensional data-cracking technology, this information would have forever remained an undecipherable enigma.

But now, it was painstakingly translated and parsed. What was finally presented to the Human Federation's supreme Command Center was a series of identifiers labeled in ancient but precise human language (a variant considered to be the standard tongue of technical officers from the dark age of technology), along with a short, weary, and resolute log fragment:

Identifier: STC-Ω ark Prototype, Final Refuge Unit

Affiliation: Human Federation (dark age of technology), Spacetime Technology Research Institute, project noah

Status: Severely Damaged (Spacetime Anchoring Core 95% failed, Memory Matrix shattered, backup power exhausted)

Log Fragment (Last Entry): "The Great Collapse is irreversible, the spacetime structure is in total collapse, conventional escape routes have been severed, all Noahs have fallen. This unit is executing final protocol 'Yesterday Once More', attempting to project the core data package to a theoretical safe time anchor point.

Projection coordinates... error... insufficient energy... trapped in spacetime turbulence... May future generations... if they find this relic... be cautious... Time... is not a toy... The Federation's glory... and its mistakes... all lie here..."

"Human Federation, STC-Ω prototype from the dark age of technology, spacetime technology." The Chief Technologist murmured these words as if struck by an invisible hammer, his face pale, yet his eyes burst with an almost frantic, burning light.

The STC was no secret to the upper echelons of the Human Federation. It was the peak crystallization of human technology from the dark age of technology, theoretically containing almost all the scientific knowledge of that glorious era.

And this one before them was not just a warship, but a prototype designated Ω, belonging to project noah, which specialized in spacetime technology! It was a relic of humanity's highest achievements in the fields of time and space during the dark age of technology!

"Spacetime backtracking," Han Zhe slowly uttered these four words. No emotion could be heard in his voice, but the light burning in his eyes was even more intimidating than when he learned of the capture of the Divine Entity.

"adjudicator, assess the reliability of the information and the potential value of this wreckage."

"The information encoding method and residual energy characteristics, when compared with all known ancient human relic data and Extragalactic high-dimensional information models, yield a 99.7% probability of authenticity." The adjudicator's voice seemed to become more condensed and profound due to processing information of such a level.

"The value of the wreckage is immeasurable. The self-repairing liquid metal of its hull contains unknown material science; its internal structure represents engineering technology far beyond any current civilization in the galaxy; its spacetime shield principle involves local time-stream manipulation, serving as a key to understanding and even applying temporal technology. Most importantly, the project noah data that may be sealed within its memory matrix (if partially recoverable) includes, but is not limited to, spacetime theory, time-anchoring technology, possible time travel or observation methods, and information regarding the Great Collapse."

"Risk: Extremely high. Any improper operation could trigger unpredictable spacetime paradoxes, timeline contamination, or release unknown spacetime disasters. The warning regarding the Great Collapse must be taken seriously."