As I looked over the entire asteroid and the countless abominations moving across it, a slow smile formed on my face. For the first time, it felt like I was stepping into the real game, the high-level one happening far above the petty fights of Armus.
This place wasn’t just a hideout. It was a full operating base belonging to the Eternals and their followers.
Traitors of the Prime Universe worked openly with them. Three massive teleportation gates connected this fortress to different corners of the universe.. And the entire organization, the Hollow Star, existed solely to help them spread destruction.
It should have made me angry.
Instead, a quiet thrill ran through me.
Yes, it was sad, even disgusting that people from our own universe were working with the enemy. But betrayal came with a silver lining.
It gave me new targets.
A whole list of people who deserved to be hunted.
I took a single step forward, letting space bend around my foot.
In the next instant, I appeared directly inside the tower’s ground floor, completely hidden from their eyes and perception.
I immediately realized it wasn’t a battlefield or a ritual hall, it looked more like a reception center.
Long stone counters stretched across the room, each one crowded with workers moving through tasks with practiced speed. Some sorted glowing scrolls, others arranged crystal tablets into neat stacks, and a few stamped symbols onto floating documents that shimmered briefly before vanishing. The atmosphere felt strange, almost like a proper administrative office... if you ignored the deathmist drifting outside.
Every single worker here... was a grandmaster.
Their auras were carefully suppressed, but to my perception, they burned like steady furnace flames.
It looked almost peaceful like an office in some twisted underworld city.
Within a few moments I scanned everything.
Requests. Delivery logs. Teleportation records.
This entire floor existed to receive mission orders and assign abominations or phantoms to carry them out. Like some sick dispatch center for death.
The interesting thing was I found a record of a certain someone.
Lana.
My gaze sharpened.
I read the details hidden behind a thin layer of concealment. Coordinates. Lists of assigned phantoms. Numbers of abominations. Timing. Mission structure.
A complete operation sheet.
So this was where she placed her orders. Where they prepared her attacks.
But one thing was still missing, how the requests arrived here.
I checked every scroll, every desk, every formation on the ground floor, but nothing told me how the orders were sent. So I slipped and moved to the second floor.
The layout was similar, just smaller. Fewer workers, fewer counters... but one thing immediately stood out.
A Phantom.
It sat in the middle of the hall in a meditative pose, deathmist coiling around its body like a thick shawl. It looked like it was the supervisor of this floor.
I paused in the shadows, studying it.
This was honestly surprising.
These creatures were born from Eternal corruption. They were made from the souls of people who died in our universe, their identities stripped away until nothing remained. They remembered nothing of who they were and what they stood for.
Yet here they were, working for the enemy as if this was normal. The Phantom here wasn’t even particularly strong. Its aura was similar to the phantom I had killed earlier.
I scanned the entire floor again. More logs. More missions. More dispatch routing. No answers yet.
So I kept moving.
Floor by floor, silently slipping between shadows and walls, checking each section with my perception. Every floor revealed a new piece of the operation.
Until finally, I reached the seventh floor, just below the last one.
And I stopped immediately.
Because the moment I stretched my perception upward, a crushing presence hit the edge of it. A Phantom sat on the top floor. A transcendent one. Not just strong, the strongest I had ever sensed.
Stronger than Vaelix. Stronger than any Phantom I had fought until now. Its aura leaked through the floor like a silent warning. If I stepped onto that level, even with all my tricks, it would notice me instantly.
So I stayed completely still and went through all the information I had scanned so far. Piece by piece, it started forming a clearer picture.
The requests handled in this base came from all over the Blue Spiral Galaxy. Every scroll, every mission sheet, every assignment had coordinates that pointed somewhere inside my galaxy. Nothing outside it.
Which meant this place was still operating within my territory. They also recorded who submitted the request. And that helped a lot.
Every requester had a full record attached to their name. Their race, their home world, their clan status, their strength, and a numbered rating that seemed to mark their importance or value to the Hollow Star.
Then I found Lana’s file. Her name was written clearly. Race. Home world. Rank: Transcendent.
That matched my suspicion. And there were other details, her personal rating was listed as 4, which was decent but not exceptional. Below her name were five mission entries. Three marked as Completed, two listed as In Progress.
She had been active for a while.
The highest rating I found among all the records was 9, belonging to different races across the galaxy. Whoever reached rating 9... the Hollow Star really cared about them. But there was still nothing on how these requests arrived here. It was as if the requests simply appeared in their scroll folders.
Still, I learned something else from the casual conversations of the "employees." This wasn’t the only base. There were others scattered across Blue Spiral. And among them, another one kept getting mentioned Base 01.
A higher-ranked branch. A place the workers here wanted to get promoted to. If this asteroid was a dispatch center...Then Base 01 was likely the real heart of their operation.
I took a step and flashed out of the tower. I had seen everything I needed to. Now only one question remained in my mind: How should I destroy this place? A full frontal assault... or a slow, controlled dismantling?
Either option would work, but I wasn’t going to rush.
To be safe, I decided to scan the entire asteroid base thoroughly before making my move. I needed answers, especially to the most important question:
Why couldn’t I access the system in this place?