We left Shenzhou after a long and careful discussion with Jarul about the next steps and how information would flow between us. Once everything was settled, we retrieved our ship and set our course toward the rift.
As we moved away from Shenzhou, news of Armus spread faster than expected. Reports of the sudden shift in power, the fall of old families, the appearance of a Phantom, and the return of Primus alongside his human companions were already circulating through trade channels and information networks. As usual, most of the stories were exaggerated, twisted by fear or admiration, but beneath all of it, the core truth remained unchanged.
Armus had changed.
During the quieter stretches of the journey, our thoughts drifted to Lana. We wondered how she had reacted to the news, what she might be thinking now, and where she had gone. There was no doubt she would have heard of her family’s destruction by now. Whether she felt anger, regret, or something far colder, we did not know. But one thing was certain, she would not stay still.
All of us stood silently on the viewing deck, our eyes fixed on the drifting cosmic bodies beyond the reinforced glass. The ship cut steadily through the void. We had already made three long-range jumps, each one taking us farther from stable territory and closer to the region surrounding the rift.
The farther we went, the quieter space became.
In a universe-level war, frontlines were nothing like those formed when two kingdoms clashed on a single world. At this scale, war was not fought over land, cities, or even planets. It was fought over stability itself.
When one universe invaded another, it did not march armies across borders. It pressed against reality, testing where it could replace one set of laws with another. That pressure created rifts.
A rift was not a doorway. It was a forced overlap, an area where the invading universe carved a foothold inside ours. The deeper and more stable that overlap became, the more control the invaders gained. Because of this, a universe could not invade all at once. It had to seed instability, layer by layer, across galaxies.
That was why there was no single frontline.
Instead, the war existed in depth. Outer regions faced shallow contact, weak rifts used to probe resistance and gather data. Deeper in, rifts grew stronger and more dangerous, allowing greater authority from the invading universe to seep through. These rifts were classified not by size, but by dominance.
Lower-grade rifts barely altered local laws. Phantoms and unstable Abominations slipped through, testing defenses. As rifts advanced, laws eroded, space twisted, and elements behaved incorrectly. Entire star systems could be lost if a rift was allowed to deepen unchecked.
The highest-grade rifts were not battlefields at all. They were incursion points, places where one universe began rewriting another. These zones were not meant to be reclaimed. They were meant to be contained, delayed, or sacrificed.
That was also why the war was fought in the void.
Planets were liabilities. Stars destabilized under foreign laws. Fixed locations were the first to be erased. So the defenders built mobile fortresses, law-anchored platforms, and void bastions, structures designed to exist where reality itself was under stress.
And this was only the outer approach.
If the Eternals increased the dominance of their laws through a rift, our side weakened automatically. Native laws lost priority, coordination broke down, and the invaders gained momentum. Once that happened, pushing deeper became easier for them and far more costly for us.
The Council never released the full numbers, but everyone involved knew the truth.
We had already lost galaxies.
The Eternals had not come unprepared. They were not reckless invaders driven by blind conquest. They were experienced, deliberate, and frighteningly patient. They understood our universe, its structure, its laws, and more importantly, its weaknesses. Every move they made was measured, every advance calculated to exploit the smallest imbalance.
If our universe had survived this long, it was not because we were stronger.
It was because of resistance born from unity.
The combined strength of the Prime Galaxy, the System, and the remaining smaller but stronger galaxies had slowed the Eternal advance. Defensive frameworks were reinforced, rift responses optimized, and entire regions sacrificed to buy time. The System’s involvement was especially critical, stabilizing laws where they would have otherwise collapsed entirely.
Another grim sign that we were fighting on the defensive was the spread of the rifts themselves. Every galaxy had them. Through these rifts, the Eternals had laid out something far worse than invasion, a system meant to capture the souls of the dead from entire worlds.
That thought made my fists clench.
The sheer scale of that system was staggering. It wasn’t limited to battlefields or active war zones. It operated everywhere, across planets, across civilizations, across entire galaxies. Every death, whether caused by war, disease, or time itself, became a resource waiting to be harvested. A universe-sized net, cast so wide that even worlds far from the frontlines could not escape its reach.
This wasn’t conquest.
It was consumption.
To design something capable of tracking, anchoring, and extracting souls across an entire universe required planning beyond generations. It meant the Eternals were not merely fighting to win, they were preparing to replace us, stripping our universe of its future even as it continued to resist.
There had been no visible rifts near my home planet, yet even we were affected. The prevailing hypothesis was simple and terrifying: hidden rifts existed, anchors buried deep in space, unseen and unmonitored, slowly siphoning souls. That was why no galaxy was safe. Every single one was a target.
Over the long years of war, our universe was forced to adapt. One of the first measures taken was the creation of a standardized grading system for rifts. It wasn’t made for academic clarity. It existed to ensure the right response arrived fast enough, before a rift deepened and became irreversible.
There were five grades.
Grade Five rifts were the shallowest. These were the earliest signs of intrusion, places where the invading universe had barely scratched reality. Only Phantoms and unstable Abominations appeared through them. Dangerous to ordinary worlds, but still manageable if addressed quickly.
Grade Four rifts marked a serious escalation. Transcendent Eternals were involved, and their forces were no longer scattered or experimental. Large, organized formations of Phantoms and Abominations poured through in sustained waves. These rifts required standing armies, fortified void positions, and constant engagement to prevent further deepening.