Chapter 1228: Beyond Light Years

The starship the sea elves arrived on this planet in…

Hearing the last half of Tyr’s muttered words, Gawain’s mind immediately jumped to that colossal interstellar vessel still stranded deep in the Endless Sea—rumored to be even larger than the ancient capital of Gondor. Honestly, even though this planet had sprouted a cyberpunk-level advanced civilization like Talrond, that sea elves’ ship remained the most wildly out-of-place thing in Gawain’s mind—a starship! A vessel capable of interstellar colonization!

It was almost laughable that when he first crawled out of his grave, he’d thought this was a world of swords and sorcery…

Shaking his head to clear those irrelevant thoughts, Gawain turned his curious gaze back to the sea caterpillar lounging lazily on the bench, its upper body draped over the wood while its tail stretched out several meters behind it.

“So, how far along is the repair on your ship? I remember you telling me not long ago that your engineers made unprecedented progress on the power core or something like that…” Gawain asked.

“It’s the Core Fusion Tower,” Tyr corrected, flicking the tip of her tail with a knowing look. “It’s the big rig that draws energy from the negative space tides to power the jump drive. Ever since the crash landing on this planet, that thing’s been offline. Our deep-sea technicians tried everything but couldn’t reignite the primary drive furnace.”

She paused thoughtfully, as if carefully choosing how to explain next. “Now that we finally understand what magic actually is, we’ve calculated the ‘deviation’ the Core Fusion Tower encountered during startup.”

Tyr hesitated again, then continued seriously: “Apparently, the deep-sea techs gave up on restoring it to its original state—the environment here is just too different from our homeworld, and the tower’s key structures can’t adapt. So they decided to strip out the core section entirely, replace the drive components with a rainbow-light focusing matrix, and then use the tower’s outer force field coils and phase-shift diffusers to redistribute the energy flow. They’ve already tried this on a small scale… and it seems to work quite well.”

“Rainbow light… you actually shoved that thing straight into the ship’s power furnace?!” Gawain gaped. He knew the sea elves were trying to draw inspiration from Cecil’s rainbow light generators to fix their ship’s energy modules, but he hadn’t expected those reckless deep-sea fish to literally cram a rainbow light device into the power core—and not just one or two, but an entire matrix!

That thing was normally a siege cannon! Its output was terrifyingly high! Were these fish cooking nuclear warheads in their boiler?

Tyr looked at Gawain’s reaction with mild confusion. She lazily glanced up, her voice sounding like she might fall asleep any second. “What’s the big deal? Our deep-sea techs have always had broad minds. Of course, there are still some problems—the rainbow light device’s output power isn’t quite enough. Even though the techs have pushed the focusing matrix’s power density as high as possible, it only barely lets the fusion tower run at minimum power. Usually, Antavian’s main energy still comes from burning squid… but for us, who’ve been stuck for years, this is a huge breakthrough.”

Listening to Tyr’s casual rambling, Gawain’s initial shock slowly faded into numbness. Expressionless, he glanced at the sea caterpillar sprawled on the bench and thought: no wonder this was once an interstellar civilization—aside from their brains being a bit… flooded, this species was truly awe-inspiring on this planet.

Tyr, unaware of Gawain’s thoughts, yawned and recalled recent communications with home. Then, somewhat uncertain, she added, “Oh, and there’s another recent breakthrough in the repair project… you might find it interesting.”

“Something I’d be interested in?” Gawain blinked in surprise. “What is it?”

“Antavian’s faster-than-light communication array,” Tyr stretched out long and languidly curled herself up beside the bench. “Basically, the antenna system.”

“Faster-than-light communication array…” Gawain blinked, finally recalling. “Wait, you’ve already fixed that thing?!”

“Not exactly fixed. The resonant crystals in the transmitter unit were too badly damaged, and we haven’t found suitable replacements yet. But we managed to repair part of the receiving module,” Tyr said, a hint of emotion creeping into her tone. “We haven’t received any contact from other immigrant ships, but we did pick up the kind of signals you intercepted at your listening stations… and we successfully pinpointed their origin.”

The news hit Gawain so suddenly he was momentarily speechless. He blinked a few times, then the relevant information surfaced in his mind: he knew the sea elves were trying to repair their ship’s antenna array, and that when they fled their homeworld, there wasn’t just the Antavian ship—several others had launched, but all had since vanished into the vast starry sea.

Even after all these years, Tyr’s people still believed their kin on those other ships were alive. They hoped to fix the comms system to reconnect with those lost for millions of years.

On the other hand, Gawain knew exactly what “signal” Tyr meant: the mysterious transmissions previously detected by the Solin, Northern, and Ancestor’s Peak hubs—signals from the vast cosmos carrying basic math and indecipherable languages, as if other civilizations were announcing their existence and sending greetings. He’d confirmed with the Dragon God that these signals came from intelligent beings on other planets, but due to technical limits, even the most advanced magic network hubs in Cecil could only occasionally receive them unilaterally, unable to locate their exact source or decode the transmission technology.

As for deciphering those alien “star scripts”… Cecil and the Typhon Empire had long assembled large teams of cryptographers and linguists, even crowdsourcing the effort, but progress remained minimal.

He hadn’t expected the breakthrough to come from the sea elves, whose relationship with the Alliance was so ambiguous.

“The direction of those signals matches your earlier guesses,” Tyr noticed Gawain’s expression shift and didn’t hold back. “They do come from the Frostsky constellation. At its base is a dim star—there might be other small bodies, but our observation equipment is damaged, so we can’t confirm. Using Antavian’s star tracker, we precisely traced the signals to near that star.”

“Does that star have a name?” Gawain asked instinctively.

“We call it SK-32-A, but in your human world, mages and astrologers seem to have given it a pretty name: ‘Azure Star,’” Tyr shrugged. “It wasn’t easy to confirm. I had to sift through your messy, imprecise star charts and cross-check with Antavian’s astronomers several times before I dared say our SK-32-A and your ‘Azure Star’ are the same.”

Before she could finish, Gawain interrupted: “Starting tomorrow, switch the salt in your pool to refined sea salt.”

“Got it!” Tyr nodded instantly, then returned to the topic. “Back to the Azure Star—we measured the distance between it and this planet at about four light years. It should have at least one massive gas giant and two rocky planets orbiting it, but we can’t yet tell which planet the signals come from…

“Also, our antenna system tracked the signals for a long time and confirmed they’re sent in cycles of about 3.35 days, each transmission lasting 16 hours. We don’t know if this periodicity is intentional or caused by cosmic environmental factors along the way…”

Gawain’s expression grew unusually serious. He committed every word Tyr said to memory and softly repeated the special name: “…Azure Star…”

Tyr glanced at him, hesitating for a moment before continuing: “One last thing…”

“Go ahead,” Gawain said immediately, his urgency surprising even himself.

“Most humans probably won’t grasp what this means, but from what I understand, you should get the concept,” Tyr’s tail tip twitched solemnly. “Our analysis of the communication array revealed something—the signals… travel faster than light.”

Gawain frowned sharply. Tyr’s words were brief, but the implications were staggering.

“Faster than light…” he murmured. “So that means…”

“Even though it’s four light years away, those signals aren’t ‘old news’ sent four years ago. What we’re receiving is real-time communication from the Azure Star. And this transmission technology is very sophisticated—it can be picked up by our faster-than-light communication array and also by conventional antenna systems like the magic network hubs. This means it was designed from the start to broadcast to as many ‘targets’ as possible,” Tyr nodded. “If we had equivalent transmission tech, we could already be communicating in real time with intelligent beings on that other planet… across four whole light years.”

Gawain was still reeling from the sudden revelation when he asked instinctively, “But your faster-than-light array can’t…”

“No,” Tyr shook her head. “Like I said, we only repaired part of the receiving module. The whole system’s resonant crystals are broken, and we haven’t found replacements yet.”

Realizing he’d gotten a bit too excited, Gawain forced himself to calm down and thoughtfully whispered, “In any case, the Azure Star is clearly home to a civilization more advanced than ours…”

“They at least have more advanced communication technology—though that might change once Antavian is fully repaired,” Tyr said, then frowned, looking puzzled. “But about this ‘communication technology’… a sister of mine working in the comms tech team mentioned something suspicious.”

Gawain frowned. “Suspicious?”

“Compared to cutting-edge faster-than-light transmission, the Azure Star’s signals are surprisingly simple and outdated in encoding and modulation,” Tyr explained slowly. She rarely talked about such technical stuff here because it was usually too complex for humans, but she knew this incredible human could understand. “With the same channel bandwidth, they could have packed in more useful info and clearer images, but they chose the most primitive and inefficient ‘code table’…”

[Translation ends here.]

“Can you grasp the contradiction here? To put it in terms you land-dwellers might understand, it’s like they have this incredibly sophisticated, advanced magical device from the ancient kingdom of Gondor—one so precise it still works perfectly today—but instead of using it properly, they’ve tied a stick to it just to crack walnuts. Sure, the end goal is achieved, but the process itself is…”

Tyr shrugged, and Gawain quickly caught the meaning behind her words. He recalled the intercepted signals from the Thorin Hub. At the time, they hadn’t seemed significant, but now, knowing those signals were transmitted faster than light, the underlying incongruity hit him like a wave.

It was like two people in the fiber-optic age, each with the most advanced computers and the fastest fiber networks… sending telegrams to each other.

“Maybe it’s just to make it easier for ‘lower-level civilizations’ like us to decode their messages,” Gawain mused after a moment’s thought. “More complex encoding might be more efficient, but obviously harder to crack…”

“We considered that possibility too, but there’s a problem,” Tyr shook her head. “If they really wanted to accommodate ‘lower-level receivers,’ they could simply send multiple versions of the same message, each encoded with different levels of complexity. That way, no matter the receiver’s level, everyone would have a chance to receive and decode the signals. If the ‘Azure Star’ is truly an advanced civilization capable of faster-than-light communication, this would be a trivial task for them.”

Gawain’s mind had completely calmed, racing through the implications. The questions Tyr raised clearly demanded deeper thought. “Perhaps… their signals are only meant for ‘lower-level civilizations’? Or maybe the senders from the Azure Star don’t care about transmission efficiency at all. They just need to broadcast basic ‘greetings’ across the entire star sector, and the simplest, most rudimentary encoding ensures the message reliably reaches every civilization capable of ‘listening to space.’”

“That’s a possibility too,” Tyr nodded. “But what would be the point of that?”

“…I don’t know,” Gawain hesitated, then gave a slight nod. “Ultimately, we still know far too little about that distant ‘sender.’”

(End of chapter)