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Sixth Street, the RandomPlay Video Store was still closed.
At this moment, three hours had already passed since Sol gave Wise the injection.
Having suffered just a tiny bit of pain, Wise finally regained consciousness.
The moment he opened his eyes, he saw a small note stuck beside the bed.
On it was a line of elegant handwriting, strikingly eye-catching.
Wise stared blankly and read it aloud: ["Congratulations, the modification was a success. You're a girl now."]
Ah!
He's a girl now?
Sol gave him a shot that turned him into a girl?
Sol—what does he want to do to her?!
Bastard, she's Belle's older brother!
Cold sweat streamed down Wise's back. With the force of a crocodile springing up from water, he shot upright and nervously reached down below.
"Ssshuu~"
Wise wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and collapsed weakly back onto the bed.
Thankfully, it was just a false alarm.
He looked at the note again and felt an overwhelming wave of mischievous malice wash over him.
As expected of you, Sol.
But then he realized something else: he had just sprung up like a flipping carp. Was he always this strong?
Wise looked at the muscles bulging across his body, and the solid strength filling him from head to toe, and finally came to his senses: "So Sol gave me a strengthening injection?"
Although the process was a bit painful and stimulating, it really had changed his frail physique. No matter what, he had to thank him properly.
He was about to pick up his phone to send a message of gratitude, but instead noticed a clearly group-sent farewell notice… and a permissions transfer notification.
Wise shook his head, looked again at the note, and let out a helpless smile.
He wasn't even surprised. That guy had always been reliable and cheerfully reckless.
…
Meanwhile, in a boundless starry sky—
Sol sat cross-legged in the vacuum, quietly floating. Even if he rotated freely in 360 degrees with no blind spot, it made no difference to him.
He had arranged everything in New Eridu and then set out with a question in mind.
Watching the meteorite fragments drifting past him, he sank into thought.
There was no doubt—he had entered the World of Star Rail.
The problem was that he seemed to have landed in the wrong place. Not on the Herta Space Station, not on the Xianzhou… but in some unknown region of space.
It was clearly the swordsmanship notes of the limited-banner, ever-spooking-you five-star Hunt unit Yanqing that triggered the transmission—yet the place he had been teleported to had absolutely nothing to do with the Xianzhou. Was something wrong here?
"Ah, what do I do if I want to go back?"
Sol ruffled his hair and looked at the lifeless expanse of vacuum around him, thoroughly speechless: "What is this place? There's not a soul in an entire star system—every other star system is blocked off by Imaginary energy, and I can't find the damn way!"
With his mastery of the Electromagnetic Law, he should have been able to sense information from multiple star systems.
But that damned Imaginary energy was blocking interstellar passage, limiting him to information from only the system he was in.
And the star system he landed in—despite containing hundreds of billions of stars—was a dead system.
Its most lively civilization? Just monkeys running around everywhere.
He wanted to return to New Eridu, but after such a grand farewell ceremony… going back immediately felt incredibly awkward.
Maybe he should rampage around here for a month—if he found a route, he'd keep going; if not… he'd head back?
"So annoying!"
Sol looked at a passing asteroid and casually punched out.
Boom!
The innocent asteroid shattered instantly, its fragments shooting across space—some drifting alone, others joining their brethren toward a distant asteroid belt.
Staring at the shattered rocks, then at the asteroid belt far away, Sol suddenly thought of something. He shot to his feet, standing tall in zero-gravity.
Energy exceeding the extinction of stars surged outward from him, and under the influence of third-stellar particles, it poured forth endlessly.
A frenzied electromagnetic storm took shape in an instant, disrupting the cosmic force fields across the cosmos.
Far away, the massive asteroid belt spanning the void began to tremble.
Millions of meteors vibrated, like countless wild bees beating their wings.
There was no sound in the vacuum, yet that eerie high-frequency tremor still conveyed its presence unmistakably.
Then, in a certain moment, the entire asteroid belt flowed like cascading water in a single unified direction.
Monstrous meteors of millions of cubic meters were mere droplets in this river—so small they would vanish without notice if crushed by others.
Even asteroids the size of Earth's moon were barely considered lower-grade rubble among them.
The meteoric river roared forward, colliding with every celestial body in its path.
Under its momentum, star after star was crushed apart and absorbed into the flowing stone torrent.
Every so often, meteors collided, bursting into dazzling light—light that scattered into multi-colored auroras as it passed through the distorted magnetic field.
It looked like a flowing ribbon of giant fireworks—breathtakingly beautiful.
Sol gazed at the spectacle. The asteroid belt still looked gigantic before him, as if it hadn't moved much at all.
But that was just because everything was too large—the meteoric river was traveling at tens of thousands of kilometers per second, its destructive force enough to pulverize anything.
Only then did Sol stop. From here on, he'd just let this naughty meteoric river rampage freely through the cosmos.
He took a deep breath, lifted his head, and looked upward. "Nous… can you see me? Show yourself—we need to meet!"
He wasn't losing his mind. As the Aeon of Knowledge, the Aeon of Erudition perceived the secrets of the universe at every moment.
Except for extremely special places protected by other Aeons, every atom—and every smaller particle—in the universe fell under the Aeon's observation.
The universe's development had no secrets from THEM. Their knowledge was endless and expanded every moment.
In theory, the moment Sol arrived in this starfield, the Aeon of Erudition should have perceived him.
Not because THEY saw Sol, but because THEY constantly computed the universe—and anything not on the original trajectory should have stood out.
Perhaps the disturbance from those anomalous particles wasn't large enough, too insignificant on the scale of the entire cosmos, so the Aeon didn't immediately focus on it. Or perhaps THEY did focus on him, but only observed quietly in the dark.
Whatever the case, the meteoric river Sol just created should be enough.
Such asteroid belts were as common as dirt across the universe and were, on a macro scale, no more than a butterfly's tiny wingbeat.
But for individual civilizations, such a scale of destruction was unbearable. Even the Xianzhou's great wars against the Abundance wouldn't match such magnitude.
And with Sol calling the Aeon by name… any way one looked at it, THEY should respond.
Just as he expected, the starry sky soon stirred.
Light and heat emitted by countless stars—radiating across vacuum for billions of years—seemed suddenly summoned by some unseen force.
The rays twisted into a phantasmal shape, the stars aligning densely, forming a vast, indistinct mechanical silhouette.
It was a colossal mechanical eye, larger than a star, glowing with icy red light.
Countless metal tendrils extended outward, drifting in the void like energy-feeding veins.
And in truth, they served a similar function—in the time before this great being ascended to becoming an Aeon, they acted as sensory conduits for gathering information.
Nous—the Aeon of Erudition—has descended!