Cataclysm: Undead Dragons and Zero Empire

Lin Ziming gazed at the planet on the moon's surface, witnessing humanity's journey towards unification amidst adversity.

The psionic projection slowly solidified, the jet-black dragon bones gleaming coldly in the sunlight, and he gradually returned to the real universe.

Now it is time to embark on my own journey. Lin Ziming flapped his wings, which had turned into withered bones, and his spiritual energy tore through space. The ripples spread through the deep space like pebbles thrown into a calm lake.

For him, breaking the speed of light was an easy task, even without relying on subspace psionic energy. The process of Tianlong flying was a temporary hyperspace channel that allowed him to travel between countless star systems.

Lin Ziming deliberately suppressed this power, choosing to leave in a gradually accelerating manner, leaving a faint trail of spiritual energy behind him.

If that desolate space station is the legacy humanity left to itself, then the last "gift" it wanted to give to humanity is even more special.

At first, still within the planet's gravitational field, he soared between the Earth and the Moon, like a paintbrush leaving marks on black velvet.

He flew across the lunar terminator, with the desolate wilderness of night on one side and the gray-white mountains illuminated by stars on the other. The craters that had been formed by meteorite impacts looked like the rings of the earth under the sunlight, recording the long history of this satellite.

As he continued to flap his wings, his speed began to steadily increase. When he passed the gravitational equilibrium point between the Earth and the Moon, his speed had already exceeded the critical value for maintaining a planetary orbit.

The indicator light on the "Ark" space station lit up briefly as it detected the moment Lin Ziming took flight and sent the signal back to Earth.

On a human timescale, Lin Ziming flying over them was merely a fleeting moment of light and shadow. To ground observers, a red light suddenly appeared and, before they could even discern its shape, it had already soared into deep space.

As Lin Ziming passed through the planet's magnetic field, his trail collided with the high-energy particle stream in the solar wind, creating a dazzling aurora. The halo continued to spread behind him, and those particles that should have been deflected by the Earth's magnetic field were swept towards the ground.

On that snow-covered planet, people working outdoors caught a glimpse of a fleeting streak of light across the sky. Some looked around in confusion, thinking it was some kind of hallucination caused by snow blindness, before quickly lowering their heads to continue their work.

For them, the mundane details of survival had long outweighed their curiosity about celestial phenomena; these fleeting lights and shadows were not even as noteworthy as a family member's cough in the cold wind.

Lin Ziming's speed continued to increase, and as he approached the asteroid belt of the Heng system, his mass and speed were sufficient to cause a noticeable shift in the surrounding light.

The material in the asteroid belt was shattered by the impact; not a single piece could actually grazed its body. Those rocks, which have drifted in this universe for billions of years, are covered with the marks of time, and some still retain layers of ice, which were once brought to the planet by water and eventually evolved into life.

In his perception, the deliberately slowed flight had lasted long enough to leave a stable track in deep space, but to the researchers on the ground, the energy peak on the screen was just a fleeting pulse signal, and humans still hadn't reacted.

It continued to accelerate, its trail growing brighter and brighter, distorting the surrounding space into strange arcs, like the folds that appear when a blanket is lifted.

The vast starry sky began to display strange color changes in Lin Ziming's eyes. The starlight in front of him became more blue-purple, while the starlight behind him turned deep red, as if the entire star system was adjusting its color scheme to bid him farewell.

As it passed by the gas giant, ripples spread across the planet's rings. Fragments of the rings, composed of ice and rock, seemed to be awakened from an ancient slumber, briefly flashing across the sky before returning to their long silence.

If this scene were captured by an astronomical telescope gazing at the stars, it might be interpreted as a disturbance caused by an incorrect observation, as human observation equipment was not yet able to keep up with this instantaneous change.

The moment the speed finally broke the speed of light, the universe underwent a tremendous change. Time seemed to be stretched into a ribbon, and the light of stars solidified into colorful lines that rushed past Lin Ziming.

He entered a state of faster-than-light travel, leaving a dazzling trail behind him that was permanently left in the starry sky. This trail was not an ordinary light and shadow residue, but rather like a bridge spanning the stars, visually displaying the mysteries of space and dimensions in the universe.

Wherever the trajectory passed, spacetime was subtly distorted, and the light of the stars refracted strange colors within it. The interstellar dust near the trajectory formed a string of pearl-like luminous points.

The nebula at the edge of the Hang galaxy, under the influence of this trajectory, presents spectacular ripples of disturbance, like a long carpet laid out for a farewell ceremony, as if specially left as a guide for future explorers.

Lin Ziming's figure gradually faded into the distance, passing through the dazzling starlight of the globular cluster, where a vast number of stars were tightly embracing each other, born at the dawn of the universe.

He flew past the pearls scattered in the darkness of space among the open clusters, the stars drifting slowly in the arms of the spiral galaxy, and he could no longer see the white planet hidden in the universe.

Then Lin Ziming turned his gaze to the depths of the universe, where the electromagnetic pulses ejected by the rotation of neutron stars and the accretion disks emitting brilliant light around black holes made him feel as if he had returned to his own ocean, like a fish swimming through a long river and entering a vast blue expanse.

On the planet he departed from, the wind and snow still howled at the Black Stone Altar. Terence gazed at the brilliant trail streaking across the sky, the flames in his eyes growing ever brighter.

He took out the stone tablet from his bosom, his fingertips overflowing with spiritual energy, and traced it across the rough stone surface to record this great miracle. He wanted human civilization to witness the Lord's power and mercy for generations to come, and to make humanity understand that their future had been entrusted to their own hands.

Inside the command center, technical officers reported the abnormal data to Howard. At every monitoring station, the detectors had returned to zero and were completely silent because the readings had exceeded the limit.

He recalled what Terence had told him not long ago: "When the Lord deems us worthy to walk alone, He will return to the stars. What we need to do is prove ourselves worthy of this grace."

A few days later, Terence spread the oracle to all the settlements. When people learned that the brief flash of light was the trace of the Lord's departure and that the continuously shining band of light in the starry sky was a gift left to mankind, their faith finally transformed into concrete worship.

"We must remember the years when the Lord dwells high on the moon. This is the grace of the Lord who stays and looks after mankind. When we approach the stars, we will surely build an altar for the Lord on the moon."

The wind and snow still blanketed the land, the steam tower roared day and night, a new batch of crops had been planted in the underground greenhouse, and transport locomotives were moving supplies between various settlements.

On this planet covered in ice and snow, countless people are fighting for survival and the future, each one doing their own way to protect the hard-won life.

In the distant depths of the universe, a celestial dragon of the dead soars among the stars, always keeping the coordinates of that white planet.

Lin Ziming waits, and so does human civilization, waiting for the day when life, which has tenaciously grown in the harsh winter, can follow the path left by the Lord and truly step into the embrace of the stars and the sea.

Separation is not the end, but a new beginning.