The first sign that the universe was actually breaking didn't arrive with a bang or a frantic alarm. It arrived as a weird, empty silence.
Out on the edge of the Astralis expansion ring, a monitoring station tried to check on a star system called KX-441. The computer didn't say the star system was blown up or taken over. It just returned an error. It was like trying to look for a file on a computer that had been deleted so hard it never even existed in the first place.
At first, the tech guys thought it was just a glitch. They poked at their machines and recalibrated the sensors, but every single report came back with the same answer: Nothing. KX-441 wasn't there. Then it got even spookier. When they checked the history books, the records for KX-441 were gone too. No trade routes, no colony maps, nothing. It was like a blank space that had always been blank.
But the lead technician just sat there, shaking. "I remember it," he whispered. "I swear on my life it was there."
