Yekase popped a Dancing Light, a firefly orb gliding ahead as she pushed into the fortress’s ragged throat of corridor.

The Cosmic Bubble teemed with wild life; in a sealed dark belly like this, strange things felt normal, so she moved like a cautious cat through brambles.

Half an hour sifted away like sand through a cracked hourglass.

She took stairs, crawled through ruptures, flew across gulfs; her spatial sense, sharp as a needle compass, told her she’d left the surface and sunk into the hidden underground.

Then she met the fortress’s first resident—

A black-furred rat, wolf-large, a shadow with iron whiskers.

…

Why.

Her gut balked first; then her mind sighed—of course rats thrive in closed dark places. Rodents endure like weeds; in an ecosystem this rich, no rats would be the real oddity.

She forced herself calm and slid the Polaris Staff back—she was used to fighting human opponents in cities; beasts moved like weather she didn’t read, and sloppy blocks would be useless. She refused to let those walnut-cracker yellow teeth chip her treasured iron staff.

She would guard her weapon, even at the cost of flesh.

“Come on!”

She barked, then cranked the Dancing Light to a blinding white, a sudden sunrise in a cave.

The black rat had been crouched to spring; her shout and flash struck like lightning in midnight eyes, and its motion choked for a heartbeat.

Yekase didn’t waste the gap. Her right foot bit the ground; buoyed by a stealthily pre-cast Levitation Spell, she shot forward like a cannon shell into the beast’s shadow.

…Wait.

If a new face means a restart, this was already her third life. Back on the electric trike—what had she sworn?

“To be a traditional mage.”

Would a traditional mage use Levitation to hurl herself at an enemy?

Obviously not; in fact, the opposite.

…Push the enemy to her?

No! Keep distance.

Yekase wrenched direction midair, woke like from a dream of heat, and lifted her hand to fling a Flame Burst Spell.

A washbasin-sized fireball took the automatic boost from Flash Energy; its core, usually just a different hue of flame, condensed into a dark, solid globe. It slammed into the rat’s sharp snout; she heard a crisp crack and saw its nose fold to the side nearly ninety degrees.

Then tongues of fire poured from the core, climbing its tangled mane; in moments the small beast was swallowed whole, a pyre in fur.

The air carried a barbecue smell, smoky and cruel.

“…Hungry.”

She’d slept in today and skipped breakfast; her stomach echoed like an empty drum.

Her gaze drifted to the smoking corpse, a charred offering on cold stone.

Maybe…a bite?

A few more Flame Burst Spells would cook it through; her space clasp held whatever spices she’d grabbed on a whim; if stubborn bacteria remained, let her stomach be brave and evolve, and burn them out.

Once noticed, hunger became a drumbeat she couldn’t ignore; her eyes grew hazy, like heat shimmer over dunes.

But a single cockroach means a nest; rats keep the same law of dark alleys.

Rustling rose from seams of iron and earth, whispers through bone and dust.

Rats in the walls…

As if they’d marked Yekase as prey, a dozen rats squeezed out from every slit, pooling into a black tide.

They ringed Yekase like crows around carrion.

“You…want barbecue too…?”

Her eyes glassed; she drew the Polaris Staff, staked it to the floor, unfolded its auxiliary modules like iron petals.

“I won’t share…”

“Parallel, continuous, passion, passion, passion…”

“—Flame Burst Spell.”

Hellfire loomed and roared in the narrow ruin, a fountain flood of flame that clawed every corner.

…

…

She’d burned too far; the rats turned entirely to ash and drifted like gray snow. She could only tap pepper onto her palm, lick it like a stray fox, and keep walking deeper.

[Alert. Unregistered intruder.]

—?!

Two rows of red warning lights snapped on, painting the ruined corridor with blood-streaked shadows.

The walls started to tremble; lucky panels that weren’t jammed spun a full 180 degrees, and something stepped out from the guts—

—Guard robots.

One glance, and Yekase knew—they were all armed guard robots, guns raised like a steel forest.

Run.

That count—numbers often favored her, but this was too many; beyond her cap. They meant to saturate this narrow corridor with remote fire like a monsoon of lead.

Her body moved faster than thought. She dove with zero grace into a heap of scrap, grabbed two thick iron plates, and slammed them onto her back like door-sized shields. In the blink of a match-strike, the robots with rifles and cannons poured bullets across every inch of the passage.

Clang-clang-clang-clang-clang—!!

A storm of noise swallowed Yekase, shattered warning lights, and ricocheted off floor and wall like hail. She could only pray the bots gave her time and cover to gradually evolve an American-grade gunfire tolerance, and she bolted deeper, shouldering her twin-door shields like a turtle under fire.

“I should’ve known, I should’ve known—”

In a sci-fi mechanical fortress, how could there be no robot guards? Treat the “Heavenly Divide” during the initial foray as a small waste from poor intel; but she’d had prep time before leaving. She should’ve soaked with the Southern Sky Cross longer, recharged a gulp of Flash Energy—at least enough to fire a second Heavenly Divide.

As things stood, any attempt to surface and cast meant getting turned into a sieve—no, a sieve still has shape; one volley here would grind her into powder.

Run or die—there was no third path.

Find terrain they can’t saturate, twist through complexity, then take these dozens apart, patient and precise.

…While sprinting, Yekase spotted an iron door.

Human-sized; door and frame sealed tight as welded bone. Precisely because it was sealed so perfectly—amid this drafty ruin—it looked wrong, a quiet stone in a river.

This is it—whatever’s inside, hide first, think later.

Ha, her favorite “kick the door” moment again—

“…”

A last shred of sanity made her drop the door shields, yank out the Phase Shifter, hit the switch, and ram through like a ghost.

Her eyes slid through the iron’s model and surfaced inside.

A monitoring room.

Screens tiled walls and ceiling like dead scales, none alive; the whole room steeped in night.

Yekase slipped out of the iron, stepped in, and finally let out a held breath, like steam from winter lips.

[Welcome, unregistered visitor. Welcome to Gaia planet Solar-3.]

“—?!”

The sudden synthetic voice shot like a spark through silence. She turned and saw a small mechanical cart wobble out from her blind corner.

A cracked little screen perched on top, showing a yellow bean smiley face—a simple sun in cartoon skin.

The room’s lone glow cut the dusty air with the Tyndall effect; more than mere abandonment, the light painted a cemetery calm.

“…Gaia planet? Solar-3?”

She latched onto the words, voice wary first, then curious.

[Introducing to the unregistered visitor. I am the AI guide of Rest Station B-666.]

Wait, wait…

Her brain finally shoved past low blood sugar, evolved an emergency mode that could think on empty, and her thoughts clicked back into place like beads on a string.

Gaia planet—her star-game used that term for Earth-like worlds fit for life. It had to mean the planet inside this Cosmic Bubble—its name: Solar-3.

Solar means Sun; Solar-3 is the third planet—

…Earth itself?

“You said this is a rest station?”

[Answering the unregistered visitor. This is Orion Arm, Sector B, Rest Station No. 666 located on Solar-3.]

You built a rest station like a bunker? That size doesn’t say “relax”; it screams “siege.”

A flash of lightning cracked inside her skull.

“Do you—do you know what happened to Sol—Solar-3?”

[Answering the unregistered visitor. Forty-two seconds ago, it fell into the Eye of the Universe.]

The guide bot finished the sentence—and froze; the bean emoji locked mid-grin as error pop-ups cascaded across the screen like a blizzard, making Yekase flinch.

“Why…”

Why the sudden crash? She reached a hand toward the pop-ups, and the bean-faced emoji extended a tiny hand and swept them aside like autumn wind clearing fallen leaves, then continued as if nothing fractured:

[Answering the unregistered visitor.]

[Per Galactic Year Article 140500, ecological preserve Gaia planet Solar-3 was put into the Eye of the Universe, seeking evac— dis—zzz—]

Its voice skewed, warped like tape heat-melted.

[Error. Network connection error occurred.]

Network error?

Galactic Year… Eye of the Universe… evacuation…

Her departure questions didn’t shrink under the guide’s answers; they deepened, twisting like roots in rock.

An Earth-grade environment as polished as the main world; “guards” that could erase a mid-sized outfit anywhere; an AI with settings like a sci-fi theme park, rich as a tapestry.

If all this were monkeys with typewriters hitting Hamlet by luck, that would be a bit—

Every sign pointed to the Cosmic Bubble not being a random dungeon spun from nothing. At least, not only that.

Its matter and energy, even the information-bearing particles—it might all be a copy of another universe’s Earth. Or…the Earth itself that fell into the Eye.

Yekase watched the bean face tear and warp with screen glitches, scatter into colored snow, then stubbornly reload. Error windows faded one by one like bubbles, and after nearly ten minutes, the little smile settled back into place.

[—Requesting information sync update.]

[A question to the unregistered visitor.]

The AI guide, voice crisp as a school bell under static hiss, gave her room to ready herself, then asked:

[Has the Milky Way been destroyed? Did humans find a new home? What lies on the far side of the Eye of the Universe?]

[Did our world—get saved?]