Chapter 582: Star of Lightning
"Welcome to space.
Hold on tight—we’re going for a ride."
Jamie’s voice cut through the silence, and with his words, their interstellar journey began.
The cosmic energy bubble around them surged forward, cutting through the vacuum like a fish through water.
Stars that once hung motionless around them blurred into streaks of light, their glow stretching into bands as they sped through the galaxy.
The three of them could feel the intense pull of Jamie’s magic as he manipulated space itself, propelling them at impossible speeds.
There was no sense of inertia, but the sight of everything moving around them told them how fast they were going.
Occasionally, they would feel brief moments of stillness—a sudden halt in their breakneck speed, only for a second or two—before they were thrust forward again.
Arthur’s comprehension of the law of space allowed him to know exactly what was happening, and Evan already had the experience of being yeeted through space-time.
Each pause was a break in their journey through space; they were moving through spatial tunnels, crossing immense distances in the blink of an eye.
Jamie wasn’t just speeding through the galaxy in a straight line; he was bending space, creating shortcuts, leaping across billions of kilometres in an instant.
The stars around them shifted and changed with every leap, and each time, they appeared deeper into the galaxy, closer to the heart of it all.
The invisible (invisible to Evan) bubble around them shimmered as they pierced through the seemingly endless vacuum, unbothered by the weight of the stars and nebulas whizzing past them like streaks of coloured light.
Finally, they arrived at a distant point, thousands of light years from their starting position.
The spiralling arms of their galaxy stretched out before them, its scale even larger than before.
The stars here seemed even denser, their light more intense.
Eventually, they reached the halfway mark of the galaxy, and Jamie brought them to a halt.
What greeted Arthur here, however, was something he had never expected—something that, by all the laws of physics he knew and his understanding of universal laws, shouldn’t have existed.
His breath caught in his throat.
Evan’s eyes widened in shock, and recognition flickered in them. He had seen this before—just never this close.
Before them was something that defied all logic.
It was a star, but not like any star Arthur had ever seen. It was a giant, supergiant even by the most liberal standards of cosmic proportions.
But this was no ball of plasma, no fusion-driven sun. This was something else entirely—a star made of pure, sparking lightning.
The enormous ball of crackling, electrical energy pulsed in the void, its jagged arcs of lightning dancing across its surface like a living storm.
It emitted an ethereal glow, illuminating the surrounding space with a sharp, electric brilliance that no ordinary star could match.
Even the largest supergiants Arthur had encountered in his travels were dwarfed by its sheer magnitude.
And Arthur knew that it was far larger than what he was seeing, given how far away they were from it. Around a few hundred billion kilometres far out.
Seeing Arthur’s expression, Jamie laughed and spoke.
"You probably haven’t seen this before, Arthur."
Arthur shook his head, still trying to grasp the enormity of what he was seeing.
"This, is the marvel of the Orithya galaxy. A wonder of the Valmone universe. Nowhere else in the universe would you find such a thing."
Jamie declared with a sweeping gesture, pointing at the behemoth star as he called out its name.
"The Star of Lightning."
Arthur’s mind struggled to comprehend it. This star should not exist—at least, not by any physical laws he knew of.
But then again, the universe had a way of bending its own rules, supplemented by magic and other forces that made up the fabric of existence.
And so, despite every instinct that told him this sight should be impossible, it was right there before him, as real as any other celestial body he had encountered.
The Star of Lightning pulsed again, the arcs of electricity growing even fiercer as they danced across its surface, casting shadows in space.
Arthur guessed this was something entirely unique to this universe, it had to be.
His expression turned into one of quiet awe as he finally found his words.
"I’ll admit... I wasn’t expecting this."
"I told you we were going for a ride."
Jamie spoke with a widened grin, while Evan who was beside them shook his head in silence. Clearly, this wasn’t his first time seeing the Star of Lightning, but it wasn’t any less overwhelming.
Even more so as he was closer than ever before.
Despite how far away from it they were, they could still see the full enormity of the star, its full grandeur.
And it still filled a good portion of their fields of vision.
"I don’t understand..."
Such words were what escaped Arthur’s lips.
"How something so ridiculously big could exist? Don’t worry, you’re not alone."
Evan’s reply to Arthur’s statement brought a wry smile to the godslayer’s face. Nevertheless, Evan’s words were not far from the truth.
His understanding of the universe—the laws of physics, the mechanics of gravity, the limits of celestial bodies—simply did not allow him to believe in the possibility of such a star existing.
And yet, here it was.
Radiating lightning instead of plasma, its size dwarfing even the largest supergiant stars he had ever encountered.
Jamie turned to him, a knowing smile spreading across his face. Then he laughed, the sound both familiar and disarming.
"Even I was surprised when I first arrived in this universe, hundreds of millions of years ago. I saw this, and trust me—it left me speechless.
It defies logic, doesn’t it? I spent ages trying to understand it, and the more I learned, the more I marvelled at its existence."
Arthur’s mind reeled, but Jamie continued, his tone steady.
"Take a closer look around its edges. Focus. You’ll see a few of ’them’."
’Them?’
What could Jamie possibly be talking about? —Arthur thought. At Jamie’s prompting, he focused his gaze on the periphery of the brilliant, crackling star.
The light was overwhelming—so bright that it drowned out almost everything else around it. But as he strained his eyes and sharpened his senses, something else began to come into view.
At first, it was difficult to distinguish. However, once Arthur adjusted his vision to the blinding electric radiance of the Star of Lightning, he began to notice the silhouettes—entire stars, smaller than the supergiant but colossal by normal standards, locked in orbit around it.
They were moving, massive and radiant in their own right, but utterly dwarfed by the sheer presence of the lightning star.
"How? How could stars—stars with their own gravity wells, their own star systems—possibly be held in orbit around something like this?"
In response to his question, Jamie spoke.
"It’s not just gravity, Arthur. The laws here are... supplemented.
Cosmic energy and magic twist the fabric of space around the Star of Lightning. Its gravity alone isn’t strong enough to hold entire stars like that—not without pulling on something more.
This star taps into mass and energy from other dimensions, pulling at forces that don’t abide by your conventional understanding of physics. It draws on that mass, reinforcing its gravitational pull with power far beyond what we’d normally expect.
That’s how those other stars—entire systems, in fact—stay in stable orbits around it."
Arthur still had an incredulous expression on his face, but his mind was able to grasp the truth behind Jamie’s words.
That was because he could see the strange manner in which cosmic energy acted around it.
The Star of Lightning wasn’t just a supergiant by size. It was a supergiant by virtue of its ability to manipulate cosmic energy.
Cosmic energy intertwined with the fundamental universal laws, and this star had become a nexus of two of those laws which intertwined to form the fabric of spacetime.
’Reaching into unseen dimensions, anchoring itself by pulling on mass from realities beyond this one...’
That’s what allowed it to do the impossible—to hold other stars, systems of stars, in a stable orbit.
These smaller stars weren’t just drawn to its overwhelming mass, but to the cosmic energy that radiated from it, binding everything around it in a delicate yet powerful balance.
It was a perfect harmony between cosmic energy and the universal laws of space, time, and gravity, creating this cosmic dance in which entire stars moved as though they were no more than planets orbiting the sun.
"You see it now, don’t you?"
Jamie said, watching Arthur’s dawning realization with satisfaction.
"The Star of Lightning isn’t just the centre of this part of the galaxy because of its size. It’s a gravitational well fed by magic and cosmic energy from across dimensions.
This is one of the great wonders of the Valmone universe."
Arthur nodded, still processing the sheer scale of what he was witnessing. This little explanation also helped Evan gain more knowledge on the star, more than what he already knew.
Jamie’s words hung in the vacuum for a moment, letting the crackling sound of the supergiant star of lightning fill the silence between them before continuing.
"The best part?"
His tone carried an unsettling nonchalance as he spoke.
"This star hasn’t even gone ’supergiant’ yet."
"..." "..."
For a brief, intense moment, Arthur and Evan just stared at Jamie. Then they blinked in unison, their brows furrowing as their minds tried to make sense of what Jamie had just spoken.
"Wait, what?"
