Chapter 586: Intergalactic Expanse
"...Light from what?"
Evan asked with a furrowed brow and a confused expression, and right after, a faint glow caught his attention from below.
The boy froze.
His whole body screamed not to look and the sensation clawed at his gut, warning him. But, of course, Jamie had other ideas.
"Why don’t you look down and find out?"
Jamie teased with a grin, his voice laced with mischief and Evan silently swallowed, before slowly tilting his head downward, every muscle stiff with tension.
At first, his eyes only registered a mass of light—brilliant, overwhelming, almost blinding.
But then, as his vision stabilized, the enormity of what he was looking at came crashing down on him. It wasn’t just one massive source of light.
It was billions.
Billions of stars.
Evan’s breath caught in his throat. He knew what he was looking at, but even so, the question spilt from his lips before he could stop it.
"Is that Orithya?"
"BINGO!
That is your one and only home galaxy of Orithya!"
Jamie’s laughter rang out, bright and full of amusement as he threw his hands out theatrically.
"..."
Evan’s mind reeled as he continued to stare in silence. The sheer size of the galaxy seemed to have left him in a state of stunned disbelief.
’Wait a second...galaxies are enormous things, aren’t they?’
Such a thought crossed Evan’s mind as his gaze locked onto Orithya’s majestic swirl of stars and dust, and the realization dawned on him.
Earlier, he, Jamie, and Arthur had travelled thousands of light years to reach the Star of Lightning, and even then, they were still over a hundred thousand light years from the centre. Which meant Orithya had a diameter of at least 200,000 light years.
And yet... he could see more than half of it right now.
’The closer you are to something big, the less of it you can see. But the further away you are... the more it all comes into view.’
Knowing this, Evan questioned just how far away they were for him to see this much of the galaxy. To capture over half of it in his field of vision?
The question tumbled out of his mouth before he could stop it.
"How far away are we?"
"For you to catch all of that in your field of view...you really don’t wanna know."
Jamie’s reply came, the man still wearing his mischievous grin, but his answer told Evan everything.
They weren’t talking in thousands of light years. Not even hundreds of thousands. They were far, far beyond that.
Before Evan could finish processing how many million light years, Jamie continued speaking, his tone shifting into something more serious.
The man explained to Evan, why he had passed out, going on to state that the only reason he just ’passed out’ was because he was within the cosmic energy bubble Jamie created.
If he were to step outside it on accident, forget passing out, his body and soul would be crushed into space dust by the pressure.
Evan wasn’t even sure he could imagine the kind of force Jamie was talking about, but he knew it wasn’t something he wanted to test.
Even Arthur couldn’t survive out here for no more than a few minutes, but Arthur had the Cosmic Teleporter so if anything went wrong, he was going to bail without looking back.
Evan didn’t have that luxury, though. He was entirely dependent on Jamie’s protection.
The vast emptiness of space outside the galaxy never felt more dangerous, but somehow, Evan found it hard to take his gaze off Orithya.
It was as if something was trying to force him to keep not just his gaze, but all his senses on it.
While he was trying to force his senses out of that focus, Arthur and Jamie were busy making fun of the shapes of different galaxies.
"Jamie, that one looks like someone spilt paint. I mean, look at that swirl!"
"Yeah, it does. I think we should name it... Galaxy Splash."
Jamie laughed, nodding as he traced the strange shape with his finger while Arthur turned to another one.
"Look at that one. It looks like a lopsided doughnut."
"You mean the kind of doughnut you regret ordering because half of it is missing?"
"Exactly."
The two laughed after Arthur’s reply and they turned to another direction with a canvas of galaxies in the distance.
"And that one over there—what is it? A three-legged spider?"
"Looks more like a mangled squid, don’t you think? Flailing its arms, trying to figure out which way’s up."
Jamie squinted, examining the jagged, spiralling arms of a distant galaxy as he spoke, and just as Arthur was about to descend into another laughing fit, his eyes caught something.
"Wait, is that a Quasar in the middle?"
He asked, his tone shifting from amused to curious. Jamie turned in the direction he pointed and noticed the glowing beacon at the galaxy’s centre, nodding in affirmation.
"Yeah, looks like it."
The Quasar gleamed brightly, outshining the surrounding galaxies with its intense energy. Its radiant jets stretched across space, spewing out streams of energy that cut through the surrounding darkness like radiant lances.
Even from their vantage point, the distant Quasar looked like some sort of intergalactic lighthouse.
"Man, those things are wild—like the galaxy’s way of saying, ’I’m still hungry.’"
Arthur gave an analogy of the quasar and Jamie nodded along with a chuckle.
"Yeah, a black hole with a light show. Just the universe showing off."
It was around this part of their talk that Evan became more stable. He turned in their direction so he could see the quasar they were talking about and in the process of turning, his eyes caught sight of a rogue giant star floating silently in the emptiness of space.
The rogue giant star drifted through the void, its surface a turbulent swirl of crimson and gold plasma. It radiated a quiet light, standing out against the endless black of space like a solitary beacon.
However, this little beacon was nothing before the bright light of the quasar pulsating in the distance.
"There’s a black hole behind all that, right?"
"Yeah, it’s behind that entire swirling mass. But you can’t see it—not with all the gas, dust, and star births going on."
Arthur’s response to his question had Evan’s mind trying to imagine what it’d be like to see it without all of that. He would have to be a lot closer to it, but before he could even voice that thought, Jamie spoke.
"Yeah no, I can’t take you closer. If I did, you’d pass out again. Only this time, you wouldn’t wake up here—you’d be on the reincarnation path, right before your soul gets tossed into its next life."
Arthur burst out laughing, the sound echoing through the emptiness and Jamie quickly joined in, their laughter bouncing around Evan’s frazzled mind.
Evan just deadpanned, staring at both of them.
"Yeah, not like I wanted to be that close to a black hole. I just thought it’d be cool to see the whole thing, you know? The accretion disc, the jets, all that."
"Fair enough. But trust me, there’s only so far you can go before the black hole itself becomes the least of your worries.
Anyway, let’s go a bit further away so you can clearly see whatever you want to see."
Jamie snapped his fingers as he spoke, and for a brief moment, the vision of both Arthur and Evan dimmed, a strange sensation washing over them.
When light returned to their eyes, they noticed something strikingly different. The Orithya galaxy was now much farther away than before—so much so that they could see more of its spiralling beauty.
The galaxy now filled only part of their field of view, and as their gaze shifted beyond, they noticed something else: other galaxies beside it that were previously hidden from their sight.
"Whoa..."
Evan breathed out, before squinting at the sight of one particularly close galaxy.
"Hey Jamie, isn’t that galaxy like, really close to Orithyia?"
Jamie merely shook his head, a knowing smile on his face.
"They might look close, but they’re actually incredibly far away. That galaxy you’re pointing at is running parallel to Orithya, not moving toward each other.
Their gravitational fields are aligned. In other words, they’re on the same track but never destined to meet—unless, of course, something big happens to shift them."
Evan nodded, but the answer left him confused.
"Shift them?"
Galaxies didn’t just shift for no reason, did they?
"He’s talking about an external force—something huge enough to alter the balance of entire galaxies.
But Orithya’s safe. If anything like that happened, the Race Kings wouldn’t sit around twiddling their thumbs."
Arthur spoke, reminding Evan about those powerhouses that resided within Orithya.
Take Gozon’s demons, for example. Just from them alone, there are 71 beings capable of detecting any major galactic shift in advance and doing something about it.
And that’s just Gozon’s forces. Other Race Kings from other worlds would be on it as well.
"So yeah, Orithya’s not randomly colliding with any galaxy anytime soon."
Evan stared at the vastness before him, his mind racing as they casually talked about galaxies and beings powerful enough to protect entire star systems.
But instead of being awed, he felt a little overwhelmed. Maybe it was better not to think about it too much. He could only handle so much cosmic trivia at once.
"Yeah...let’s not bother with all that."
He muttered to himself, shaking his head as if to clear it from his mind.
He decided to focus on the beauty of the galaxy before him, taking in the swirl of stars, gas, and dust, far more comfortable with admiring it from a distance than worrying about galactic collisions.
"But...we’re much further away, right? Millions of lightyears away, right? How did we move so fast?"
Evan couldn’t help but ask this as he noticed that it only took Jamie a snap of his fingers to bring them further away from Orithya, far away that they could now see the entirety of the galaxy and others beyond it.
"I’m the Child of Space. In space, I’m more at home than a fish in water."
