High Martial Arts: Slay enemies to become stronger, forge invincibility from billions of corpses.

The spaceship continued to accelerate.

The Cangxing spaceship's engines didn't work like rockets in any way that humans imagined; there was no roar or vibration, and not even any sound.

There was only a barely perceptible buzzing sound, like a bee fluttering its wings in the distance.

The spacecraft's internal gravity system simulates the standard gravity of Earth, allowing the crew members to walk, sit, and drink water normally inside the cabin, completely unaware that they are traveling through space at speeds far exceeding those of any human spacecraft.

Gu Qianzhi walked to the center of the hall and raised his hand to bring up the star map on the main control screen.

A luminous flight path originates from the solar system, extends along seven numbered jump nodes, and finally stops on a planet labeled "Streamer Star".

"Seven nodes," Gu Qianzhi began, speaking in a tone befitting a report to the council.

"The first node is about 0.1 light-years away from us, and we can reach it with a few jumps, in about an hour."

"So fast?" someone whispered.

"Not fast, 0.1 light-years, one hour, that's the speed of the Cangxing civilization."

An hour may not seem like a long time, but for someone entering space for the first time, every minute is something new and exciting.

When the spacecraft passed through lunar orbit, everyone crowded to the porthole to look.

The craters on the lunar surface are so clear from a close-up view that they seem almost tangible. The gray lunar regolith is covered with a layer of extremely fine dust, which reflects a soft silvery-gray luster under the sunlight.

Some people pointed to a huge crater on the far side of the moon and said that it was the landing site of the old Chang'e 4 lunar probe.

Immediately, someone countered that Chang'e 4 was on the other side of the moon, and the two groups then engaged in a small debate about lunar geography by the porthole.

Song Chen didn't participate; he just glanced at the moon from afar. It wasn't much different from the moon he had seen on Earth, except it was a bit bigger.

As the spacecraft passed through Mars' orbit, someone exclaimed in amazement.

The red surface of Mars unfolds outside the porthole, with the white ice on the polar ice caps contrasting sharply with the red deserts of the equatorial region.

Fifty minutes later, the spaceship approached the first jump node.

From the outside, this jump node looks no different from ordinary space; there is no glowing door or rotating vortex.

However, the spacecraft's navigation system clearly marked its location on the light screen, a space fold that has been stable for billions of years at a point of gravitational equilibrium.

"These spatial folds are natural," Gu Qianzhi explained to everyone, referring to the explanation in the spaceship's database.

"There are many such places in the universe. The warp drive technology of the Cangxing civilization utilizes these natural folds. They use a warp drive to make a hole in the fold, then go in from one end of the hole and come out from the other end."

"Like a wormhole?" Chen Yuanzhou asked.

"The principle is similar, but it doesn't require compressing the space into a tunnel," Gu Qianzhi continued to explain.

"A more accurate analogy is that space itself is a sheet of paper, and natural wrinkles are the creases that already exist on the paper."

"The function of the warp drive is to fold the paper along the crease, bringing together two points that were originally far apart, so that the spaceship only needs to step over it without having to dig a hole itself."

"How come humans never thought of such a simple principle as stepping over creases?" someone exclaimed.

"Some people thought of this long ago. Physicists of the old era proposed the theory of space folding in the 20th century, but there was not enough energy to realize it."

"The warp drive requires a star-core level of energy output, and before that, humanity couldn't even afford the ticket."

The spaceship slowed down slightly before the first jump point, and everyone held their breath.

The starry sky outside the porthole began to distort. The stars, which were originally fixed, suddenly seemed to be pinched and pulled by a hand, and the wavelengths of light were stretched and compressed at the boundaries of the folded space.

The stars changed color from white to blue, and then from blue to red, like a whole starry sky being kneaded into a rainbow-colored cotton candy.

Then the spaceship shuddered slightly, very lightly, like someone tapping a table with their finger, and the view outside the porthole completely changed.

The sun disappeared, and the familiar constellation arrangement was completely disrupted.

Instead, there was an unfamiliar orange star, with a huge gaseous halo revolving around it in the distance.

The halo's texture is as delicate as marble, and under the starlight, it displays a gradient of colors from deep orange to light gold.

"Where is this?" someone asked.

"I don't know," Gu Qianzhi admitted frankly.

"The star map only marks it as a transit star with the designation ND-7721; it has no name."

"The Cangxing Civilization's attitude towards these uninhabited stars is similar to our attitude towards roadside parking spaces: as long as they can be used, they don't deserve to have names."

The spacecraft stayed on this transit star for less than three minutes before accelerating toward the next jump node.

The second jump node was located outside the corona of a red dwarf star, and the spacecraft flew almost close to the plasma storm on the star's surface.

Outside the porthole, surging orange-red plasma reached temperatures of millions of degrees, but the temperature inside the spaceship remained unchanged. The heat insulation materials of the Cangxing civilization were able to keep out the high temperatures on the surface of the star.

The third transition point is at the gravitational equilibrium point of a binary star system.

The two white dwarfs orbit each other at extremely high speeds, completing one revolution in just a few hours.

Their gravitational pulls on each other, forming an extremely stable spatial fold in the middle.

The engineers of the Cangxing civilization used a technology that the mission members could not understand at all to erect a permanent jump gate on this fold.

The warp gate is a huge ring structure, hundreds of kilometers in diameter, made of some kind of silvery-gray metal, with no rivets or welds on its surface, just like the spaceship.

The inner side of the ring structure is covered with a light blue energy film, like a huge blue mirror suspended in space.

"There's something next to the jump gate," Zhou Wangyue suddenly said.

Everyone crowded to the porthole to look.

Near the base of the jump gate, several obviously unnatural structures are suspended.

As the spaceship drew closer, the details of the structures gradually became clearer; there were three in total, each with a different shape.

The closest one to the jump gate is a flat, disc-shaped building, about 200 meters in diameter, with flashing lights on its surface, showing obvious signs of human maintenance.

The other two, parked next to the building, were two small spaceships.

Much smaller than Song Chen's spaceship, one was spindle-shaped and the other spherical, with some kind of markings on their hulls that the mission members had never seen before.

"It's a jump gate management station," Song Chen said, having read about such facilities in the spaceship's database.

"The Cangxing Alliance has management stations at all official warp nodes, responsible for maintaining warp gates and registering passing ships, which can be considered toll booths in the universe."

Chen Yuanzhou tensed up: "They want to charge us? We don't have any money."

"The first voyage of a Class I civilization will be exempt from toll fees; it's stated in the documents."