In a small town along the southeastern coast, the residents had long since retired, the entire place seemingly fallen into a deep, silent slumber.

Down a dimly lit alley, a young man pedaled his bicycle with labored grunts, his forehead glistening under the weak yellow glow of the streetlamp, beaded with sweat.

Suddenly, the young man's body stiffened; the bicycle wobbled twice before crashing against the adjacent wall with a dull clang. He tumbled to the ground, his head lolling to one side, utterly still.

Only the faint, lingering hum of the bicycle’s spinning wheels remained in the alley.

At this very moment, hundreds of meters above the town, the air warped violently for an instant before snapping back into place—a phenomenon lasting less than a minute.

In this precise location hovered an exploratory vessel belonging to an intelligent species from a hundred million light-years away. For security, the ship remained cloaked, determined not to alert the inhabitants of Earth.

Remarkably, these extraterrestrial beings were visually identical to humans.

The ship's captain was currently communicating with the main fleet anchored far beyond the solar system.

Unbeknownst to them, the powerful magnetic field generated during this transmission had inadvertently wrenched the soul of one Earthling free. Carried along by the communication waves, the essence was teleported toward the mother ship.

The mother ship's receivers could not categorize the anomaly, and the stray soul drifted near the massive vessel until, just as it began to dissipate, a tremendous suction erupted from some unseen point within the colossal craft, drawing it inside.

With their mission complete, the star fleet commenced its long journey home, carrying the lingering spirit of a twenty-year-old Earth boy into the vast expanse of the cosmos.

Several years later, the fleet reached the galaxy's sole spatial jump point. After executing several consecutive jumps, they finally arrived at a star system billions of light-years distant from the Milky Way.

On this particular day, everything aboard the fleet proceeded normally. Only two more years separated them from home, where endless honor and reward awaited.

This massive armada, equipped with the Empire's most advanced vessels, operated publicly under the guise of exploration, yet secretly shouldered a profoundly critical assignment.

Now that the task was flawlessly executed, every member of the exploration team felt immensely satisfied.

They had finally entered the sphere of a highly civilized region. The survey team relaxed their vigilance. The surrounding territories were populated by nations of low to middle-tier civilizations; they posed absolutely no conceivable threat to the Empire's cutting-edge starships.

Yet, fortune is fickle. While passing through a seemingly empty field of asteroids, the exploration team was horrified to discover inexplicable malfunctions erupting throughout the fleet.

The alarm lights flashed for less than ten seconds before the titanic mother ship silently disintegrated entirely, along with the hundreds of thousands of crew members aboard, dissolving into cosmic dust.

Simultaneously, a single asteroid fragment, no larger than one-tenth of a square meter, broke free from the local gravitational influence and vanished into the immeasurable void.