Eagle Nebula

After transporting Hawke to this unknown star realm, the ghost race, made of human souls, disappeared to who knows where.

Hawke sighed tersely and began to make plans for his future.

The first thing to ascertain was where this was and whether it was still in the galaxy, and the second thing was to determine how much time had passed in the outside world during the day's journey.

This is a large nebula, a dozen light-years long and wide, which is a luminous nebula.

There are three types of nebulae: luminous nebulae, reflective nebulae and dark nebulae. Luminous nebulae, as the name implies, emit visible light themselves. A reflection nebula is one that reflects light from other stars, and a faint nebula is one that has no stars nearby or within it, so it is not visible in the visible band, but can be found by looking for black areas in the bright background.

The nebula that Hawke was passing through before he encountered the Moltonian civilisation was a dark nebula. The nebula that Hawke is now in is the Luminous Nebula.

This nebula is an extremely efficient and huge stellar factory. Countless amounts of interstellar dust have gathered into stars, and the ultraviolet light emitted by young stars causes the interstellar dust to ionise, so that in the visible wavelengths they appear faintly red.

That is why the starry sky here is not dark, but red. A magical scene can be seen here, where bright young stars are set beautifully above the faintly red sky, like a brilliant jewel.

But behind the beauty lies a sinister danger. Because of the large number of young stars, the radiation levels here are dozens of times higher than in the rest of the universe. Moreover, the more massive the star, the shorter its age, with the shortest-lived giant stars lasting less than 10 million years.

When a star dies, it has a different fate depending on its mass, with stars similar to the mass of the Sun dying as white dwarfs. After a supernova explosion, if the mass of the remaining core exceeds the Chandrasekhar limit, which is about 1.44 times the mass of the Sun, the core will form a neutron star.

If, after the supernova explosion, the core mass still exceeds the Oppenheimer limit, which is about 3.22 times the mass of the Sun, it will simply collapse into a black hole.

So it is certain that there is more than a neutron star, a white dwarf, or even the most dangerous star in the universe, a black hole, hidden behind this unusually beautiful reddish canopy.

At this stage, these dangerous stars would be deadly to Hawke. Hawke decided that here, in his own actions, he must be careful and careful again.

"It's so beautiful here ... but where is this?" Hawke sighed.

Perhaps it was because all these stars were covered by a dense dust belt, and here, there did not exist any stars that Hawk had included in the Group Paleography. To find the initial coordinate point, one must search outwards.

Hawke's gaze extended beyond the nebula. The stars beyond the nebula appear to be extremely faint, even imperceptible, due to their concealment by the nebula. For this reason, Hawke used a variety of observation methods, visible, x-ray, infrared and ultraviolet.

"It's an aging red giant, too small in mass to even qualify for a supernova explosion, about three thousand light-years away from ..., and not included in the Ultramarine Vault."

Hawke shook his head and gave up on the target after including it in the Swarm Vault catalogue.

"It's a red dwarf star, only ninety-three times the mass of Jupiter, which is really too small for a star, and it's not included in the Swarm Vault Book." After likewise including it, Hawke gave up on the target.

"Eh? This is a ... pulsar? How is its rotation speed, and pulse intensity, and nebula, so familiar?"

A pulsar is a type of neutron star, and if a neutron star can emit high frequency pulses, it is called a pulsar.

When he reached the thirty-fifth star, Hawk found a familiar pulsar. Immediately, Hawk launched a search in the Qunar Vault, and a tenth of a second later, Hawk found a star that matched all the data of this pulsar.

With a jolt of energy, Hawke immediately began a more detailed observation.

Over the next five hours, Hawke observed the pulsar in all frequency bands, from radio waves to gamma rays, and gathered a lot of data.

"This is the one pulsar in the ... Crab Nebula, ah." Hawke came to the conclusion.

This result made Hawk breathe a sigh of relief. Because it proved that he was still in the galaxy and not lost in the vast universe of stars.

It was about twelve hundred light years away from itself. The Crab Nebula, on the other hand, is about six and a half thousand light-years away from the Sun.

Having found the Crab Nebula, Hawke began to try to locate the Sun. But the Sun is only an ordinary yellow dwarf, and this is a place hidden by a heavy nebula, so the search for the Sun took a lot of effort.

Fortunately, over the years, Hawke's technology has developed tremendously, and consequently, astronomical observation methods have been updated, using the latest technology, and finally, after half a month, Hawke found the Sun through a very large radio telescope.

Here, the sun is not visible in the visible band, but it is possible to find it in the infrared band.

Having found the Sun, Hawke began to stretch out, using it as the initial coordinate point, and one familiar star after another was found by Hawke. Eventually, Hawke identified his location.

"So ... this is Eagle Nebula. Eagle Nebula is 6,000 light years away from the Sun and the ε Eri galaxy, and within the span of one day, I have actually crossed a long distance of over 6,000 light years to get here from the ε Eri galaxy ..."

Hawk's heart could not tell what it felt like.

Moreover, in the process of locating his position, by measuring the movement of the Sun, the Crab Nebula and other stars relative to certain benchmark neutron stars, Hawke also deduced the time he had consumed during the journey.

The conclusion was that during the journey, Hawke felt that only one day had passed, and that more than 6,100 years had passed in the outside world. A time ratio that reached a terrifying one to over two million two hundred thousand.

Through the time ratio, Hawke further deduced that his average speed, during that day's voyage, was roughly ninety-nine point nine hundred ninety-nine percent of the speed of light.

"Well, since my people have sent me here, I'll be at ease here." Hawke reassured himself.

After determining his location, and the time, Hawke began the busy task of organising his travels.

The Ghosts had brought the remaining Lucca fleet along with them. It was about 20,000 Lucca ships, including eight City ships. Of course, because of the Ghost attack, the energy shield engines of these ships were all damaged due to overload. However, judging from the way the Ghosts attacked, apart from the energy shield engines, these ships should not have suffered any major damage.

Thinking of this, Hawke's heart began to get excited. Hawke hadn't forgotten about the two great weapons of Class 4 civilisation origin that the Lucca fleet had carried when they came to capture him.

The force field generator was loaded on top of that provincial ship, which had already self-destructed, so the force field generator was out of the question, but, as Hawke remembered well, they had another level four civilisation weapon. That was, gravity bombs that could empty hundreds of kilometres of matter in every direction with just one!

They carried tens of thousands of gravity bombs, but in the middle of the battlefield, the gravity bombs that exploded were, at most, no more than a thousand. In other words, the gravity bombs that had not yet exploded all went to Hawk.

This huge harvest made Hawk very excited. Moreover, in addition to that, there were more than 20,000 Lucca ships, from within these ships, Hawke would be able to harvest more technology, which was also very important to Hawke.

Hawke sent countless droids to start landing on these Luca ships.

Hawke knew the structure of the Lucca ships very well, after all, Hawke had experience in dissecting Lucca ships, so Hawke's robots easily found the power and control systems of the ships.

Within the ship, Hawke saw countless long-dead Lucanians. However, Hawke did not bet much on them, and simply gathered them up and hastily cremated them.

The ships still had plenty of fuel, so there was no need for Hawke to draw fuel from his own ship. Hawke manipulated the droids, modified the operating systems of the ships and installed the over-the-horizon communications equipment, and they were now owned by Hawke.

The number of ships in Hawke's fleet grew to 130,000 in an instant. Of these, sixteen were City ships, and the number of County ships reached three thousand.

The damage to the Luca ships was not serious, and once the energy shield engines were repaired and the energy shields were regained, the performance of these Luca ships would be better than Hawke's own ships.

After modifying the ship's control and power systems, and initially repairing the energy shield system to give it a basic level of protection against meteorite impacts, Hawke steered the huge fleet and set off on a new journey.

This time, the target of the voyage was the nearest star.

This star, only 0.3 light years away, would take Hawke about thirty years to reach his destination.

Thirty years was not a long time for Hawke.

In the middle of the pale red cosmic space, Hawke's fleet was travelling at a rapid pace.