The Birth of Dimensional Travel
In the early 63rd century, Earth's gravitational integrity was on the brink of collapse due to unchecked mining across continental drift plates. It was during this resource crisis that Project HALCYON was born.
Led by an unknown savant only referred to as The Architect, HALCYON developed the first Dimensional Breach Engine (DBE), which could split localized reality into thin slices — revealing parallel instances of Earth, each altered subtly in time or composition.
The first jump was unintentional.
During a failed test in Antarctica, the DBE glitched and sent an observation drone into what would be labeled Earth-3XJ: a world identical to ours, except the oceans were replaced with black shimmering liquid and the sky bent like a lens.
The drone returned.
But it wasn't alone.
Inside it, embedded in its scanning module, was a shard of mineral that did not exist in any known chart — humming with raw potential, impossible gravity, and a signature that bent spacetime slightly around it.
That shard would later be called Zenthirite, and it would change everything.
With it, new engines were created. Experiments became expeditions. And eventually, The Dimensional Order was formed — a council of explorers, historians, and navigators who charted not only the stars, but all versions of them.
But knowledge has a price.
Some rifts opened into places where time stood still. Others, into realms where the laws of physics were mere suggestions.
And some rifts... were not meant to open at all.
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Back aboard the Astera V, Lys held a shard of Zenthirite retrieved from Fragment Theta.
It pulsed.
Not like an artifact.
But like a heartbeat.