"By the Emperor's lungs, what the hell is going on here?"
Adam broke into a cold sweat.
His eyes were filled with absolute disbelief.
To be honest, before arriving in this universe, Adam had carefully simulated countless possibilities.
He had considered the possibility of the Emperor's teleportation messing up, accidentally dropping him into some cosmic war between gods and demons.
He had even prepared himself mentally for the worst: if his luck was truly terrible and he landed in an apocalyptic, high-level battleground reminiscent of those early god-tier clashes, he would just accept it. To witness a battle of such absolute power—even if it killed him, it would be worth the price of admission!
However, Adam never imagined he would run into something so thoroughly absurd.
Where did my giant Foundation go? How did it just vanish into thin air?
Where was he supposed to look for it now?
Adam had not forgotten the primary goal of his trip: to force the Foundation to honor its promise and hand over the Square Peg in a Round Hole for his use, serving as the ultimate insurance policy for his plan.
But now that the Foundation was completely gone, who was he supposed to collect from?
"What do I do now?"
Adam forced himself to calm down.
He quickly searched his mind for answers, checking whether "a world without the Foundation" corresponded to any specific lore created by the endless upper-narrative authors.
However, he abandoned that train of thought almost immediately.
The universe was vast, and the maze of narratives had no end. He could instantly recall numerous world concepts that fit a similar premise, but none of them matched what he was currently seeing.
Heaven only knew which specific branch universe he had ended up in this time.
Without hesitation, Adam activated his Reality Warping ability.
The surrounding scenery shifted instantly. He disappeared from the lush green plain and reemerged a split second later in the middle of what should have been a bustling urban street.
Unfortunately, it was far from bustling.
The crowd was exceedingly sparse.
The structures along both sides of the street were in a state of utter ruin, with massive sections of plaster peeling off to reveal rusted steel reinforcement bars underneath.
The cars parked along the curb had clearly been abandoned for years, their roofs and hoods covered in a thick layer of moss. The air carried a damp, musty odor, like an forgotten basement.
The entire city looked as though it had been abruptly abandoned at some point in time and left to rot for uncounted years.
Yet, within a city that looked like an absolute ruin, Adam could still see human figures moving about.
And those pedestrians were walking around with smiles on their faces.
Everything seemed entirely ordinary to them.
It was as if nothing had ever gone wrong.
Carrying shopping bags, chatting in small groups, they occasionally paused to greet acquaintances. They stepped over cracked pavement and navigated around rusted iron plates, acting completely blind to the ruined state of their environment.
"What kind of situation is this now?"
Alarm bells blared in Adam's mind.
Without hesitation, he slapped more than a dozen different types of defensive measures onto himself, stacking layer after layer of protection.
Then, treating the situation with absolute gravity, he took a step forward.
Right. In a situation like this, the best course of action was to question a local.
Adam picked out a random passerby who looked like a young college student.
It was a tall, lean youth wearing casual clothes that looked quite familiar to Adam. He was walking along the sidewalk with a blank expression.
Adam walked up to block his path and materialized a microphone out of thin air like a magic trick, thrusting it in front of the young man.
"Excuse me, I'm doing a quick interview."
Normally, such an elaborate setup wouldn't be necessary.
However, Adam was taking no chances. He was operating at one hundred percent readiness, even employing a psychological suggestion as primitive as holding a microphone just to dig out pure information from beneath this peaceful surface façade.
The student turned his head somewhat sluggishly, staring blankly at the microphone before looking at Adam.
Then, he gave a slow nod.
"What is your name?"
"My name is Li Qi."
As Li Qi spoke, he stared curiously at the black object in Adam's hand. He tilted his head with a bewildered expression, as if looking at something completely incomprehensible.
"Sorry, before we start, I'm a bit curious... what is that black thing in your hand? I don't think I've ever seen one before."
Adam looked blankly at the microphone in his hand and fell into a brief silence.
Wasn't this just a completely ordinary, everyday microphone?
He hadn't used Reality Warping to pull out any bizarre local specialties from the Warhammer universe, so there was no reason the guy shouldn't recognize it.
"...This is a microphone. Have you really never seen one?"
"A microphone... Oh, so this thing is called a microphone."
Li Qi repeated the word slowly, as if chewing on an extremely important piece of long-forgotten information.
"Sorry, is this some kind of new high-tech product? It's my first time seeing something like this. How strange."
He spoke with effort, as though dragging every syllable out from the deepest recesses of his memory. His tone carried an odd, unnatural cadence.
Hearing this, Adam's brows furrowed instantly.
How does he not even recognize a microphone? What kind of anomaly is this?
"Do you know about the Foundation?" Adam pressed on.
Li Qi raised his head blankly and gave a slow shake.
"The Foundation? What's that? Sounds like some kind of organization... I'm not really sure."
Adam froze.
He doesn't know about the Foundation? What is going on here?
Suppressing his internal shock, Adam searched his memory. He came up empty. Even before he transmigrated, he hadn't read through every single Foundation canon and story in existence. Perhaps this was a specific version he had never encountered.
Just as Adam was thinking this, Li Qi suddenly spoke up again.
"Oh, now I remember. I think some people were making a fuss about something like that."
He frowned, as if trying hard to dredge up fragmented memories from a deep ocean. "They broadcasted a message to the entire world, telling everyone that they were leaving... Leaving this city—no, wait, I think it was... leaving the planet?"
Li Qi paused.
"To be honest, I didn't really understand how they left, either."
He stopped abruptly.
A deeper look of confusion crossed his blank face, as if he couldn't even confirm the validity of the words he had just uttered.
Adam remained silent for a moment. Remembering that the young man didn't even recognize a microphone, he couldn't help asking one more question:
"So, do you feel there's anything unusual about your surroundings?"
The response he received was an even more bewildered expression.
Li Qi slowly looked around him, gazing at the broken streets, the moss-covered abandoned cars, and the crumbling buildings. His eyes swept across the wreckage before settling back on Adam.
"I don't think there's anything different. Hasn't it always been like this?"
He paused, a look of complete naturalness appearing on his face.
"None of this is any different from what I remember, right?"
Alright then.
That leaves only one final possibility.
Having roughly realized what was happening, Adam finally let out a long breath of relief, putting his mind at ease.
He thanked Li Qi with a few brief words, then turned and left immediately. His departure was sharp and decisive, as if a firm conclusion had been reached.
The young man remained standing where he was, watching Adam's figure disappear down the end of the street before slowly resuming his walk.
It was as if nothing had ever happened.
Adam walked slowly through the wasteland.
By now, the truth had finally clicked in his mind.
His previous large-scale spatial scan had indeed covered a massive range, but in truth, it had only checked things on Earth.
He had just realized his own blind spot. He had completely overlooked everything beyond Earth.
To be fair, making such a rookie mistake was truly inexcusable.
In the Warhammer universe, Adam spent every day dealing with the vast, boundless void, traversing galaxies across distances measured in light-years. How had he limited his thinking to a single planet the moment he returned to the Foundation universe?
The Foundation universe had sci-fi interstellar canons too, didn't it?
With that thought, Adam slowly raised his head. His gaze pierced through the hazy gray sky above the city, punching through the atmosphere and reaching out into the vast void of space.
And then, he saw them.
They were... starships.
Gleaming, highly futuristic giant vessels flew freely through space. Though no visible thruster trails spewed from their sterns, Adam could sense the fundamental propulsion principles driving them.
Using Reality Warping, they nullified the strict physical laws of the universe, traversing between planets at faster-than-light speeds.
Meanwhile, the Moon had been transformed beyond recognition.
The once-barren, gray satellite floating silently in orbit was now densely covered with space megastructures.
Shipyards, orbital rings, deep-space harbors, energy matrices—massive metallic complexes overlapped and intertwined, enveloping the moon into a glowing, modernized fortress.
Enormous transport vessels took off and landed above the lunar base, the flames of their thrusters blooming silently in the vacuum of space.
As for the humans walking inside those space megastructures, their expressions were normal, their eyes bright, and their complexions healthy and energetic. They were clearly accustomed to low-gravity environments.
Without a doubt, they had broken free from the pull of their homeworld and become citizens among the stars.
Adam's vision extended further, passing straight through the Moon.
Mars, Callisto, numerous planetary space stations, Neptune, the Kuiper Belt...
The solar system was teeming with vibrant life, populated everywhere by the same space-dwelling humans he had seen on the Moon.
Adam's pupils contracted slightly.
Among those people, individuals wearing a familiar emblem moved openly without any concealment, their presence looking just as natural as the starships traversing the void.
It was a circle containing three inward-pointing arrows.
The Foundation.
Clearly, that concept and identity were no secret here.
Adam let out a relaxed laugh.
So that was it.
He finally recognized the true identity of this universe.
This canon was:
Ad Astra Per Aspera—Through Hardship to the Stars!