IBHJ 1331

It was light.

A vast, boundless light.

Even with his eyes shut, Shirou felt the searing brightness pressing against him, cutting through every layer of his senses.

Slowly, he opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was the sun, massive and brilliant as always—but it wasn’t the sun that made him freeze. It was what surrounded it.

His breath caught.

No… that wasn’t just a star. That was something else entirely. Something crafted, not born.

A structure so massive it wrapped the entire solar system in chains of glowing steel and light.

A Dyson Sphere.

Stretching across the void, an endless web of starlit metal circled the blazing sun at the center. It pulsed with power, majestic and terrifying in scale. Pathways of energy linked every planet, forming arcs that shimmered as they moved in rhythm, like constellations brought to life.

The entire construct spun slowly, a quiet dance in harmony with the sun’s pull. And far out near the edges of the solar system, trails of light stretched even farther—reaching into the great unknown beyond the stars.

Shirou couldn’t tear his eyes away.

Even Chaos, for all his monstrous grandeur, was nowhere close to something like this. Even the Ideal King's barrier, as overwhelming as it was, couldn’t compare to it.

This place—this impossible machine—was the legacy of an age long buried.

The Origin Era.

A civilization that rewrote the interstellar law. The ones who forged the Arrow of Akasha. The ones who sealed the Lord of Salvation away.

Shirou coated himself in black mud, sealing off his body from the freezing vacuum. The mud shifted and adapted, pulling in trace elements from the surrounding cosmos—sifting through scattered particles until it gathered enough oxygen to create a thin layer of breathable air around him.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough to keep him alive.

Just as he stabilized his environment, he felt it.

A heavy force locked onto him.

The Dyson Sphere's gravity had caught him, dragging his body toward the colossus.

Then suddenly a massive stream of information flooded his mind, overwhelming his senses like a flood crashing through a narrow tunnel.

[Analyzing foreign presence… Carbon-based lifeform detected. No friendly star-region identifier found. Warning issued—unauthorized entity within restricted core region. Immediate departure required. If ignored, removal protocol will activate.]

Shirou’s body tensed. The weight of the message wasn’t just mental—it was physical.

He could barely breathe.

"...Who are you?" he managed to ask, forcing the words out.

[Designation: Alaya System. Core defense unit of the Stellar Origin Civilization. You are trespassing in a restricted zone. Leave now. Final warning—depart immediately.]

"I'm from Earth!" he shouted. "Listen to me, I'm human!"

[Scanning in progress… Biochemical structure: 97% consistent with Earth-based organisms. Soul wavelength analysis: 35% correlation. Result: Foreign hostile mimicking Earth-human traits. Initiating elimination protocol.]

A chill ran through his chest.

She weren’t going to listen.

To the Alaya System, he wasn’t a visitor—he was a threat.

[Mother planet’s blessing detected. Judgment overridden. Interception sequence canceled. Welcome to the Gaia Star System.]

The moment Alaya revoked its defense protocol, the oppressive weight vanished from Shirou’s body. The pressure that had frozen him in place dissolved like mist, and before he could even breathe a sigh of relief, his body was pulled forward—gently, but irresistibly—toward the Dyson Sphere.

Guided by a silent directive from the system, he drifted along a predetermined path until he reached a massive structure—an ancient stronghold labeled in his mind as the Earth Fortress, located in the third orbital column.

He landed lightly. His boots hit solid ground with a quiet thud.

Rising to his feet, Shirou took in the scene.

Endless towers curved and twisted along invisible lines of geometry, their surfaces shimmering like folded stars. Great walls stretched on for miles, anchored in gravity-defying formations. The space itself felt wrong—as though time had bent around the buildings, stretching and coiling like a dream looping in on itself.

It looked like a temple built by gods. No, even that comparison felt too small.

But one thing stood out.

It was empty.

Not a single soul moved in the vast halls. No footsteps echoed through the corridors. No signs of life.

Only silence.

Then—

"Who are you?"

The voice came from nowhere and everywhere, brushing across the edges of his mind.

"We haven’t seen you before," another added, quiet and cold.

Shirou’s eyes darted around, but no one stood before him.

The voices were getting closer, intangible yet present, like whispers behind a veil.

It felt like he was speaking to ghosts.

"Information-based life forms..." he murmured, narrowing his eyes.

"You deceived Alaya, didn’t you?" one voice said, sharper now. "We’ve never seen you. You’re not from Earth. You’re a material lifeform."

Another spoke, more curious than hostile. "But strange... why do you carry Gaia’s blessing? And others... yes, we sense them. Blessings from multiple UOs. That shouldn't be possible."

“I’m from Earth,” he said quietly. “I… came from the future.”

For a few seconds, silence.

Then came the layered voices again, overlapping like waves.

“You came from the future?”

“Impossible,” another voice cut in. “You're lying. Your quantum structure is stable. No resonance anomalies. Your thought wavelength is consistent. There’s no distortion in your flow state—none of the signs that would suggest temporal displacement.”

“The Gaia Star System doesn’t support time-space travel. The temporal axis here is locked.”

Shirou’s brow furrowed. He didn’t fully grasp what they meant, but he got the gist—they were talking about the mechanics of time travel. The rules he must have broken just by being here.

Still, he could only respond with honesty.

“I’m telling the truth. I really did come from the future.”

The voices didn’t sound convinced.

“We don't believe you.”

“If you're lying, then you're either a new experiment from the Golden Emperor... or worse, a disguised infiltration unit.”

“Prove yourself. Come with us to see Gaia.”

One of them paused, then added coldly,

“If you refuse, we’ll be forced to treat you as a threat.”

Shirou sighed, raising both hands slightly in surrender.

“Alright. I’ll go with you-”

Before he could finish, the floor beneath him shifted.

A pulse of light spread across the ground, and the next moment, his body went weightless.

A white hole bloomed under his feet like a silent explosion, and he fell through.

When he blinked again, everything had changed.

He stood before a soaring Tower of Light, radiant and endless, piercing the star-speckled void beneath him. The space around him shimmered, as though reality had turned translucent.

Shirou stared at the radiant tower of light, eyes wide with amazement. The Star Anchor... That name drifted through his mind.

In front of the gleaming structure stood a throne, pure white and majestic in its stillness.