Ning found it incredibly hard to focus on anything as he looked down into the void. For some reason, he was feeling scared.
He never felt this sort of fear when he was flying through space, and yet, he felt it now.
"System, is my emotion natural right now? Why do I feel like it is your doing?" Ning asked.
<This is an instinct carved into every soul that turns into Energy after using the Energy System.>
<You are meant to feel scared so that you never enter a black hole in your life.>
Ning kept watching without saying anything. He quickly called Saphandra out as well. "I thought you would want to see it too," he told her.
"What am I looking at?" she asked. He couldn't see anything after all.
"That down there is a black hole," Ning told her. He simply couldn't keep his vision away from the thing down below.
"I've never seen something simpler and yet more horrifying in my life," Ning said as he felt the fear very clearly.
They were so far from the accretion disk that it didn't even register in their vision.
Ning finally gained back some focus and pulled out his body before changing back. He put the metal ball away and looked below at the black hole.
"Alright, I've looked at it. Tell me what you've been keeping to yourself about black holes," he asked.
<No, you haven't done it yet.>
"What? Look, I'm looking at it. See?" Ning asked while pointing out of the window.
<You cannot just look at it. Look into the black hole.>
"Into… oh," Ning looked down at the Black hole. Of course, he couldn't see anything in it, so there was no way to look into it.
A black hole, as far as Ning knew, was something with immense gravity, so much so that even light couldn't escape from it. If even light couldn't escape from something, then looking at it was impossible.
However, what if one didn't need light to look at something?
Ning had bought his Vision III skill long ago, which allowed him to see things as they would under light even in the absence of light entirely.
Ning took a deep breath as he was finally going to look into a black hole. He activated his vision skill and gazed down from the spaceship window.
"… what?" he looked confused. "Why… is it empty?"
Inside the black hole, there was nothing. There was no object inside the black hole at all, let alone having a high concentration of matter that created this massive gravitational pull.
In fact, this only made Ning even more confused as to where the gravity even came from if everything was empty.
"It's empty?" Saphandra asked after hearing him speak out loud.
"Yeah, it's empty. There's nothing in there. What the hell?" Ning was beyond confused at this point. He was in fact starting to believe that everything he had learned and knew about black holes until now was a lie.
"System, you need to explain right now why it is empty," Ning said.
<It is not empty. There is something tiny at the center that is hard to see.>
"There is?" Ning looked back into the black hole and saw the emptiness again. However, this time around he tried to find something, anything.
His vision zoomed to the most it could until Ning actually found something at the center of the black hole.
There was a crack in space, one that did not give off much light, but it was visible thanks to a mild glow around its edges.
"Hmmm?" Ning focused even more and looked at the crack, but he couldn't tell what exactly it was. As he was wondering, a few words came to his mind.
<You have looked into a black hole. You are now privy to information regarding black holes.>
<Next energy can now be unlocked.>
Ning was too confused to give a crap about the notifications and kept staring at the crack at the center of the Black hole.
Rather, there was no black hole, there was only this crack.
Ning watched the matter in the accretion disk slowly fall into the range of the gravitational pull where it couldn't resist but go inside.
Ning expected the matter that entered the range to continue spinning, but to his surprise, it instantly lost all momentum and fell to the center where the crack lay.
The object went into the crack and disappeared.
Ning looked at the thing down below with a surprised look and asked, "System, just what exactly is that?"
<The crack you see is the real Black Hole.>
<Black holes are the end of all matters. They are the gateway that take back back everything that has been given to this world.>
"Take back everything that has been given? What do you mean?" Ning asked.
<Everything originates in the form of Energy. It is only after coming to this universe that they turn into matter and space.>
<The black hole's task is to return everything back to energy.>
"So… a black hole is like a recycling bin for the galaxy where everything goes to die?" Ning asked curiously as he looked below.
<In a way, yes. It is where it all turns to energy before sending it away.>
"I see," Ning contemplated the information for a while. "Wait, where is it getting sent to again?" he asked.
<From where it all came. A world where matter and space do not exist, the dimension of Energy.>
Ning remembered something that he had known for a long time, but he hadn't thought about it since it never came up again.
"Wait… this world, do you mean the place where everything is Energy and I can die?" Ning asked.
<Yes.>
"So, a black hole is nothing different than an Origin," Ning said. "No, wait, they do the opposite things, right?"
<Correct, but you cannot compare a black hole to an origin on any planet. They are the exact opposite of galactic Origin.>
"A galactic Origin?" Ning questioned curiously.
<Yes.>
<Which is also sometimes known as a White Hole.>
