The Xanzhou Blight

"The Blight" is the common name for a star cluster featuring Xanzhou, a neutron star with particularly strong electromagnetic emissions. There are several systems in the Blight cluster, most of which would likely be only a few days' Warp travel from one another if properly surveyed.

Xanzhou, however, makes travel in the cluster extremely hazardous. At long interstellar distances it poses only a minor annoyance to communication and navigation, and two of the outermost stars in the cluster are thought to have been visited by multiple explorers. Xanzhou's emissions cause rapidly increasing difficulty for the machine spirits of voidships, as well as the ability of Navigators to perceive the configuration of the Warp. Furthermore, every few decades Xanzhou has been observed to "glitch"--an unpredictable and powerful emission of radiation that might have catastrophic effects on nearby voidships.

As famously inaccessible as the systems in the cluster are known to be, rumors abound about remains of strange colonies upon those words, and the value of the artifacts that a few daring souls are said to have brought back. Such stories tend to spring up around any poorly-explored region of space, however, and they remain entirely unproven.