Seraphine’s eyes blazed with divine radiance, cutting through layer after layer of memory images—straight toward the opponent’s recollection of that ritual before the Evil God...

  Only to find absolute blackness.

  From the very moment Erice stepped into the rite, every fragment of memory was swallowed by boundless darkness, sealed airtight, not a single trace escaping.

  As though some power had deliberately erased and smothered it.

  Erice, fully aware of Seraphine’s intrusion, felt his memories being ransacked one by one. Yet he betrayed no fear—instead, he chuckled with grotesque pride:

  “Well? Isn’t the story of my life magnificent? Aren’t my methods of torment exquisitely inventive? Heh heh heh heh... Did you know? On that mysterious night, my soul was utterly remade by the 【Great Eye】. From that moment, all pain turned to bliss. The carving of knives and axes upon my flesh, the mental anguish of despair, grief, and resentment... all of it only drives me to ecstasy, makes me tremble with joy.”

  At those words, Erice’s unrestrained grin abruptly darkened. He fixed his gaze on Seraphine, his face contorting with malice and venom.

  “So what can you possibly do to me? Pathetic, worthless fool! Ha ha ha! Torture only deepens my rapture! In the end, you’ll be forced to kill me... ah, but it won’t be easy. You’ll have to kill me over and over, an entire hour of desperate slaughter, before I finally die! Just imagining your ragged, despairing face—ahhh, it makes me want to die a thousand deaths from sheer joy!”

  “No... no, you’re mistaken.”

  Seraphine lifted one finger, wagged it lightly, then smiled with disarming calm:

  “There’s more than torment. More than death. There is a third path.”

  “A... third? What path?!”

  Erice froze. A wave of dread surged through his heart like ice water.

  Buzz——

  Space itself warped. A phantom maw yawned open and swallowed him whole.

  The blue sky, white clouds, and gentle meadow vanished at once.

  In their place stretched a boundless, gray wasteland—desolate, endless.

  And above it...

  The black void of the universe, pricked with faint, dying stars, stripped bare of atmosphere, pressed down upon him with merciless infinity.

  In the infinite void of the cosmos, a blue planet shimmered—seemingly impossibly distant, yet at the same time looming right before his eyes—at the bewildered edge of Erice’s vision. It hung there like an alien world, both unreachable and suffocatingly close.

  A jolt of wrongness surged through his chest, awe mingled with dread.

  And then, realization struck.

  This place... was the Moon.

  “I... I’ve actually been dragged to the Moon?!”

  At that very instant, a presence descended. Vast, crushing, unfathomable—like some eternal will stirring from the abyss of the universe. Erice’s soul shuddered as instinct screamed:

  Something divine had awakened nearby.

  Something that opened its eyes.

  For once, the face sculpted from his thick, turbid soul power grew solemn. Slowly, hesitantly, Erice turned toward the source of that terror.

  Whoosh—

  Blinding radiance detonated, swallowing all sight. The black sky, the gray earth—everything drowned in divine brilliance.

  And then he saw it.

  In the distance, a figure of pure light—vast, infinite—slowly opened serene eyes, gazing down with cold indifference.

  The moment Erice met that gaze, the heavens themselves ignited. The stars boiled, the air burned, and his Soul Body felt as if it would liquefy on the spot.

  It was like staring directly into a living sun.

  “You...”

  Erice’s voice cracked as he stared at Seraphine—seated in quiet meditation a thousand meters away. His words trembled out:

  “So... this is your true form. It’s... beyond comprehension!”

  The Seraphine he knew on Earth was already enough to crush him, to toy with him, to kill him a thousand times over with ease.

  But this one—this one on the Moon—had power so far beyond his scope of understanding it broke his mind to measure it.

  A hundred million times stronger?

  A trillion?

  A hundred quintillion?

  There was no answer. Only the abyss of the unknown.

  Buzz—

  Suddenly, an alien force welled up from every direction, swallowing Erice whole. It flooded through him, twisted him, remade him.

  And then the world around him began to grow.

  The ground stretched wider, the sky swelled deeper, space itself ballooned outward.

  Even the drifting lunar dust that had floated like mist now surged and expanded into titanic shapes—pale mountains of chalk-white stone, each larger than a stadium.

  The very fabric of the Moon transformed.

  The gray soil vanished beneath him, swept aside by the advance of a flawless, endless jade-white plain. A land without blemish, gleaming like sculpted crystal, raced across the horizon and consumed the landscape where Erice drifted.

  And in the farthest reaches of that radiant plain...

  He glimpsed them.

  Five colossal jade pillars, piercing the heavens, binding sky to earth.

  “What... what is happening? Am I... shrinking?!”

  The words barely left his lips before suffocation struck—immense, suffocating pressure pressing down on his chest.

  Erice instinctively lifted his gaze—

  And froze.

  The starry sky was gone.

  In its place hung a face.

  An enormous face, vaster than the sky itself.

  Upon that colossal face, two blazing eyes—like twin suns—half-lidded, released strands of divine radiance, freezing not just the world but the very pulse of creation itself.

  Through that suffocating brilliance—radiance that by its very presence shredded his soul body—Erice strained with every last shred of willpower. Finally, he caught a glimpse: a pair of vast golden eyes, cold and merciless, gazing straight down at him.

  “Seraphine?!!”

  His body quaked violently, disbelief ripping from his throat:

  “You... You can alter the size of all things?!”

  “Hm...”

  From the heights of the firmament, her voice rolled forth—immense, calm, and devastating, shaking all phenomena.

  “Neither your body nor the world around you has changed. What has changed is the space itself. I have compressed it... a trillion times.”

  “Uh... Uh...”

  Erice’s soul-wrought face twisted into utter shock. His five senses vanished, collapsing into nothing but a whirling, turbid vortex.

  Compressing... space... a trillion times?!

  What kind of impossible, mythic ability was this?

  It defied reason. It was madness made real.

  Seraphine’s serene voice drifted down again, vast and timeless:

  “Through endless cultivation, I came to grasp the essence of space and dimension. Near and far, great and small—such terms have lost all meaning to me.”

  “...”

  Erice’s heart sank into bewilderment, no longer able to fathom her power.

  And then her voice descended once more—serene, distant, yet cutting like scripture:

  “You claimed that order is fleeting and chaos eternal. At first glance, it seems true... but in reality, that is only the overture.”

  “Within any closed system, entropy increases—it never decreases. With time, all things unravel: suns die, galaxies fade, even black holes eventually evaporate into nothingness. Yet when chaos reaches its absolute extreme, even chaos itself collapses, leaving only the endless void.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Erice’s gaze narrowed, his tone cold, defiant.

  The titanic visage above arched a faint smile.

  “Do not let your soul be bound by the false duality of killing and torment, Erice. Expand your vision.”

  “You claim no fear of death, no fear of pain, that you have no weakness. But...”

  Buzz—

  Countless threads of mental power cascaded from the heavens, descending in a storm of light. They wrapped Erice in an instant, spearing into his soul body from every direction, drilling into its deepest recesses.

  And there, using his own soul’s energy, they began to weave—constructing intricate pathways, complex frameworks, impossible architectures within his essence itself.

  Erice convulsed as his soul warped under a transformation both alien and profound. He could not begin to comprehend what was happening. Raising his head, his voice rasped with both gloom and fury:

  “What are you trying to do? To dissect the secret of my pain immunity? Ha! Don’t waste your time! There is no mechanism—it’s pure spiritual transfiguration! Kill me already! Let me rot inside your heart as a thorn forever—ha ha ha—haunt you until the day you die!”

  At that moment, Seraphine gazed down from the heavens, lips curling into a soft chuckle:

  “Patience. The mechanism I’ve inscribed into your soul will take time to operate. When it is complete, all of your power will no longer belong to you—it will be subsumed, controlled. And you... you will be reduced to a fragment of incomplete awareness, shackled to the device itself. Your soul will be your prison.”

  Her voice reverberated like law pronounced by the firmament.

  “And your perception of time—yes, I will accelerate it a millionfold. That is the limit of what your soul can endure. Were it otherwise, I would gladly increase it to one hundred billion times... or a trillion, to make it truly unbearable.”

  Erice’s Soul Body instinctively recoiled, his voice low and harsh:

  “Control my power? Warp my sense of time? So what—just to prolong my torture? Hmph. You should know by now... such things mean nothing to me.”

  Seraphine’s laugh rang out, clear, melodic—and merciless.

  “How quick of you. Yes, you guessed there would be torment. But not the kind you imagine.”

  Her eyes glowed as she peered into Erice’s essence, as though his very soul were a fragile insect resting in her palm.

  “Though your soul power is immense, its essence is muddled. By nature, your lifespan is scarcely a century. But with your thirty-three million ‘lives,’ you will resurrect each time you succumb to age. Cycling endlessly, that grants you more than three billion years of existence. A crude imitation of the Immortal Species. Not the worst fate.”

  Her smile then twisted into something cold, cruel, divine.

  “So here is your sentence: I will seal away all your senses—hearing, touch, sight, taste, smell, even your mental power. Every perception of the outside world will vanish. I will bury you in the heart of the Sun. There, you will endure a life stretched to madness itself. Unless the Sun withers into death, you will never walk among humanity again.”

  Her words were soft, but each fell like an eternal decree:

  “You will never sleep. You will never dream. You will never touch or be touched again. The only thing left to you... will be yourself. Even the fantasy of weaving illusions with your own soul power—denied. That too, sealed away.”

  “And lest you fracture into a thousand personalities in your desperation, the construct I’ve woven into your soul will tirelessly preserve your coherence, forcing you to remain stable—forcing you to feel every moment. All of them. Without escape.”

  Erice stood petrified, as if frozen in stone. Seraphine’s laughter chimed like cruel bells.

  “Suicide? Ah, that luxury is forbidden. Life and death are no longer yours to command. From this moment on, you cannot die without my sanction. I sentence you to billions of years of silence and emptiness. And with your perception accelerated a millionfold... your prison term will stretch across quadrillions of years.”

  Erice’s Soul Body convulsed violently. For the first time, an alien sensation surged from the pit of his being.

  That sensation... was fear.

  Shaking like a man seized by seizures, he roared at the sky:

  “You lunatic! You monster! Someone... someone will—”

  Seraphine clenched her hand.

  The scream snapped off, silenced in an instant.

  Her gaze turned upward, toward the burning Sun. Her figure shimmered, blurred—

  Swoosh!

  Over 140 million kilometers away, outside a colossal blazing sphere that had been turning since the dawn of time, a figure appeared within the solar corona—Seraphine.

  She gazed down at the endlessly roaring surface of the Sun, a hellish ocean of fire, her expression utterly calm.

  The Sun—1.4 million kilometers across, a sphere of burning plasma entwined with magnetic fields.

  For billions of years it has poured its immeasurable energy outward, nurturing generation after generation of intelligent life on Earth.

  So vast. So overwhelming.

  And yet, in Seraphine’s eyes—fragile.

  She plunged through the raging streams of charged particles lashing outward from the solar surface, cutting across the corona and descending toward the chromosphere.

  Around her, terrifying eruptions and searing heat flared constantly, yet to her they were no more than a summer breeze, hardly worth notice.

  Crack!!!

  Suddenly, a solar flare of impossible scale burst upward—its girth greater than Earth itself, its length stretching hundreds of thousands of kilometers.

  Rumble—Rumble—Rumble!!!

  Like a dozen burning planets exploding at once, the flare surged toward Seraphine with crushing, apocalyptic force.

  But she only flicked her sleeve.

  Boom!!!

  It was as if ten worlds had detonated together.

  A storm of light consumed the heavens for hundreds of thousands of miles.

  From Seraphine’s hand surged a power vast enough to pulverize Earth into dust. It slammed into the flare, ripping it apart with a titanic detonation. The flare shattered into a swarm of blazing dragons of fire, each the size of a moon, flung across the void in all directions.

  The shock was so great it set half the Sun’s surface shuddering.

  In a region nearly 100,000 kilometers across, the magnetic field collapsed instantly. Fire and light went mad, billions of high-energy particles exploded outward, and the entire zone dissolved into chaos.

  And under these extreme conditions, a new, even fiercer Solar Flare began to brew, on the verge of eruption.

  But by then, Seraphine had already pierced through the Sun’s outer layers, continuing her descent.

  Before her body—harder by countless orders of magnitude than the heart of a neutron star—even this wrathful Sun could not inflict the slightest harm.

  Every second, Seraphine pierced downward tens of thousands of kilometers.

  Along her descent, the torrents of high-energy particles colliding against her triggered instant nuclear fusion reactions.

  Colossal nuclear detonations, beyond all possible measure or equivalence, erupted ceaselessly around her.

  Two minutes later, Seraphine reached the solar core.

  Here, thermonuclear fusion blazed unending, moment by moment.

  Temperatures soared to 15 million °C, while the density surpassed even lead tenfold.

  Amid this furnace, Seraphine lifted her clenched left hand. Slowly she opened it, releasing a tiny mote of black light.

  It was Erice’s soul.

  Through Seraphine’s intricate alterations, the soul’s outer boundary had been reshaped into a spatial discontinuity, woven with tens of thousands of complex structures.

  No matter how violent the Sun’s core, it could not pierce this heavy barrier to wound Erice.

  Every eruption of energy was scattered, consumed, transmuted, and finally absorbed into the discontinuity—softened into a current that sustained its existence.

  But within Erice’s time perception, the few minutes that had passed outside equaled more than half a year of crystal-clear torment.

  The instant she sensed the outer world, her voice broke into desperate pleas:

  “Please kill me! I beg you! These days are unbearable!”

  Seraphine gave only a slight nod, a faint laugh:

  “Your endurance is pitiful. You cannot even withstand three minutes? Very well—this is the last time we meet. Farewell.”

  “No… no, no, no! Don’t lock me away!”

  Erice’s Soul Body twisted in despair. His face contorted, wanting to kneel and bow before Seraphine, yet he found himself unable to move. He could only shriek and plead for mercy:

  “I beg you! I beg you! Please—kill me! Ahhhhhh—!”

  Then silence.

  The speck of black light, small as a grain of dust, lay motionless within the Sun’s heart.

  And Seraphine—was gone.

  …

  The boundless cosmos stretched out, hushed and infinite.

  In the endless vacuum, Seraphine drifted forward with effortless grace, her wide-sleeved robe trailing behind her.

  As she walked, countless streaks of silvery, phantom light shimmered into existence, casting their glow across the deep black of her wide sleeves, like stars against a void.

  Her loose robe billowed and swelled, the endless stellar phantoms embroidered upon it drifting and flickering as though alive.

  Amid the flowing tides of light and shadow, her figure resembled a slow-turning galaxy—much like her eyes, fathomless and impossible to grasp.

  These so-called “illusory lights,” as if fired from realms beyond the world, were in truth subtle manifestations of high-dimensional pure energy bleeding into low-dimensional reality.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  They were the strange phenomena that arose whenever Seraphine cultivated.

  Having already opened the gate to the eighth layer, she could feel the ninth layer’s heavenly gate drawing ever nearer.

  It might be minutes; it might be hours.

  But soon, she would master the Skyroot Codex completely, ascending to the peak of the Martial Saint Grand Realm.

  Buzz—

  With her calm, measured steps, each pace twisted vast swathes of space, folding and contorting them violently.

  Inside that vortex, where everything bent beyond recognition, her form flickered in and out, as though she had become pure nothingness—ready to vanish from this universe at any moment.

  And with every distortion, like a black hole swallowing all before it, each tranquil step hurled her hundreds of thousands of kilometers forward.

  Her speed rivaled light itself.

  Yet even for Seraphine—who could twist, compress, and fold space to accelerate her movement—her velocity remained bound to the universal limit.

  Not an inch, not a fraction, surpassed the speed of light.

  It was as if the cosmos itself were her jailer.

  No matter her power, the universe refused to let her transcend that shackle.

  “Even with this spatiotemporal compression technique—born from dimensional theory, spatial modeling, and the relations of cosmic curvature—I cannot break through the chains of light-speed.”

  Walking with clasped hands amidst the storm of distortions, Seraphine frowned, her voice low:

  “Is this shackle truly so unbreakable?”

  The universe gave no answer.

  It remained silent.

  "Ah." Seraphine’s lips curved into a faint smile. “The shackles of the speed of light will eventually be broken—by me.”

  Her gaze lingered on the star clusters glittering light-years away, before she resumed her steady walk through the void.

  A few minutes later—

  Roughly sixty million kilometers from the Sun, hovering just beyond Mercury’s tenuous atmosphere, a figure shimmered into existence, wrapped in distorted ripples of warped space.

  It was Seraphine, who had traversed the gulf by bending the fabric of reality itself.

  Looking downward—

  Through the planet’s fragile, near-nonexistent veil of atmosphere, she perceived the truth beneath Mercury’s scorched and barren surface: a fledgling colony of mobile life forms, crawling like ants.

  These primitive Mercury ants scurried tirelessly through the subterranean rock layers.

  They burrowed, harvested materials, carved tunnels to shape their nests, reproduced, and slowly pieced together their fragile little kingdoms.

  If left undisturbed, it was entirely possible that one day, from among them, Mercury’s first intelligent species would emerge.

  But the pioneering creatures had no inkling that at this very moment—just a hundred thousand kilometers away, in the silent dark of space—an otherworldly visitor was quietly watching them.

  Of course, with their rudimentary structures and barren minds, it would take eons before they could even begin to grasp the concept of an 【alien】.

  Suspended in the void, witnessing the fragile spark of life’s beginning, Seraphine exhaled a soft sigh:

  “Even such simple life on Earth required countless years to evolve.

  And yet, after Ether’s recovery, even a world like Mercury—where complex organisms should never survive—can give rise to such creatures in so short a span.

  It seems Ether is far greater than I ever imagined.”

  She tilted her head slightly, gazing down at silent Mercury, and whispered:

  “With Ether surging, the birth of life itself has become easy. If that is true, then the Milky Way is not the empty void we once imagined. On the contrary—it may already be overflowing with life, bustling and alive.”

  For a moment she lingered in the stillness of the void, lost in thought. But soon Seraphine pulled her mind away from vast meditations on life, civilization, and galaxies—and turned it back to herself.

  Ever since she had ‘acquired’ that Pyramid spaceship, she had set countless avatars loose within Imaginary Space, conducting intricate, painstaking research on the craft.

  And after a long span of meticulous investigation, Seraphine reached her conclusion.

  The Pyramid ship—its origin steeped in mystery—had been ravaged by one hundred and fifty thousand years of time. After scouring it down to the atomic nucleus, she uncovered not a single artifact, not even the faintest trace, left behind by the civilization that built it.

  All that remained was its hollow, incomplete shell—stripped of countless essential components and systems.

  Yet in Seraphine’s eyes, even this stripped-down hull was a priceless treasure.

  From the thousands of layered dimensions of Imaginary Space nested within its structure, she reverse-engineered an advanced, elegant method of opening and sustaining Imaginary Space far beyond her earlier mastery.

  And within the vast lattice of Ether-Crystallized nuclei forming the ship’s body, Seraphine uncovered something staggering: those nuclei, artificially modified, possessed an intelligent network of their own. They could transmit both energy and information, shift autonomously, monitor their surroundings, and repair damage throughout the vessel.

  This microscopic, intelligent material design gave the Pyramid ship a lifespan approaching eternity.

  For Seraphine, it also ignited entirely new perspectives on the Ether-Crystallization material technology she herself had pioneered.

  Drawing on fragments of Mercury Race material science and shards of Pyramid civilization technology, her Ether-Crystallization fabrication advanced with stunning speed. Pushed by these revelations, her mastery surged to the nanometer scale—and was now pressing forward into the picometer frontier.

  Soon, perhaps, the reverse-engineered Mercury Race ship would be ready for mass production—heralding Earth’s leap into the true era of the great starry sea.

  And the riches of knowledge within the Pyramid craft went far beyond that.

  Its energy-transmission lattice, woven seamlessly through the entire hull, granted Seraphine profound insights into wireless energy transfer—a path she had never before touched.

  Above all, the ship’s most valuable feature lay in its modular power-core system, which drove her grasp of energy science higher with every passing study.

  She could not yet unravel the full technical principles.

  But even the layers of Ether-simulated high-energy materials that wrapped its surface carried such depth of brilliance that Seraphine felt herself advancing with every fragment absorbed.

  If one were to pursue this technological path, the Mercury Race’s antimatter reactor technology could be tossed straight into the trash.

  Antimatter is notoriously difficult to manufacture, a nightmare to store, and inherently unstable to use. A single mishap could annihilate an entire starship.

  Even on a planetary surface, building antimatter plants is suicidal—one accident, and an entire biosphere would be reduced to ash.

  Even producing it in orbit carries the same curse: one mistake, and everything ends in catastrophe.

  The only surviving application of value is the core antimatter-cell tech used for maintaining the Etheric Battleform.

  By contrast, the Pyramid ship’s core reactor—driven by Ether-simulated high-energy materials—completely sidesteps these risks.

  Though its energy density falls short of antimatter, the technology boasts overwhelming advantages in safety, stability, and universality.

  So long as Ether exists, the reactor can endlessly extract it, transmute matter, and generate energy.

  And yet—these are merely the reactor’s peripheral technologies. The core breakthroughs—hydrogen-isotope decay, dark matter annihilation, vacuum energy harnessing—lie on a level far too deep. Seraphine lacked not only the principles, but even the prerequisite frameworks needed to begin.

  Now, she can only lean on the Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation, inching forward against exponential difficulty.

  Her inner Ocean of Knowledge is now crammed with thousands upon thousands of massive 【Problems】, densely clustered like storm clouds.

  And yet, this too is a gift.

  Alien sciences—whether fragments or complete systems—continuously collide within her mind. With every clash, new problems are born; with every clash, new answers emerge.

  An endless cascade of inspiration drives her forward, elevating her martial arts realm step by step, higher and higher.

  Deep within the hull, at its most critical junction, Seraphine uncovered something extraordinary—an incomplete, shattered warp drive.

  In fact, the very foundation of her earlier ability to compress space and accelerate through the cosmos stemmed from her study of this damaged relic.

  Warp travel—better known as the warp drive.

  Through her painstaking, atom-level dissection of the engine, Seraphine deduced its underlying principle: when activated, the drive would generate a warp field encasing the entire Pyramid vessel, forcing it to bulge outward from the fabric of flat spacetime.

  In terms of general relativity, this could only be described as a Lorentz Manifold.

  From the fragments of data she painstakingly salvaged, Seraphine speculated that a ship cocooned within this Lorentz Manifold warp field could, in theory, break the ultimate barrier—achieving faster-than-light travel itself.

  This was the ability she craved above all others.

  But cruel Time had twisted the engine into ruin.

  And beyond that, its technological tier lay far above Earth’s reach.

  Even the formidable Mercury Race—who, in their prime, nearly erased Earth from existence—had no trace of such a technology.

  Neither the reverse-engineered Mercury starship nor the harvested memories of its crew contained so much as a whisper of warp mechanics.

  The likely truth was simple: the Mercury Race never possessed it at all.

  Perhaps the barrier to this technology is staggeringly high. Even with the Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation, Seraphine could not hope to reconstruct its technology tree anytime soon. She hadn’t even glimpsed the roots—only brushed the bark.

  The gap was immeasurable.

  And worse still: to ignite the engine, to generate a stable, functional warp field, a ship would require vast amounts of 【Negative energy】.

  That energy came from a single source: Exotic Matter.

  So-called Exotic Matter is a special form of quark matter—a high-pressure fluid composed of up quarks, down quarks, and strange quarks.

  Its properties are bizarre. Instead of collapsing under gravity, it pushes back, exuding tremendous repulsion—negative pressure on a cosmic scale.

  But such matter can only exist in the hellish crucibles of neutron star cores, under crushing densities, searing temperatures, and unimaginable pressure.

  In short—the Solar System holds no neutron stars, and thus, no Exotic Matter. Activating the warp drive here was little more than a dream.

  Had this been before she obtained the memories of the Mercury crew, Seraphine might have reached a dead end, despair gnawing at her.

  After all, the nearest neutron star is hundreds of light-years away. Distant water cannot quench a fire at your feet.

  But now... now the situation was different.

  During the Mercury Race’s desperate flight through the Oort Cloud, Seraphine had glimpsed traces of Exotic Matter.

  The so-called Galactic Tyrant—the very being that had driven the Mercury fleet into abject terror—was vividly annotated in the memories of their corpulent, well-informed captain.

  According to the Pauli exclusion principle, identical particles cannot occupy the same quantum state. Forced into tighter and tighter confinement, particles surge into higher energy states, generating crushing degeneracy pressure and strength on a cosmic scale.

  The Galactic Tyrant, entombed in slumber deep within a black hole, was no ordinary beast. It was forged entirely from matter in a neutron-degenerate state.

  In other words—it was a neutron star given life.

  Not a lifeform clinging to the surface of a neutron star, but something far more terrifying. The Tyrant itself was a sentient neutron star.

  And within such a being, Exotic Matter almost certainly existed.

  Only by harvesting Exotic Matter could the Pyramid’s warp drive ever be awakened.

  And only by bringing the engine to life, forming a tangible warp field, could Seraphine leap directly from the warped fabric of spacetime itself—skipping over the incomprehensible gaps in the technology tree—and claim true faster-than-light travel through her own extraordinary mastery.

  Yes, she already wielded the Real Number Channel, a secret technique capable of breaching light-speed. But its limitation was absolute: 【effective information propagation speed cannot exceed c】. Over interstellar distances measured in light-years, it became cumbersome, almost impractical.

  Thus, Seraphine’s hunger for a simpler, more efficient FTL capability burned fiercely.

  And for a being of such scale—a Galactic Tyrant—worlds like Earth, Mercury, and Mars were nothing but brittle parchment. Even the Sun itself was but a trifle in comparison.

  No wonder the Mercury Race trembled before it.

  On the subject of planetary destruction—

  Seraphine herself had recently ventured into the Sun’s blazing core. After days of cultivation amid its inferno, she had finally mastered the Skyroot Codex in its entirety.

  Buzz—

  All one hundred and eight of Seraphine’s major acupoints erupted with divine radiance.

  The surrounding void twisted violently, as though reality itself were about to rupture from being overfilled. From beyond the veil of dimensions, endless torrents of pure energy cascaded into the material world, spiraling and coiling around her. Seraphine stood calm, arms spread wide, as the flood was drawn into her form, devouring and refining itself into sublimation across the hundred trillion cells of her body.

  Zoom in—deeper, microscopic.

  Every cell within her blazed and boiled in the storm of high-dimensional energy, each one transfigured into a tiny sun, glittering with incandescent power.

  Her body, her soul—both surged upward in an unstoppable, mad ascent.

  BOOM!!!

  In that instant, Seraphine standing against the cosmos became a true Sun.

  Matter itself howled. The eruption mirrored the ferocity of a gamma-ray burst.

  With eyes half-closed, she floated with arms outstretched, casually unleashing rings of electromagnetic annihilation, torrents of destructive force rippling outward. Around her spread billions of ultra-high-energy electric fields—each one powerful enough to vaporize worlds.

  All of it raced outward as blinding radiance, sweeping across the universe in every direction.

  So dazzling. So brilliant.

  The Sun’s own surface dimmed in shame beneath her impossible light.

  But Mercury—the closest world—suffered catastrophe.

  Its fragile atmosphere was instantly scoured away, vaporized by the lightstorm of her breakthrough, even from one hundred thousand kilometers distant.

  Within seconds, the surface itself blazed to tens of thousands of degrees.

  The air warped, mountains buckled, the crust wept into rivers of molten stone.

  The sky seethed, crimson and furious.

  And if, in that moment, some wandering soul had walked upon Mercury’s inferno and dared to look upward—

  They would have witnessed the starry night itself torn apart, shredded by a sea of boundless light.

  Within that boundless sea of pure white radiance, a single golden-white Great Sun hung suspended in the heavens, its overbearing blaze bright enough to blind billions.

  So dazzling. So brilliant. The entire starry vault seemed to burn beneath its fire.

  From afar, endless golden-white flames boiled and roared through the cosmic void—an unspoken declaration of her immeasurable power.

  And with the spread of those boundless flames, uncountable trillions of razor-sharp divine lights were born, streaking forth in torrents toward the four cardinal directions and the eight realms.

  Each divine light was like a celestial blade from some high tribunal, rending the mortal world and the Underworld alike, shredding the unseen barrier between reality and the Sentience Realm. They plunged into that hidden realm, throwing it into violent upheaval.

  In the chaotic depths of the Projected Layer, where dream-eddies once drifted freely like galaxies of color, billions of these lights tore through at once, piercing, vaporizing, annihilating the dream-clusters.

  The result: a vast and sudden emptiness, as though a colossal cubist canvas once alive with erupting prominences had been violently smeared away.

  And from that void—irregular, jagged, immense—billions of divine lights coursed back and forth, spiraling with uncanny intent. They gathered, converged, coalescing into a single blazing form: a colossal Golden Crow of the Great Sun.

  The instant the divine bird took shape, it unfurled wings as vast as continents, dense and radiant as the Sun itself. With a single cry, soft yet unfathomably vast, it rose from the Sentience Realm, soaring into the boundless void. Each beat of its wings scattered radiant feathers, dazzling fragments of living light.

  These feathers drifted free, radiant and unbound, streaking in every direction. The more distant Projected Layers trembled under their brilliance, destabilized to the edge of collapse.

  Some feathers pierced even deeper, breaching the barriers of realms, reaching into the Symbolic Domain. There, in the ancient dark where the dying Void Whale had slumbered for countless ages upon the path of the Sentience Realm, the feathers shone. Light caressed its fading silhouette, lending it grace again, and for the first time in millennia it was no longer dim.

  And the real world, woven inseparably with the Projected Layer, shuddered in response.

  Across Earth, countless beings—whether working, resting, or wandering—suddenly saw. Within the inner eye of the mind, each bore witness to a peerlessly magnificent vision: a colossal golden bird of divine splendor, opening its gilded eyes, gazing down upon them with sovereign indifference.

  In that single instant, all humanity felt the immeasurable gulf in life-level between themselves and the divine bird.

  It was the difference between ants and gods.

  And so, human society across Earth erupted into turmoil.

  The 【Divine Bird】 event swept aside every headline, even the raging Solar Flare eruption, to dominate the world’s attention.

  Some proclaimed it a sign of Ether’s return.

  Some feared it as an omen of coming catastrophe.

  Others dismissed it as a rare natural phenomenon.

  Still others insisted it was a divine message, a revelation to humankind.

  In many places, doomsday cults arose, stirring waves of unrest and fanaticism.

  Yet none on Earth knew the truth: the golden bird was nothing more than a projection—an outward manifestation of Seraphine’s martial arts will, unleashed in full force, revealed as a spiritual image blazing across the realm.

  This image did not focus into a single directional beam, but expanded spherically, radiating outward to fill the starry sky.

  If it had not…

  No—if Seraphine had instead hurled hundreds of millions of directed beams across the four directions of the cosmos, and if even a single one had struck Earth, then in that instant billions of souls would have shattered, their minds boiling under the crushing weight of her martial will.

  Human civilization would have ended in a heartbeat.

  But Seraphine cherished Earth too deeply. She chose restraint.

  Otherwise, humanity would have been annihilated without trace.

  Even so, her will burned so fiercely that it brute-forced its way through the layered barriers dividing the Sentience Realm from the waking world.

  Had Seraphine borne killing intent, she could have summoned forth the true essence of the Great Sun, piercing deep into the Sentience Realm itself, collapsing the conscious projections that gather as Alaya, and extinguishing billions in a breath.

  Fortunately—mercifully—she willed no such slaughter. And so, the people of Earth survived, spared from extinction.

  But not all escaped.

  On Mercury, the billions of Mercury ants that had painstakingly evolved under Ether’s surge were swept away in this cataclysm. Their swarms vaporized in an instant, consumed by the blazing heat, collapsing into the molten layers of their scorched planet.

  A sigh.

  The destiny of the weak is truly so fragile.

  A casual, unintended gesture from the strong can erase their entire race in an instant.

  Buzz —

  In the very next second, a blazing array of light erupted from Seraphine, surging outward in all directions. Its radiant tide swept across a radius of one billion kilometers, enveloping almost the entire inner Solar System in its dazzling brilliance.

  Mercury, the planet nearest to her, was struck the hardest.

  From its core to its mantle to its surface crust, the whole of Mercury liquefied and collapsed under the terrifying heat pouring off Seraphine’s breakthrough—even at such vast distance.

  Only the planet’s immense mass and the gravitational bonds it generated kept it from fragmenting outright.

  Without that anchor, Mercury would have shattered into a storm of drifting debris long ago.

  Further out—

  At a distance of 56 million kilometers, Venus, Earth’s slightly smaller twin, also fell victim to the cataclysm.

  Its atmosphere writhed under the onslaught of Seraphine’s electromagnetic bursts, its climate careening toward absolute chaos. The planet became smothered in raging torrents of corrosive acid rain, falling without end across its entire globe.

  Farther still—

  At 97 million kilometers, Earth itself reeled under the impact.

  Its magnetic field buckled, collapsing and reforming in violent spasms. The magnetic poles twisted out of alignment.

  The auroras above both poles fractured into colossal, otherworldly vortices of blended colors—vast whirlwinds of light tearing through the skies.

  And in the upper atmosphere, phantom flares of red and blue electromagnetic fire suddenly bloomed, erupting across the entire planet.

  Billions of people across Earth’s nations looked on in shock, their hearts seized by awe and trembling fear.

  First, the Eliondra Continent had been obliterated by that so-called God with a single strike.

  Then, the Grand Leader of Beaconreach was slain with casual ease by the same God, shattering Beaconreach into a patchwork of splintered nations.

  Afterward came the 【Divine Bird】 incident.

  By now, many had already begun linking the divine bird’s appearance with Seraphine.

  Whispers spread, arguments flared—praises, doubts, curses.

  But the result was the same: humanity’s collective fear of Seraphine only deepened.

  Even farther away—

  At 175 million kilometers, the fourth planet from the Sun—Mars.

  Its rust-colored surface, lying hundreds of millions of miles from Seraphine, suddenly erupted into upheaval.

  The planet’s thin atmosphere ignited into a colossal, planet-wide dust storm, surging with unnatural force.

  Still farther—

  At 420 million kilometers, between Mars and Jupiter, lay the asteroid belt: half a million fragments of rock and ice drifting quietly for eons.

  That silence ended in an instant.

  Under the irradiation of Seraphine’s breakthrough light, rocky asteroids ignited, melting into vast crimson fire-meteors, while icy asteroids sublimated into towering clusters of glittering ice-crystal clouds.

  The divine radiance even warped the belt’s gravitational web, plunging the entire region into chaotic collapse.

  One after another, asteroids lurched from their ancient orbits, drifting free, scattering in every direction across the void.

  634 million kilometers.

  The colossal, banded giant—Jupiter, the Solar System’s most massive planet—was not spared.

  Its gaseous outer layers of hydrogen and helium, normally in constant motion, boiled into madness.

  Billions of violent atmospheric currents congealed into titanic storm clusters.

  At their forefront churned the most famous of all: the 【Great Red Spot】—25,000 kilometers long, 12,000 wide, vast enough to swallow Earth whole.

  This monstrous storm cluster—rotating counter-clockwise, persisting for centuries, composed of billions of tons of reddish phosphorus gas—stood like a colossal bull’s-eye, drawing the fury of countless divine beams that rained down upon it.

  Hundreds of beams. Thousands. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands!

  Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Each lance of divine light carried a power greater than a million Thunder Kings, crashing into the Great Red Spot with merciless force.

  Every impact unraveled matter within a thousand-kilometer span of the storm, tearing it apart down to subatomic particles—smaller than atoms themselves.

  In barely a single minute, the Solar System’s greatest storm, a vortex that had raged for ages untold, was no more. Erased. Reduced to history.

  Its sudden disappearance, the vanishing of such a fundamental storm system, plunged Jupiter into deeper chaos—an upheaval without precedent, destined to last for millennia.

  And in that moment—

  Seraphine’s breakthrough reached its end.

  Near the collapsing Mercury.

  Eyes shut, she floated amidst the endless cosmos, her presence suffused with majesty, divinity, radiance, and grandeur.

  Like a Creator God suspended in the starry void.

  Buzz—

  The ocean of radiance that had engulfed a billion kilometers suddenly froze in place. Then, as if time itself reversed, the light recoiled, streaming back from the far reaches of space toward her.

  “Just a bit of energy.”

  Near Mercury, with eyes still closed, Seraphine raised one hand and swept it lightly through the void.

  “Disperse.”

  Whoosh!!!

  The cataclysmic surge of energy—the very force that had thrown the entire inner Solar System into chaos—stilled in an instant. Then, under her casual wave, it simply vanished.

  Gone, as if it had never existed.

  So fleeting, so ethereal—an illusion scattered on the wind.

  And yet these divine energies...

  The havoc they wreaked at the moment of their birth had been so overwhelming they could have obliterated every planet in their path.

  Now, their disappearance stirred almost no disturbance at all—yet not a single atom in the outer world had been harmed or destroyed.

  Such was Seraphine’s precision. Her control over power was terrifying beyond comprehension.

  Only after this did she slowly open her eyes.

  In that instant—

  Boom!!!

  From her pupils erupted two beams of raw annihilation, true Gamma-ray bursts, blasting outward into the endless starry abyss.

  Wherever her gaze fell, all matter was reduced to smoke and dust beneath that merciless cold light.

  And fate dealt Mercury the final blow.

  This time, the planet stood directly in the trajectory of her glance.

  With nothing more than a flicker of her gaze, the entire planet collapsed.

  The immense gravitational lattice woven in its core unraveled as though it had never existed, crumbling, dissolving, and fading into nothingness—disassembled from the most fundamental mechanical stratum upward.

  In scarcely a second—

  Mercury, a world that had endured for billions of years, disintegrated in silence. It fractured into trillions of hyper-energized particles, each carrying colossal force.

  Accelerated to velocities far beyond the third cosmic speed, they burst free of the Solar System’s grip, scattering in every direction like a storm of radiant shrapnel.

  But at that very moment—

  “Stop.”

  A cold whisper cut across the void. Its resonance pierced both the material plane of reality and the communicative tides of the Sentience Realm, reverberating through the airless abyss.

  At near-light speed, the voice rippled outward, carried across the starry deep.

  By all known laws, sound cannot exist in a vacuum.

  But in Seraphine’s eyes—post-breakthrough, ascended into unnatural might—the universe no longer obeyed such constraints.

  Wherever she gazed, wherever her perception touched, the so-called vacuum revealed itself for what it was: not emptiness, but a sea of endless energy.

  In Seraphine’s vision, the vacuum itself was a false vacuum.

  At every instant, she could perceive endless virtual particles flickering into existence within the vacuum, only to vanish into nothing the very same moment.

  This was quantum vacuum fluctuation.

  And it had become the foundation by which sound itself could now travel through the void.

  After her breakthrough, beyond Ether and high-dimensional pure energy, Seraphine uncovered yet another source of power—

  Zero-Point Energy (ZPE).

  The bedrock energy of the cosmos.

  Even at absolute zero, it persisted. Limitless, eternal.

  And in Seraphine’s perception, its density surpassed even the raging inferno of the sun’s core.

  She had not yet mastered the means to wield it. Not yet.

  But once Seraphine gathered enough knowledge, once she completed her deductions, she would forge an entirely new path—an evolutionary system of body and soul founded upon Zero-Point Energy.

  The framework was incomplete, but even now, she could use it to transmit sound across the vacuum.

  And so, with a single act of will, the boundless high-energy fragments of Mercury froze where they were—trillions upon trillions of luminous particles, suspended in the dark.

  “Recover.”

  A single word.

  Yet it echoed like a divine command.

  Instantly, the scattered particles reversed their course, streaking backward across the starry abyss, retracing the fabric of the void itself.

  They reassembled, coalescing into a planet indistinguishable from the Mercury that had been lost.

  Not merely in form.

  Its very core, mantle, and crust—the mechanical lattice, elemental stratification, precise volume and mass—down to the exact coordinates of every crater—reappeared.

  A resurrection at the atomic scale.

  Even the billions of Mercury ants that had been annihilated in Seraphine’s eruption were restored—each one reconstructed from the raw particles of the void.

  And dazed, unaware of the cataclysm, they once again burrowed tunnels and raised their tiny nests within Mercury’s layers of stone.

  It was as if extinction had never occurred at all—everything had merely been a fleeting dream.

  When the restoration was complete, Seraphine shifted her gaze to her attribute panel.

  【Host: Seraphine】

  【Physical Strength: 33,000 Planet】

  【Soul: 33,000 Planet】

  A new unit had appeared—

  Planet.

  And Seraphine instantly understood. Planet referred to Earth’s mass.

  Having crossed the final Three Heavenly Gates and endured three consecutive doublings across three days, her attributes had erupted upward—by hundreds of thousands of times.

  Her strength now equaled the mass of 33,000 Earths.

  Nearly one-tenth the mass of the Sun itself, embodied in pure power.

  And all of it flowed, thundered, and sang within her body and soul.

  A mythic ocean of force condensed into a frame not even two meters tall, distorting spacetime around her until it twisted, collapsed, and rewove itself simply by existing near her presence.

  Yet the strain was not from excess. The true reason was that all 108 of her major acupoints had ascended to 3.9 dimensions, suspending her body in a liminal state between the third and the fourth dimension.

  With this alone, Seraphine standing motionless in the void was like a living star—her presence blazed outward, so real, so overwhelming, it nearly pierced the edge of reality itself.

  An ordinary human who drew near would be crushed and annihilated by her aura in an instant.

  And not just mortals—

  Even her self from three days ago would be obliterated a million times over beneath her current gaze.

  And this was only the beginning. Even if she did nothing, the system’s relentless daily doubling would soon allow her to surpass the Sun, reducing it to a speck of dust in her palm, a candle flame she could snuff out with a flick.

  Even now, should Seraphine desire it, destroying the Sun would not be difficult.

  Just one percent of that power condensed in her Physical Strength was enough to shatter the Sun with a single strike.

  “I am too powerful.”

  Seraphine slowly spread her hands. Spirit power and mental power fused together, transfiguring into something both real and unreal, a force that pierced through reality itself and the Sentience Realm beyond.

  It was divine will.

  From this moment on, there was no longer spirit power or mental power. Only this—an essence that carried all their traits yet eclipsed them, descending into the world as something entirely new.

  Yet even such divine will was constrained by the speed of light, rippling out at less than 300,000 kilometers per second. The slowness irritated her.

  “Too slow. My power cannot be displayed in full.”

  She turned, fixing her eyes on the distant Earth.

  A sharp desire surged in her heart—to leave the Solar System altogether, to uncover the true method of breaking the chains of light’s speed.

  Human civilization felt no grander than an anthill beneath her feet.

  But then—

  Across the gulf of hundreds of millions of kilometers, her clone on Earth transmitted information.

  “…Hm.”

  Seraphine thought for a moment.

  “Very well. I’ll return for now. My state of mind is unsettled—I need to adjust it. For a time, I’ll use Earth for amusement.”