High above Emberlight, at the very edge of the sky, the space surrounding Seraphine twisted violently—above, below, left, and right—forming colossal spatial vortexes, ring after ring.
From within those whirlpools of space erupted torrents of blazing light, each composed of infinitely fine motes. They surged outward like floods breaking free of eternity itself.
The light torrents writhed like massive, coiling pythons as they burst forth, only to fracture instantly into hundreds of thousands of slender, serpent-like streams that scattered across the heavens. As they streaked away, each stream continued dividing—splintering smaller and smaller—until they vanished into invisibility.
In truth, these motes of light were the foundation stones of the 【Citizen Module】.
For the people of the Emberlight Empire were pitifully frail in both Physical Strength and soul, their wisdom woefully underdeveloped.
Seraphine chose to intervene from the very top, accelerating their evolution at the deepest root.
She would not stoop to outdated academy methods—testing talents one by one, sorting into classes, forcing years of rote study.
Instead, Seraphine had resolved upon an absolute, empire-wide approach.
Every citizen of Emberlight would be directly assigned a personal cultivation mentor.
That mentor was the 【Citizen Module】.
It was built in two grand parts.
The first part: the material conductor.
On the macroscopic scale, it took shape as an ocean of Ether-Crystalline nanomachines, each no larger than a billionth of a meter. They blanketed the skies and lands of Emberlight with a staggering density—one billion particles per cubic meter.
Functionally, this inconceivable swarm of nanotech, exceeding the combined count of every living organism on Earth, from animals down to viruses, formed the bedrock of a hyper-era network.
Its latency was a mere one nanosecond—faster and more stable than visible-light transmissions or 6G radio communication. It enabled multi-band connectivity, vast multimode data storage, full-dimensional panoramic AR simulation, bidirectional haptic feedback of crushing strength, and ultra-fast material imprinting. Together, it would utterly reshape the social order of the entire Empire.
Against this network, traditional phones and personal computers became obsolete overnight—useful only as relics, or in the case of a few specialized supercomputers with monstrous processing power.
The entirety of Emberlight society was now poised to surge into the True Era of the Internet of Everything.
Augmented by the countless semi-intelligent central processors deployed by the Sapphire Research Institute, and reinforced by the superconducting power grid—soon to span every corner of the empire—the Emberlight Empire’s productive capacity would only grow more formidable with time.
And yet, the nanomachines Seraphine had released were but a fragment of the full 【Citizen Module】.
Across the breadth of Emberlight, expanded spatial vortexes had opened one after another, endlessly spewing forth uncountable tides of nanotech.
Every single particle had been researched, refined, and tested inside Seraphine’s Dimensional Pocket—developed, manufactured, then released in one sweeping surge.
The Dimensional Pocket itself was no longer the confined chamber of a mere trillion cubic meters it once had been.
Just as Mycenae had once been “miniaturized” by a trillion-fold compression, Seraphine had enacted the opposite: a trillion-fold expansion.
After her modification, its storage capacity had become a staggering 1 septillion cubic meters.
To put it plainly—that is equivalent to a cube 100,000 km on each side.
Large enough to swallow the Earth whole, with room to spare.
Now, the Dimensional Pocket functioned as a planetary-scale research facility, partitioned into thousands of strata. Within those endless layers, countless Seraphine clones labored ceaselessly, conducting scientific projects whose number could not be tallied.
But back to the 【Citizen Module】.
Its second half—the true core—was the informational state, surpassing in importance even the infinite nanomachine conductor.
It was no mere tool, but a vast informational lifeform, woven into the very surface of Earth’s Gaia consciousness. Seraphine had designed it by fusing Alaya—the collective will of Earth’s sentient beings—as its template, integrating Mercury Race computer science with her own extensive AI research, then forging it together with raw soul power.
Its name was 【Ayla】—taken from a sci-fi novel Seraphine had once read in her previous world.
In the days ahead, Ayla would become the guiding mentor of tens of thousands of Emberlight citizens, shepherding them along the path of cultivation.
Within Ayla’s boundless archive lay the cultivation method templates Seraphine herself had created.
Each template was a complete, dissected framework: the precise step-by-step evolution of a mortal ascending all the way to the realm of Martial Saint. Every stage. Every layer. Every grueling step, laid bare with absolute clarity.
Yet one set of cultivation methods did not fit all.
Each path contained multiple sequences and branching stages, but no single template could be universally suited for everyone.
For example, one individual might practice a method that proves unbearably slow and ineffective, with every stage presenting crushing difficulty. Yet if that same person were to switch to another method, their progress might suddenly accelerate at a staggering pace.
Strange, yes—yet wondrous.
And if this strange, wondrous process is dissected and broken apart, step by step—then in Seraphine’s eyes, each stage reveals itself as a component.
If a cultivator finds that every stage of their chosen method aligns perfectly with their nature, then rapid advancement becomes inevitable.
An ordinary man—or even one dismissed as mediocre—could, under these circumstances, leap forward and be recognized as a genius.
This is the role of 【Ayla】. Using the planet’s spiritual consciousness as her main server, Ayla continuously collects the cultivation data of every Emberlight citizen. With it, she deduces suitable paths, constructs step-by-step cultivation stages, and designs individualized methods tailored for each soul.
She lays out the most fitting route for each person, steering them clear of every pitfall, ensuring none are left behind, and granting all the courage to stride forward smoothly upon the path of evolution.
In time, with Ayla’s guidance, every citizen of Emberlight will walk as a cultivation genius.
As for these cultivation components—Seraphine had stored several million such parts in Ayla’s database.
Originally, Seraphine had conceived and built a powerful artificial intelligence to fulfill this role. But after witnessing Mycenae’s Wrath of Eliondra, she realized that a virtualized computational structure was the superior path.
Her long years of research in computer science had revealed the truth: once the precision of large-scale circuitry reaches a certain scale, quantum tunneling inevitably interferes. It obstructs further increases in computational density and even hampers the evolution of artificial intelligence.
But Ayla is untouched by such limits.
For her essence is not material. Thus, no law of physics can restrain her growth.
And indeed, in terms of programming intelligence, Ayla had already reached the threshold of Strong AI. In raw computational power, logical architecture, and abstract thought, she surpassed every form of intelligent life or supercomputer on Earth.
Yet Seraphine regarded her as something beyond artificial intelligence. To her, Ayla was a true lifeform—for only life could bear a Mind Suppression Seal.
“Ayla,” Seraphine spoke calmly.
“Master, what are your commands?” A soft, feminine voice murmured in her ear.
Seraphine’s lips curved into a faint smile. “You are to address me as Your Majesty.”
The voice laughed gently. “As you command, Your Majesty.”
Seraphine leaned back, her expression sharpening. “Good. Now the immediate matters are settled. It’s time we properly sift through the information buried in those Mercury Race memories.”
Seraphine’s eyes gleamed with crystalline divine light. With a faint smile, she murmured, “That ancient road hidden deep within the Sentience Realm… it is indeed a highway.”
Her ‘gaze’ pierced instantly through the veil between reality and the Sentience Realm, fixing directly upon its depths.
“Ah… a most accurate name.”
Her mental perception crossed endless distances—bent, scattered, and inverted by the vast Projected Layer—until, with less than ten percent of its original strength remaining, it finally reached the Symbolic Domain.
There, suspended in the endless void, stretched a blazing pathway billions of kilometers long, shining silently like a river of fire.
According to the memories she had extracted from the Mercury Race, this ancient road was originally named 【Outuben Corridor】. Yet it bore many other titles: 【Hyper-dimensional Corridor】, 【Sentience Realm Hallway】, 【Sub-material Tunnel】, 【Path of Symbols】, 【Ancient Path】, 【Galaxy Blood Vessel】.
Of these, the most common in use were Hyper-dimensional Corridor and Sentience Realm Hallway.
As for its origin, the legends were as numerous as the stars.
Some claimed the Corridor was born with the Big Bang itself, a primordial natural phenomenon.
Others swore it had been forged by an ancient civilization long since vanished to dust—built to dominate the Milky Way.
Still others whispered that it was constructed by alien civilizations beyond this Galaxy, for purposes unknown.
And some spoke in hushed tones of extradimensional architects, higher-dimensional beings whose motives mortals could not fathom.
From such myths and conjectures had arisen an entire academic discipline: 《Galaxy Corridor Studies》.
All this only deepened the Corridor’s aura of mystery.
But one truth remained certain: the Sentience Realm Hallway’s place within the Milky Way was utterly pivotal.
Without these corridors, branching and weaving like blood vessels across the Galaxy, countless civilizations would remain forever bound to their homeworlds—caged by beams of light, perhaps even doomed to extinction without ever stepping beyond their star systems.
For the chains of 【light speed cannot be surpassed】 are like an unyielding wall—too solid, too cruel to break.
If intelligent civilizations relied solely on sub-light spacecraft, they might toil for generations and never reach even the nearest system.
Without the Corridor, the vast majority of life in the Milky Way would remain hopelessly imprisoned within their stellar cradles, unable to transcend.
It is precisely the existence of these corridors that has allowed the Galaxy to flourish.
Through their memories, Seraphine perceived the grand design of the Milky Way’s civilizations. From a cosmic vantage, the Galaxy itself appeared as an immense, fibrous lattice stretching across light-years.
If the Milky Way were imagined as a slumbering giant, then within its body pulsed countless hearts—stellar systems—numbering in the trillions.
Bound together by vessels—the Sentience Realm Hallways—thick or thin, vast or narrow, these arteries linked the hearts of the Galaxy.
Each beating heart ceaselessly generated its own torrents of sustenance: matter, energy, information.
And clinging to those hearts and vessels was flesh—civilizations—drawing nourishment by any means, feeding upon the giant’s lifeblood to preserve their existence.
Once their vitality grew secure, their ambitions naturally swelled.
They strove to channel those nutrients and powers across the vast web of vessels, swelling their own mass of flesh, expanding across new hearts, claiming greater strength—until they could occupy more, consume more, and rise toward supremacy.
Thus they grew: from frail to mighty, from small to vast. And should they endure long enough, they would one day consume all hearts, seize dominion over the giant itself, and proclaim themselves the sole King of the Milky Way.
Just as veins differ in size, so too do the Sentience Realm Hallways, each existing on a hierarchy of scale and power.
According to the crew of the Theron exploration vessel, the innumerable corridors laced throughout the Galaxy fall into three tiers:
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Low-level corridors: able to accelerate objects to 10,000× the speed of light.
-
Mid-level corridors: able to accelerate objects to 300,000× the speed of light.
-
High-level corridors: the most fearsome of all, capable of hurling objects to 10,000,000× the speed of light.
Yet traversing these corridors is no simple feat. Their use demands precise conditions—no random beast or stray vessel can stumble upon one and expect passage.
For example, a low-level corridor requires that any object within its field already maintain a velocity of at least three times the speed of light before activation becomes possible.
“Three times? The speed of light?”
Indeed.
The entry requirement for a low-level Sentience Realm Hallway was not merely to break the light barrier, but to surpass it—by a factor of three.
In the real universe, such a feat was utterly impossible.
Out beneath the true stars, if a vessel were to accelerate to ninety percent of light-speed, its mass would double compared to its rest state. Its engines, in turn, would be forced to double their output just to maintain acceleration.
In short: the faster an object moves, the greater its mass becomes, and the greater the energy required to keep it in motion.
And as velocity draws closer to the speed of light, the energy demanded surges toward infinity—while the object’s mass itself approaches infinity.
At such limits, even the mass of a single particle would grow without bound, eclipsing the total mass of the entire universe.
This phenomenon, known as the Mass Increase Effect, is why nothing in reality can ever reach, let alone exceed, the speed of light.
But in the memories she inherited from the Mercury Race crew, Seraphine saw that outside of reality—in the 【Sentience Realm Symbolic Domain】—things were different.
There, motion no longer obeyed relativity. The Mass Increase Effect did not exist.
As long as propulsion was sufficient and the energy source inexhaustible, objects could accelerate without end.
“…Then the transmission of power across vast distances—is it not accelerated through the Sentience Realm itself?”
The thought struck her suddenly. She recalled the eruption of power when she had broken through earlier.
At that moment of success, she had somehow bypassed the light barrier entirely, remotely controlling chaotic energies far away with impossible speed.
“What exactly happened?”
At once, the 【Eye of True Revelation】 and 【Chaos Calculation】 surged to life. Within seconds, countless streams of data and insight cascaded into her mind.
Her vision flooded with revelations, and she understood:
“So that’s how it was… At the peak of my breakthrough, my soul underwent a qualitative transformation, unleashing torrents of Soul Light. At their climax, these lights condensed into the purest essence of Martial Truth. That flood of Soul Light tore open a vast ‘void’ within the 【Projected Layer】—a fleeting corridor that aligned 【Reality】, the 【Projected Layer】, and the 【Symbolic Domain】 into a single continuum.
Through that bridge, my thoughts were able to command and bind the spilled energies across distant ranges—at speeds magnitudes beyond the speed of light.”
Her eyes widened.
“The speed of light barrier… I bypassed it—without even meaning to?!”
Her heart surged with exhilaration.
With the ease of a trial run, Seraphine loosed a casual beam of light—yet within it seethed the force to annihilate a star. It tore upward into the endless heavens.
The moment it breached Earth’s atmosphere, the beam expanded, accelerating until it raced at light-speed. It thickened into a luminous spear kilometers wide, blazing straight across the abyss of the cosmos—toward the distant Sun.
If nothing interfered, that colossal lance would strike the Sun’s surface in just over eight minutes, igniting a vortex of plasma hotter and larger than Earth itself.
Or perhaps it would collide with a towering solar prominence, a fiery arc vaster than Jupiter’s diameter, the clash tearing both to shreds.
It might even destabilize local magnetic fields, unleashing a titanic solar flare.
Whichever fate, the force behind it exceeded what any planet could endure. Only the Sun itself could absorb Seraphine’s strike without shattering.
Five long minutes passed in silence.
Then Seraphine’s lips curved into a smile. “More likely, it will fall to me—ended by my hand as it was meant to.”
Buzz—
Her body blazed with countless divine rays, twisting the space around her in violent convulsions.
In the blink of an eye, streams of dragon-like light coiled about her form, then pierced through the membrane between 【Reality】 and the 【Sentience Realm】, breaching the 【Projected Layer】 at the edge of the reality.
There it was: vague, indistinct, chaotic—a realm of shadowed dreams.
And in that chaos, a brilliance appeared: a deity radiant beyond the true Sun itself.
Whoosh—
Her arrival shattered thousands of dream-aggregates at once, their fragments unraveling into torrents of dreamstuff, vast rivers scattering into the remote void.
This deity was none other than Seraphine, descending here in her authentic form.
And with her descent, this sector of the Solar System’s 【Projected Layer】 convulsed—quaking, twisting, trembling—threatening to collapse into a grotesquerie even more absurd than its already mad design.
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Gazing across the warped immensity, Seraphine understood. It was her own overwhelming soul that provoked this upheaval. Too much power, pressing down upon a plane already fractured by chaos, only deepened its disorder.
So she wasted no time. The experiment began.
Whoosh—
In an instant, within the dim void darker than the vacuum itself, a titanic crimson sun flared into being—an echo of the strike she had once hurled during her breakthrough.
She sought to see if the phenomenon could be repeated.
Boom!!!
Her entire body erupted, thunderous and incandescent, as billions of Soul Lights surged forth, saturated with the sovereign true essence of the Great Sun.
These Soul Lights, like countless True Dragons, Demonic Dragons, Venomous Dragons, and Fire Dragons of the ancient progenitor, roared and shrieked with boundless fury—thundering outward in all directions, shaking the endless void of the 【Projected Layer】.
CRACK!!!!!!
In an instant, the blinding radiance of the Great Sun, like an iron broom forged from pure steel, swept aside and broke open the Sentience Realm’s void. The murky expanse—filled with heavy, turbid blocks of color, like some grotesque three-dimensional oil painting—was smashed apart, torn into a vast hollow of barren emptiness.
The force was so tremendous that billions of sentient beings on Earth—each tethered by spirit to the 【Projected Layer】—screamed aloud, clutching their heads in agony.
“This feeling… it’s the same as when the Divine Bird appeared! No—it’s far worse!”
Writhing in pain, disoriented and dizzy, they nevertheless glimpsed, within their minds, the towering divine figure of Seraphine.
In that instant of shared vision, the multitudes awoke with trembling clarity:
“It was this great deity!”
Earth’s societies erupted into panic and chaos—but Seraphine paid them no heed.
Having torn this void into existence within the Sentience Realm, she instantly drove her Divine Will—splitting it in two directions, one “upward,” one “downward.” At once, she ripped through the barrier between 【Reality】 and the 【Projected Layer】, and simultaneously pierced the interface that bound the 【Projected Layer】 to the 【Symbolic Domain】.
The three domains aligned in an instant.
Buzz—
Seeing the pathway open, Seraphine gathered her Divine Will, coiling it into a taut, rope-like strand. With inexorable force, she drove it downward and upward alike, plunging deep into the tranquil, translucent vastness of the 【Symbolic Domain】. Unlike the murky chaos of the Projected Layer, this realm shimmered with clarity.
Swish—
The strand of Divine Will surged into the Symbolic Domain like a celestial ox unchained from the heavens, racing across millions of kilometers in a single breath, hurtling toward the endless black sky.
Its speed, even at the first instant, had already exceeded light by more than tenfold.
Indeed—the Symbolic Domain bore no barrier of light-speed.
But Seraphine, ever perceptive, discerned three problems at once.
The first: the Symbolic Domain did not resemble the flat spacetime of the real cosmos.
Its spacetime curvature and that of the true universe diverged—sharply, ceaselessly, and unpredictably.
Over distances of mere hundreds or thousands of kilometers, the difference was slight. But over spans of hundreds of millions, even billions of kilometers… the disparity grew vast, twisting into something unrecognizable.
Seraphine gave a faint shake of her head.
“No wonder individuals with extraordinary gifts—like Sorren—hold such value in the cosmic era. After all, there were only two aboard that Mercury Race ship.”
The second problem was clear: the void she had torn open measured only several hundred thousand miles across.
Yet that strand of Divine Will had already burst through its boundary, its course uncertain.
Without continual correction from its counterpart anchored in the real universe, the fragment within the 【Symbolic Domain】 would only drift further and further off-path.
By the time it reached the intended distance and attempted to pierce back through the inter-realm barrier, it might emerge far from its original target.
Even worse—though the Divine Will, racing at superluminal speed, could transmit information back to her, steering it was another matter entirely. To split such a strand into multiple branches while it tore across the Symbolic Domain faster than light, and to re-anchor them precisely into reality—that level of control was far from simple.
And then came the third problem.
Unlike the 【Symbolic Domain】, the 【Projected Layer】—that thin veil closest to reality—showed no such curvature.
It behaved more like a shadow of spacetime: flimsy, unreal, a counterfeit reflection of the cosmos.
But Seraphine discerned another issue. The 【Projected Layer】 acted like a turbid, smothering filter draped over the Symbolic Domain.
It refracted, scattered, and drained away any energy or force carrying vector attributes. Worse still, its refraction was utterly irregular, unpredictable.
Thus, if Seraphine wished to transmit power through it at superluminal speeds, she had only one option: to smash the Projected Layer apart in advance, carving vast voids as she had just done, then surge through in the wake of her Divine Will before the gaps collapsed.
Only then could she hope for precision.
Sensing the shifting turbulence of spacetime around her, Seraphine let slip a curse under her breath:
“This is so damn troublesome.”
She rarely spoke in such terms; her patience was wearing thin.
It was as if the universe itself were ill—pathologically unwilling to allow her transcendence beyond the light-speed barrier.
Then her thoughts flickered to that monstrous entity she had once glimpsed with higher-dimensional sight, during the relocation of Earth.
That cosmic abomination—resembling something from Junji Ito’s Hellstar—its sheer scale eclipsed Jupiter’s diameter.
She recalled its attack upon an unfortunate parallel Earth: the lash of its tongue had not exceeded the speed of light.
But if a body so colossal were truly confined to mere sub-light velocity? The notion was absurd.
How could a beast of such mass survive? In the starless gulfs of interstellar void—distances measured in light-years—such “slow” flight would see it starve long before reaching its prey.
Yet she remembered its girth, fat and engorged. Clearly, it had feasted.
Unless…
“Unless it crossed through the 【Symbolic Domain】 during its charge—slipping into superluminal, erratic, labyrinthine motion—and only emerged from the Sentience Realm once it had reached an approximate destination.”
Seraphine pondered:
"But... how did it manage to pinpoint a planet teeming with life, like Earth?"
She was convinced the Hellstar-like entity had a specific "menu." Earth just happened to fall within its hunting range. Otherwise, with so many barren planets in the Solar System, why single out Earth—and consume it in such a grotesque manner, licking it like an ice cream cone?
There was only one explanation: the cosmic beast deliberately sought out worlds rich in intelligent life.
But the question remained—how could it precisely locate such a planet from the vast, infinite distances of the universe? That was impossible to determine.
And as for whether its ability to move at superluminal speeds came from different rules or parameters in parallel universes? The answer was simple: no.
Parallel universes, in the ordinary sense, do not differ in their fundamental operating principles. Here, "ordinary sense" refers to parallel universes branching from time itself through quantum effects.
It is well known that quanta possess the property of superposition.
A quantum can exist in countless states at once, but when observed, it collapses into a definite state for the observer. At that same instant, the entire universe splits into multiple parallel universes—each corresponding to a different 【Outcome】.
Each 【Outcome】 is its own independent timeline, its own parallel universe.
And the trillions of parallel universes Seraphine had glimpsed with her evolved, high-dimensional senses were precisely that: trillions of independent timelines.
Fundamentally, no matter how many exist, no matter how similar or dissimilar they appear, they all diverged from the same root. Thus, at the grandest scale, they can be grouped into a single collection.
That vast collection, containing an unfathomable number of parallel universes, Seraphine named the 【Grand Universe】.
Other universes, however—those with different physical constants, or even entirely different mathematical rules—lay beyond this structure. To those, she gave another name: 【Twin Universes】, or even 【Twin Grand Universes】.
And if she pushed her thoughts further...
Seraphine’s expression darkened, her voice lowering into a grave murmur:
"Shadow of the Unreal... Did it truly destroy only a single timeline, or did it annihilate this entire Grand Universe, with all its infinite timelines?
In the manga, after devouring one universe, it moves on to the next.
But that next universe... is it just another timeline? Or is it a Twin Universe—equal to, or perhaps even greater than, this Grand Universe itself?"
No answer came.
The Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation remained silent. The thought was too remote, too far beyond deduction.
"Forget it," Seraphine finally muttered. "Speculating on this is meaningless."
She abruptly shook her head, her form blurring as she vanished from her original spot, breaking through the boundary layer and diving into the Symbolic Domain.
Buzz—
Deep within the Symbolic Domain.
In the ancient, eternally scarred Sentience Realm Hallway—at the very forefront of the colossal, boundless Void Whale—a figure appeared.
Seraphine.
She gazed down at the motionless, near-lifeless leviathan and spoke slowly:
"Consider yourself fortunate. Your life... I shall spare."
Her slender hand lifted gently, vaguely aligning with the giant whale.
Whoosh—
Within a radius of one hundred thousand miles, space itself twisted violently.
The Void Whale—its body vaster than Earth—immediately began to collapse in size, shrinking at a rate visible to the naked eye.
In mere seconds, Seraphine had miniaturized it on a dimensional-spatial level to one-trillionth of its former bulk, until it was but a "small" whale—slightly smaller than Emberlight Ashara when seen from the blazing, ancient path.
Then, a cavernous opening tore into existence along that path, stretching a hundred miles from north to south. Inside was only pitch blackness—devoid of light.
Or perhaps, without Seraphine’s permission, nothing within that Dimensional Pocket could ever emerge.
The opening shifted slightly, and in the next instant, the Void Whale was swallowed whole.
Seraphine exhaled softly, murmuring:
"An overlord-class species... quite the candidate for a mount. Worthy of me."
With that, she turned toward the endless dark void and said quietly:
"Actually... in such circumstances, surpassing the speed of light isn’t impossible.
It’s just that the disturbance would be... considerable."
A solution took form in her mind.
If, before attempting superluminal travel through the Symbolic Domain to a fixed point, she first blasted the entire corresponding Projected Layer into 'void'—then, in that fleeting emptiness, she could surge past light-speed. By continuously firing countless Divine Wills to "pin" her trajectory into reality, she could achieve precise faster-than-light travel without catastrophic deviation.
“Then… let’s try it.”
With a single thought, the Divine Will—already tens of millions of kilometers away—shattered into nothing.
Seraphine slowly lifted her left hand. Her palm curled faintly, and from the tiger’s mouth between thumb and forefinger erupted a terrifying blaze of light.
Its power was overwhelming.
The instant it was born, the beam ripped across hundreds of thousands of kilometers, pierced the barrier between realms, and drove itself violently into the Projected Layer.
Boom!!!
The impact shook creation. Along its path, the heavy, stagnant void was blasted into a hollow nothingness.
Yet this was only the beginning.
Once the beam had breached both realms, it began to swell madly, its size growing from mere meters to kilometers in an instant.
Not just kilometers.
Tens, hundreds, thousands, then tens of thousands of kilometers…
In only a few heartbeats, the light raging in Seraphine’s left hand had expanded until it reached a thickness rivaling the diameter of Jupiter.
Buzz—
The monstrous column of light began to churn, spiral, and boil.
Then, in a blinding instant, it condensed—reshaped into a blazing white sword, tens of thousands of kilometers long and nearly 100,000 kilometers wide.
In the endless void, the colossal blade glared like a second sun stretching across infinity.
And Seraphine—diminutive before that titanic sword—radiated a pressure even more suffocating, a force vaster and more terrifying than the weapon itself.
“Hoo—”
Her breath left her like a sigh. Her voice was calm, steady, as though she were discussing something trivial:
“That beam is about to reach the Sun’s surface. I’ll have to intercept it.”
Her eyes glimmered with divine certainty.
“Since the Projected Layer from Earth to the Sun is sealed so tightly… then I’ll cleave the entire structure apart across all 150 million kilometers with one strike.
Once it all becomes void, the path will naturally be mine.”
Her eyes flared, blazing with divine radiance, and at the same moment the colossal sword of pure light in her palm shuddered violently.
In the next heartbeat, Seraphine swung her arm down, cleaving toward the Sun.
CHOP!!!!!
BOOM!!!!!
The titanic blade—nearly 100,000 kilometers wide and tens of thousands long—moved as though the heavens themselves were collapsing. From deep within the Symbolic Domain, Seraphine gripped the hilt and drove the entire celestial-scale construct through the Projected Layer.
The strike roared like thunder splitting eternity, carrying apocalyptic kinetic and thermal force as it ripped forward into the boundless, murky void.
Everything dim or radiant seemed to have its colors annihilated. In that endless darkness, there remained only one thing: this impossibly vast torrent of blazing white sword-light.
Where the torrent passed, existence itself was erased—evaporated into nothingness, the void bleaching into pure white.
The cleave, swifter than a heaven-sent lightning strike, made the enormous sword’s body quiver violently. From its edges, countless radiant flares erupted, shooting out at every angle—scorching beams that tore outward for hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!!!!!
Dreamscapes shattered. Illusory domains collapsed. An endless storm of chaos howled across every horizon, sweeping through all four corners and eight directions. The strike purged the entire Projected Layer’s painted illusion, stripping away all forms and contours until only infinite whiteness remained—boundless, merciless light.
At the tip of the tens-of-thousands-kilometer-long blade, its radiant core blazed with star-destroying intensity. From that point surged a vast and overwhelming power: sword qi unleashed in a horizontal torrent.
The force obliterated the Projected Layer void within several million miles, reducing it to hollow emptiness. What remained was a chasm in spacetime itself—an immense River of Void, nearly a million kilometers wide, surging forward in relentless fury.
The colossal River of Void—its scale greater than the Sun itself—raged forward, surging endlessly while weaving outward into a lattice of brilliance. Like a spider’s web cast across infinity, it spawned thousands upon thousands of titanic, flashing fissures of light.
Each fissure seethed with power vast enough to tear the Moon asunder.
And yet these tens of thousands of rifts were nothing more than the peripheral radiation—the aftershocks—of the main torrent of sword-light. The true body of the River of Void was vastly beyond them.
That main body, swung by Seraphine in but a few seconds, had already roared through and annihilated the 150 million kilometers of the Projected Layer’s substrate—its very cosmic background, together with endless dream-aggregations, particles, energy, and information.
All of it evaporated.
What remained was a distant, vast, and endless void-path, hollow and unformed. The river of light, its work complete, scattered and collapsed into self-destruction.
Meanwhile, within the Symbolic Domain, Seraphine remained utterly calm. She extended two Divine Wills: one streaked forward at superluminal velocity, while the other angled upward, piercing straight toward the farthest reach of the void carved open within the Projected Layer.
One Will scaled the curvatures of dual spacetimes; the other measured and compared those curves, ensuring her course avoided detours toward the Symbolic Domain’s counterpart at the Sun’s surface in the material universe.
And at that same moment, in the boundless real cosmos—the stretch of void between Earth and Sun—an impossible phenomenon appeared.
A three-dimensional halo of dazzling light, larger than Jupiter, flared suddenly into being. It was born from the terrible swing of Seraphine’s sword in the Sentience Realm, spanning tens of thousands of kilometers.
Upon its manifestation, the halo mocked the barrier of light-speed and the law of mass increase. It surged forward at nearly 30 million kilometers per second, lancing from beyond Earth’s cosmos straight toward the blazing Sun, 150 million kilometers away.
Along its path, meteors, asteroids, drifting wreckage—any matter intersecting its advance—simply passed through it like phantoms.
There was no collision. No transfer of energy. No mechanical interaction.
It was as though the halo and the universe it crossed existed in parallel realities, mutually untouched.
You walk your road, I walk mine. We do not interfere.
And yet… that was not the whole truth.
This gigantic axis of pure light—this phantom structure blazing through the real cosmos—appeared to carry no mass, no information, no energy at all.
No, it was not so simple.
Those objects were not unchanged after the halo swept past.
If one could capture the meteors, asteroids, or drifting debris that had intersected its path, they would find their interiors riddled with microscopic voids, fragile and near collapse.
This was the aftermath of annihilation by the ultra–high-energy particle streams hidden within the halo.
In truth, the halo was never a tangible entity.
At its core, it was nothing more than an image—a projection cast onto the surface of real matter after the Projected Layer had undergone catastrophic upheaval.
Like some strange celestial mirage, the halo carried no genuine mass, no energy, no information.
It simply was—and soon, it would fade.
It lingered only as a residual phenomenon, born from Seraphine’s violent cleave, when she split open countless kilometers of the Projected Layer at reality’s outer rim with a single swing.
The searing streams of high-energy particles, together with the endless cascade of photons that gave the halo its blazing brilliance, all originated from the Projected Layer’s depths.
Why, then, could this halo appear to surpass the speed of light?
It could be explained by a simple metaphor: a flashlight.
Sweep a beam of light rapidly across the night sky—from one horizon to another. A quick hand can make the spot shift across vast distances in less than a second.
But to actually fly a starship across that same span of galaxy would demand tens of thousands of years.
Thus, the only true superluminal existence was not the radiant halo in reality, but the river of sword-light Seraphine had unleashed in the Sentience Realm. That was the strike that tore across immeasurable distances of the murky heavens, while the photon torrents spilling into reality were merely echoes.
In only a few seconds, the colossal halo had reached the surface of the Sun.
A few seconds more—
And Seraphine’s Divine Will, racing through the Symbolic Domain faster than light itself, finally arrived there. By chance, it pierced through the barrier between reality and the Sentience Realm, descending instantly into the boundless, roaring sea of fire on the Sun’s surface.
From tens of millions of kilometers away within the Symbolic Domain, Seraphine focused her gaze. At once, she received the spacetime coordinate data of the Sun’s surface, transmitted back at superluminal speed by that Divine Will.
“Real Number Channel!”
Swish—
Seraphine traversed hundreds of millions of kilometers in an instant, bypassing the light-speed barrier, and emerged directly upon the burning surface of the Sun.
She exhaled lightly.
“Not easy at all.”
With a quiet sigh, she lifted her right hand, extending it forward. Her five fingers stretched outward, swelling in an instant until her hand spanned nearly a thousand meters.
Seconds later, a colossal beam of light, several kilometers wide, streaked toward her at lightspeed—and landed squarely in Seraphine’s palm.
Boom!
A torrent of chaotic energy erupted, powerful enough to ignite Earth’s entire atmosphere, evaporate its oceans, and melt its planetary crust. From Seraphine’s palm—already shrinking back to its ordinary scale—layer upon layer of ultra–high-energy particle ripples blasted outward, rolling for thousands, then tens of thousands of miles.
The magnetic field lines of that portion of the Sun collapsed in an instant. A vast solar flare surged skyward.
Seraphine lowered her head slightly, casting a glance at the result—then vanished.
But the aftermath of this superluminal experiment did not end there.
The fading three-dimensional halo that had stretched across the Solar System, vaguely connecting Earth and Sun in a corridor of light, continued to spew penetrating streams of high-energy particles as it unraveled.
This radiation was perilous in the extreme, gnawing away at the molecular lattice of matter itself.
For simple substances—rock, water, gases—the damage was negligible.
But for amino acids, proteins, and complex genetic chains, the destruction was catastrophic.
Fortunately, Earth was spared. Before leaving, Seraphine had casually set a protective membrane around its outer layers with her Divine Will. Though billions on the surface nations trembled in terror, no human nor animal suffered harm.
The other worlds of the Solar System were not so fortunate.
On Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and its moons, Saturn and its moons, and beyond—vast ecosystems, billions of nascent life forms born from Ether’s return, perished in an instant.
In their bewildered state, countless organisms had their genetic chains shredded apart by the high-energy floods. Their fragile structures collapsed; their bodies liquefied into dark sludge, dying on the spot.
Thus, those planets fell silent once more, reverting to their barren, lifeless state, as they had been before Ether’s awakening.
Only the outermost worlds—Uranus, Neptune, Pluto—escaped annihilation. By the time the radiation reached them, its fury had waned, sparing their newly budding biospheres.
Meanwhile, in the Sentience Realm’s Symbolic Domain—
Swoosh!!!!
Seraphine, wreathed in endless waves of shimmering light, reveled in the pure exhilaration of superluminal flight.
Here, in this spacetime where the Mass Increase Effect of relativity held no sway, surpassing the speed of light was, for her, no more taxing than drawing a breath.
Her current velocity already tore past the boundary of luminal travel—an astonishing 333 times the speed of light.
Nearly 100 million kilometers per second.
“Not enough.”
Seraphine’s joyous smile widened as she let out a resonant roar:
“Show me—the true speed limit of this spacetime!”
Accelerate!
Boom!!!
A power greater than a star ignited within her body, and the speed—already extreme—multiplied by dozens in a single instant.
Her figure blurred, transcending into a streak of light.
9800 times the speed of light!
Buzz—
At nearly ten thousand c, even the fabric of space around her quivered, faintly trembling at her passage.
“Not yet the limit! Again!”
Accelerate!
Whoosh!!!
Her internal energy erupted once more, surging without restraint.
And her speed—already unfathomable—multiplied again.
In a flash, Seraphine shattered into a torrent of brilliance, her velocity soaring to a monstrous height:
100,000 times the speed of light.
Flying 30 billion kilometers in a single second.
What did such speed mean?
At this velocity, if Seraphine leapt from the Sun’s surface now, she could cross the orbits of all nine great planets, sweep through the Kuiper Belt, and pierce beyond the outer rim of the Solar System—within the span of a single heartbeat.
And this—this was the first time since her transmigration into this universe that Seraphine had ever unleashed the whole of her power.
For ages, no adversary had been worthy of it.
Only now.
The rush of unfettered release, the exultation of giving her all, swelled through her in a wave of fierce satisfaction.
“It has been far too long,” she whispered, her voice trembling with joy. “Far too long since I felt this way.”
But just as Seraphine was immersed in the ecstasy of speed, the fabric of reality around her began to shift.
She instantly perceived it: spacetime curvature convulsed with wild, irregular fluctuations, multiplying manifold times over.
And then—new disturbances emerged. Surges of fields saturated with the chaotic essence of the Projected Layer, vectors defying all order, appeared out of nowhere, wrapping themselves around her flight path.
The moment these forces superimposed, Seraphine’s velocity plummeted—cut cleanly in half, down to 50,000 times the speed of light.
Divine radiance flared in her eyes. Yet instead of frustration, her lips curved into a satisfied smile.
“Is one hundred thousand times the limit? Then let’s test it again.”
Buzz—
Her body erupted with power. In an instant, her speed doubled once more, carrying her straight back to 100,000 c.
But after just one second of blazing flight, the same bizarre distortions returned.
Without hesitation, Seraphine activated her Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation, weaving deductions at superluminal thought-speed.
Five, six times she forced her velocity to surge back to 100,000 c. And five, six times the same anomaly slammed into her.
Finally, the principle crystallized in her heart:
【Sentience Realm Regional Collapsing Coincidence Phenomenon】
Abbreviated as 【Sentience Burst Phenomenon】, or simply the 【Sentience Collapse Effect】.
Divine light shimmered within her gaze as torrents of information cascaded across her mind.
The deduction was precise:
The Sentience Collapse Effect occurs whenever an object within the Symbolic Domain accelerates continuously toward—or dares to reach—100,000 times the speed of light.
The energy field radiated by such an object becomes immeasurably high, twisting the local spacetime curvature of the Symbolic Domain into erratic, unstable forms. The spatial vectors lose all coherence.
Simultaneously, the Projected Layer asymptotically converges with the Symbolic Domain, amplifying the chaos of the surrounding spacetime until vector scattering surges without limit.
The data was clear:
-
From 99,900 c onward, faint disturbances manifest.
-
With each increment, the Collapse Effect escalates exponentially.
-
At exactly 100,000 c, the intensity peaks—an entire region of space collapses into chaos.
Here, Symbolic Domain and Projected Layer fuse completely. Flatness breaks down. Vectors scatter and dissipate in catastrophic loss.
The inevitable consequence: the object’s speed collapses back down to below 9,900 times the speed of light.
“Hoo—”
Seraphine exhaled lightly, as though she had just confirmed a theorem.
“So this is the so-called Sentience Collapse Effect. No wonder I found nothing of it within the Mercury Race soldiers’ memories. Of course—they were mere soldiers. None of them possessed any means of approaching such velocity.”
Her expression shifted. A memory flickered. She turned her head downward—searching.
But the ravaged expanse of the Sentience Realm Hallway was gone.
Vanished.
The truth was plain before her eyes.
Seraphine realized what had happened. She had simply flown too fast—likely beyond the Solar System’s boundary. Naturally, the shattered remains of that ancient corridor were nowhere in sight.
“This corridor, crafted by some unknown hand… how did it resist the 【Sentience Collapse Effect】?”
The question struck her like lightning.
She remembered now.
Even a second-level corridor could accelerate travelers to 300,000 times the speed of light—blithely ignoring the constraints of the Collapse.
And the third-level Sentience Realm Hallway, whispered of in hushed tones, was said to hurl objects to a staggering ten million times the speed of light.
What kind of magnitude was that?
Consider: the Milky Way’s diameter spans roughly 200,000 light-years.
With a third-level corridor—one the Mercury Race soldiers had only ever heard rumors of, never glimpsed—such a distance could be crossed in a single week.
One week to traverse the galaxy.
“At that speed,” Seraphine murmured, “civilizations would be in constant communication. Exchange would be seamless. Technological development across the galaxy would surge at a pace unimaginable to those bound by slower means.”
Her brows drew together, her gaze sinking inward.
“No wonder those Mercury Race people sneered at Earth as a 【Broken Civilization】. The Sentience Realm Hallways aren’t just shortcuts—they’re scaffolding for the very progress of intelligent life.”
A frown tightened on her face.
“The nearest accessible stretch of corridor to Earth lies more than a hundred light-years away. Which means… unless one dares that unstable wormhole buried in the Oort Cloud—a passage dangerous even to the Mercury Race—the Solar System is nothing but a low-speed cage. A border prison at the edge of the galaxy. Hard to enter, and harder still to escape.”
Her thoughts turned sharp.
“Perhaps… I should find a way to change this.”
The notion flickered through her mind like a hidden star coming into view.
And with it, she recalled another fragment of Mercury Race memory—something of deep significance:
The ranking system of the Milky Way.