Pluto, the most distant of the nine classical planets, swings from about 4.4 billion kilometers at its closest approach to over 7.3 billion kilometers at its farthest.
Beyond Pluto lies the Kuiper Belt, a ring of countless icy bodies and asteroids circling the outer reaches of the Solar System. Crossing it alone would demand traveling billions more kilometers outward, spanning a region from roughly 4.5 to 7.5 billion kilometers from the Sun.
Yet even after such a trek, the true frontier remains distant. To reach the actual boundary of the Solar System—the inner edge of the Oort Cloud—one must still journey more than two trillion kilometers farther.
It is there that the long-period comets are born, before their rare plunges into the inner planetary orbits. Formed from the ancient debris of the primordial nebula that gave birth to the Sun and its planets five billion years ago, the Oort Cloud is the Solar System’s placenta—a lingering halo of leftover matter.
It spans an unfathomable distance, stretching nearly two light-years across. Only by passing entirely through it can one be said to have truly left the Solar System, entering the unexplored and unbounded wilderness of intergalactic space.
The scale is staggering—so immense it borders on despair.
Without the Sentience Realm Hallway, relying only on primitive fossil-fuel propulsion, or even the crude beginnings of controllable nuclear fusion, no fledgling civilization could ever hope to cross it. Most would wither long before, collapsing into extinction as the indifferent centuries ground them away.
And yet, this immense, suffocating Solar System is nothing more than a single spark—an insignificant mote of light—resting upon one of the four great spiral arms of a barred-spiral galaxy known as the 【Milky Way】.
The Milky Way spans two hundred thousand light-years in diameter, holding hundreds of billions of stars. Against its backdrop of countless suns, star clusters, nebulae, tides of interstellar gas, veils of cosmic dust, and a numberless host of black holes, the Solar System is reduced to near nothingness.
Therefore, beyond humanity on Earth, within the vast star-cluster system of the Milky Way, trillions of other intelligent life forms exist.
These beings hail from countless worlds and countless species.
Each planet bears its own gravitational constants, terrain, and atmospheric composition. Each species, in turn, cultivates unique cultures, modes of logic, and standards of beauty.
From these differences arise power systems and ability structures so numerous and complex that they defy easy categorization. Even a single species on a single world may develop multiple, entirely distinct systems of power.
The inevitable result is this: for any individual or civilization to create a universal standard for measuring combat power—one that spans every life form and every perspective across the Milky Way—is an almost impossible dream.
Take, for instance, a frozen world in the remote depths of space: Planet A. Beneath its surface lies a vast, liquid ocean, cheerful in its strange way, despite a temperature that plunges to –180° Celsius. Within that abyss, a race of alkyl-based intelligences arose, shaped by the interplay of time and Ether.
Forged in such extreme cold, these beings developed an obsession with thermal energy bordering on mania. Their frigid cradle slowed their evolutionary pace, stretching their lifespans far beyond those of many other species.
Over countless generations, they constructed what came to be known as Power System A. Its core revolved around two pursuits: the storage of thermal energy, and the extension of life. Every advancement within their system fed one or both of these goals.
At its highest tiers, a practitioner’s body became a vessel holding thermal reserves on par with a high-yield nuclear warhead. Yet their offense and defense were feeble. Their vast stores of energy served not to strike down enemies, but simply to prolong their existence.
Against a system honed for Physical strength and speed, such a power user resembled nothing more than a lumbering gas cylinder. One clean blow—and they erupted.
In fact, it was grimly ironic: the greatest destructive potential of their entire system could only be realized in the instant of their death, whether through external force or deliberate self-detonation.
Now compare this to another world, several hundred light-years distant—Planet B.
Also a frozen sphere, also home to intelligences fascinated with heat, shaped by their equally hostile environment. They too possessed slow generational turnover and extended lifespans. Yet their approach diverged. Instead of hoarding thermal energy within, the power system they built revolved around the art of borrowing heat from the world around them.
They stored not a shred of energy within their own bodies. Instead, through intricate, painstaking methods of channeling external forces, they could reproduce results comparable to System A.
In combat, these practitioners could even forcibly borrow the thermal energy within an opponent’s body, draining them dry and ending their life.
Yet, when pitted against high-speed, physically dominant species, users of System B fared no better than their counterparts in System A. One decisive blow, and they too would burst apart. The only difference was that, lacking vast reserves of internal energy, their self-destruction carried far less explosive force.
Of course, these two cases do not suggest that focusing purely on Physical strength represents the “correct” evolutionary path. For countless other evolutionary routes exist that directly counter systems built solely on raw physique.
For instance: a power user whose physical body is frail, but whose mental power reigns supreme. Against such an adversary, a Physical evolver may find their very soul shackled at first contact—reduced to a hollow, wandering husk.
Or the mage-type systems, which can easily maintain distance, launching overwhelming long-range assaults until the brute is annihilated.
Or the purely defensive systems, designed to nullify, redirect, or dissipate incoming attacks of every kind.
Some systems even abandon offense and defense altogether, enhancing only computational ability or soul strength in order to better wield external weaponry: conventional arms, devastating area-of-effect devices, or continent-level annihilation weapons.
Still stranger are power systems with no destructive focus whatsoever, evolving instead toward exploration, research, preservation, or guidance.
Thus, across the Milky Way, many advanced civilizations ultimately converged on the most direct and quantifiable attribute for gauging any being’s combat power:
The degree of destruction they can unleash upon the external world.
Those systems with negligible or no destructive capacity are excluded from this hierarchy; separate evaluative scales exist for them. Likewise, powers that are too bizarre or anomalous are assessed by distinct standards of their own.
For the vast multitude of Ether-evolved beings, however, a relatively unified ranking system emerged—built on the bedrock of destruction.
The system is simple, using only numbers. Mathematics is the one language all intelligences can share.
Levels range from 1 to 30.
Over time, these thirty levels were grouped into three great tiers.
From Seraphine’s Earth-born perspective, the divisions can be understood as:
Stage 1 ~ 10: Ordinary Life
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Destructive range: several meters to thousands of meters.
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Equivalent to Wall-Busting up to Street-Busting power.
Stage 11 ~ 20: Transcendent Life
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Destructive range: 10 km to thousands of km.
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Equivalent to City-Busting up to Land-Busting power.
Stage 21 ~ 30: Milky Way Overlord
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Destructive range: tens of thousands to millions of km.
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Equivalent to Planet-Busting up to Star-Busting power.
Here, “Busting” refers specifically to short-term destructive feats.
Although there are no excessively rigid limits on time or frequency, sustaining attacks for half a year just to scrape together the required destructive standard is obviously invalid.
The destructive effect must be realized within a single decisive clash—within minutes, at most—for it to count as legitimate.
“Destructive Range” refers to a three-dimensional volume, not simply a two-dimensional spread. Range must have height and depth, not merely surface area.
To put it bluntly: if a creature can churn through ten thousand meters of land in a short burst, but only to a depth of a few dozen meters, then despite the apparent surface devastation, it cannot be considered Transcendent level.
By this measure, Earth Civilization presently has no human who qualifies as Transcendent.
Even Seraphine’s second disciple—Kael, a martial prodigy who has already condensed a true Aether field and begun forging a Saint Body—remains at the peak beneath Transcendence.
Of course, the Aurora clan members engaged in research at the Sapphire Research Institute are without doubt Transcendent beings.
As for figures like the Aurora King, the Witch King Mycenae, Monroe Holmes, the Primordial Demon—these aberrations that should never have appeared on Earth—every one of them is certainly Transcendent, likely at stages far higher than the first.
Yet even if such entities were all healthy, cooperative, and aligned with humanity’s defense, without an existence of Seraphine’s magnitude, Earth would remain vulnerable. A single strike force of only a few dozen alien Transcendents could still sweep across the planet with ease, crushing all resistance and seizing dominion over Earth entire.
Indeed, when Seraphine captured that Mercury Race battleship, one of its crew—a captain—proved capable of reaching Transcendent Stage One when fully armed, clad in an Etheric Battleform.
From his memories, he had once been a mere commoner at the very bottom of the Mercury Race’s rigid bloodline hierarchy. By every conventional standard, it should have been impossible for him to attain Transcendence at all.
According to the original work, Mercury Race commoners could never grow stronger through their own efforts. Even with an Etheric Battleform, they could not step into the Transcendent realm—
Unless that Battleform was of an exceptionally high rank.
By sheer chance, the corpulent captain wielded one such Battleform, one that ranked among the finest even within Mercury’s noble caste.
It was not his by birth. He had torn it, almost madly, from the corpse of his fleet’s supreme commander—after their entire branch fleet was annihilated in a wormhole by the Milky Way Tyrant.
“He was a reckless alien, charging straight ahead… what a pity,” Seraphine whispered, shaking her head with a faint sigh. “But you encountered me.”
Her tone shifted, thoughtful and cold:
“That Milky Way Tyrant slumbering in the wormhole… by the combat standards of the galaxy, it was almost certainly an overlord-class entity, perhaps even among the apex.”
The Milky Way’s power hierarchy placed Overlords as beings of the true Planet-Destroying level.
Not the false kind—creatures who could shatter a planet in one blow yet fail to deal with the aftermath, the swirling stellar remnants and drifting debris that, under gravity, would coalesce back into a world. Those were imposters, pseudo Planet-Destroyers.
No, true Planet-Destroyers could obliterate a planet like Earth completely—inside and out—erasing its energy bonds, scattering its matter into untraceable fragments across the void, ensuring that gravity could never gather them again.
That was a real Planet-Destroying existence.
Milky Way Overlords might not instantly unmake a star, whose vast bulk dwarfs any planet. Yet under their sustained assault, a star’s very structure could crack, falter, and eventually collapse.
For entities of this order, solar flares were mere irritants, and even a star’s core could not kill them—barely enough to cause discomfort.
With enough time, patience, and merciless persistence, such beings could burrow through a star’s outer layers, strike its burning heart again and again—thousands, tens of thousands of times—until the stellar core ruptured, forcing the star into premature death.
This is why the title “Milky Way Overlord” exists.
Imagine, then, such a creature targeting an interstellar civilization armed with thousands—even tens of thousands—of warships.
It would take only a small vessel, riding the Sentience Realm Hallway at superluminal velocity, to reach those scattered worlds. With fists alone, it could smash each planet into silence.
If that civilization lacked a power of equal tier, its fate was already written.
Because those so-called star-piercing cannons? At best, they would be weaker than a single strike from an Overlord’s hand.
One being could eclipse the strength of an entire interstellar empire.
One lifeform was, in essence, a civilization unto itself.
And from this, Seraphine quietly drew her own conclusions.
The struggle between civilizations across the Milky Way could only be described as barbaric.
Among the countless Milky Way Overlords, those ranked in the top ten were regarded with unparalleled dread—nightmares in the eyes of every interstellar society.
For such beings, who had nearly reached the pinnacle of evolution, even stars were nothing more than targets to shatter in short order. Compared to their fists, the so-called star-piercing cannons of civilization were little more than a passing breeze.
Before these apex Overlords, the entire Milky Way lay open—its countless systems and empires theirs to claim or discard at will.
Unless a force stronger still appeared, all the lofty “interstellar laws” and “interstellar codes” amounted to nothing but scraps of paper—nonsense without weight.
They could play as they pleased.
In fact, whatever rules or order might exist in the galaxy likely arose only from compromises, or direct clashes, among those very top-ten Overlords.
“If that’s the case…”
Seraphine’s voice lingered, sharp with amusement.
“I should count as an Overlord-class lifeform myself. And this… this is only what I wield in terms of Physical Strength. If I include my other powers, even the so-called ‘Overlord Stage Ten’ is far too low to measure me.”
She sifted through the memories of the Mercury crew, then shook her head and let out a derisive click of the tongue:
“Tsk, tsk, tsk. This so-called Milky Way ranking system has a rather pathetic ceiling. I had assumed I might encounter opponents on par with something like Super Saiyans, who would at least force me to exert myself. But now? They’re nothing more than trash to be erased with ease.”
Indeed.
That elite echelon—the strongest ten Milky Way Overlords—might appear comparable to her in terms of sheer destructive range.
But Seraphine’s arsenal was not limited to Physical Strength and Soul.
She wielded a terrifying Divine Will, a force of mind and spirit vast enough to crush hundreds of thousands of Earths in an instant.
She bore the Great Sun Divine Aura, whose magnitude had reached stellar scale—capable of conjuring world-ending flames that exceeded 1 billion degrees Celsius with a mere thought.
And she commanded the Real Number Channel, a power unbound by distance, allowing her to appear instantly wherever she possessed the coordinates of spacetime itself.
She also wielded Instant Time Compression—a technique whose scope might well encompass the entire universe itself, halting time for five full seconds.
And beyond all else, Seraphine cultivated the Skyroot Codex: a supreme-tier entry point. Once mastered, it opened the path of true ascension, granting her overwhelming dominion over space and the freedom to practice peerless arts without ever relying on Ether.
It was precisely through the Skyroot Codex that Seraphine uncovered the fatal weakness lurking behind the supposedly invincible Milky Way Overlords.
That weakness was simple—
They were born of Ether, strengthened by Ether… and shackled by Ether.
Seraphine, however, was not. With her high-dimensional acupuncture points, she could pierce through dimensional barriers at will, siphoning pure energy from across countless higher layers of reality. This allowed her to cultivate and battle entirely independent of local Ether conditions.
Whether in a High-Ether Sector or a barren void utterly devoid of Ether, her combat power and state would remain untouched, absolute.
But those so-called “exalted” Ether-born Overlords? They were another matter.
Even without records in the Mercury Race memories, Seraphine needed no confirmation. She had already observed the Aurora Clan on Earth—beings that fell dormant and reawakened in rhythm with the ebb and flow of the Ether tide. From that alone, it was not difficult to deduce:
The countless overlord-class entities of the Milky Way, who had clawed their way to power by absorbing Ether step by step across eons, would inevitably have rigid, even desperate, dependencies on external Ether activity.
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It was highly probable that in Ether-barren sectors, a Milky Way Overlord’s combat power would collapse dramatically—perhaps to the point of being unable to even hold their form.
And there was more. All evidence suggested that despite their terrifying might, these Overlords were still chained by a greater shackle: the speed of light.
Like her, they could not surpass it—whether in movement, in projection of power, or in the velocity of their attacks.
Seraphine’s lips curved into a cold smile.
“Just a bunch of sub-light-speed wastes.”
Frankly speaking—
If the King of Aurora, a being of such stature, were to examine the complete memories of these dozens of Mercury Race members, he would almost certainly be terrified to his core. The sheer vastness of the revelations might drive him into a mental collapse, instilling a permanent dread of the boundless universe. From then on, he would likely remain caged within the Solar System, never again daring to venture outward until the day he died.
But Seraphine was not such a creature.
Not only was she unshaken—
She actually found the so-called interstellar civilizations and star-bursting “experts” beyond the Solar System to be little more than noisy, squawking rookies, endlessly pecking about.
Far too weak to be worth serious consideration.
In her view, perhaps only the top ten Overlords at the peak of the Milky Way could withstand even a couple of her punches.
And even that estimate applied only to the Seraphine of now.
Give her another ten days, half a month at most, and even if she did nothing—merely sleeping peacefully each day—the Infinite Attribute System would still elevate her thousands, tens of thousands of times higher in power, unhindered by anything.
“Speaking of which—”
Seraphine’s form flickered and vanished from the depths of the Symbolic Domain, reappearing within a stretch of lightless cosmos.
“Where am I now?”
Her eyes swept across the dark sea of stars. The Sun glimmered faintly in the far distance, dimmed by the sheer gulf of space. She turned away, fixing her gaze elsewhere.
Roughly 100,000 kilometers ahead, a reddish planet drifted “slowly” along the vast curvature of spacetime—its path bent by the overwhelming mass of the distant Sun, hundreds of millions of kilometers away.
The planet itself seemed imprisoned within that immense gravitational dent, and yet, at the same time, it created its own smaller depression in the fabric of spacetime. Though insignificant compared to the Sun’s, the dent it made was fundamentally no different in nature.
Around this reddish world, its spacetime influence extended tens of thousands, even over a hundred thousand kilometers. Within that radius, five smaller planets, lesser in both volume and mass, orbited steadily—each at a different “height” along the warped curvature of spacetime, circling their reddish master in patient arcs.
Within the layers of concentric spacetime dents—great and small—Seraphine perceived a ceaseless birth of exotic bosons. They appeared, then surged outward at light-speed in every direction, weaving successive force fields that tugged on all matter, pulling it down the slopes of curvature toward the dent’s heart.
This field was the fundamental tether binding the cosmos together.
It was gravity.
The reddish world before her was Pluto.
The five celestial companions orbiting it: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos, and Styx.
And those elusive bosons—seeming to exist across multiple dimensions, perhaps even across parallel realities—were none other than gravitons.
“I didn’t expect this. After racing for so long at 100,000 times the speed of light through the Sentience Realm, I’ve only just reached Pluto.” Seraphine’s eyes glimmered faintly. “So the curvature shifts in the Symbolic Domain are even more warped than I imagined.”
Her gaze lingered on Charon, Pluto’s gray and lifeless giant moon, little more than a thousand kilometers across. Her expression flickered.
Swish—
A hundred thousand kilometers away, the spacetime dent anchoring Pluto suddenly flattened, erased by a force that had no origin.
In an instant, Pluto’s gravitational structure—stretching hundreds of thousands of miles in every direction—collapsed.
The tidal lock between Pluto and Charon, upheld for hundreds of millions of years, snapped apart. Charon broke free, cast adrift as a wandering planet sliding rapidly into the abyss.
The other four moons followed. Stripped of Pluto’s pull, they spun away along their last trajectories, scattering toward the void.
Pluto was left alone, barren, and moonless.
But only for a breath.
The five moons, barely a heartbeat into their flight, froze in the dark. Seraphine’s will seized them, forcing their paths to twist and redirect. Like arrows loosed in reverse, they hurtled toward her.
Boom. Boom.
A colossal dent opened around Seraphine herself, spacetime bowing inward. From its depths, countless gravitons erupted like a flood, racing outward across a massive curved surface, surging at light-speed in every direction.
In less than a second, an astronomical-grade gravitational field—the field named Seraphine—came into being.
And within that field, she captured all five moons tens of thousands of kilometers away, binding them as her satellites.
Seraphine stood with her hands folded, alone in the frozen depths of space. The five moons now circled her, their pale light reflecting in her flawless features as a bright, satisfied smile curved across her face.
“If I desire to pluck stars,” she murmured, “then the stars should hasten to my side.”
Her gaze swept deeper into the eternal dark, her smile blazing with fervor.
“One day, the entire universe itself will circle me.”
Had an Earth astronomer, peering through a deep-space telescope, fixed their lens on Pluto’s region at that instant, they would have noticed a miracle: a hidden planet had appeared, attended by five moons, yet utterly invisible to the optical sky.
For Seraphine’s frame—less than two meters in height—was far beyond the detection range of even Earth’s most precise instruments, billions of kilometers away.
And if that astronomer, burning with curiosity, attempted to calculate the mass of this invisible planet by gravitational methods, the answer would have been astonishing.
The planet’s mass would match Pluto’s exactly.
For Seraphine—whose body weighed less than a hundred kilograms—had twisted spacetime and warped dimensions, weaving from nothing a gravitational field equivalent to Pluto’s own.
And yet, this too was far from her limit.
For as long as Seraphine willed it, and as long as her patience endured—
She could, if she wished, kick the Sun itself aside and erect an astronomical-grade gravitational field of her own, its magnitude no weaker than the star’s. With that titanic field, she could capture Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars—the nine great planets, the far-flung Kuiper Belt, and even the distant Oort Cloud—then bind them together into a new Solar System of her own making.
But clearly, Seraphine wasn’t that bored.
Even playing with Pluto and its five moons had been nothing more than a passing whim, an indulgence of idle fancy.
In this Solar System, Seraphine did as she pleased.
The reasons were irrelevant. The results were irrelevant.
What mattered was her mood.
After a few minutes of amusement, she dispersed the vast gravitational field around her. With a flicker of will, the five moons that had been revolving around her drifted back to Pluto, which had stood solitary for a brief time.
Whoosh—
Invisible power swept down once more.
The spacetime dent around Pluto restored itself as if by miracle, and countless gravitons erupted outward at the speed of light, weaving again into the immense gravitational field that enfolded the five moons exactly where they belonged.
“Time is truly a magical power.”
Seraphine tilted her head back, eyes falling on the resplendent Milky Way glowing across the abyss, and sighed softly. “Even gravity, once an elusive mystery, is nothing more than a toy in my palm now.”
She still remembered her shock and elation when, during the first great Ether tide, she had inadvertently glimpsed and brushed against the primal dead world and the electromagnetic force.
The electromagnetic force is the interaction between charged particles—or between charged macroscopic bodies.
Not just electrical force.
Friction, fluid drag, surface tension, gas pressure, buoyancy, adhesion—all are macroscopic manifestations of microscopic particles pushing and pulling at one another. All can be encompassed within the domain of the electromagnetic force.
Moreover, photons are the carriers of electromagnetic interaction, and light itself is an electromagnetic wave. Thus, even the simple ability to see the world around oneself is inseparably tied to electromagnetism.
And so, to master the electromagnetic force is, in theory, to hold a ticket to godhood.
Seraphine could still recall her racing, fevered thoughts in that moment:
This is one of the four fundamental forces!
This is the kind of high-order power exalted in most works of fantasy—where even a single mastery is enough to cross the stars and rise to supreme heights.
At the instant she had “touched” the electromagnetic force, countless possible methods of wielding it had burst into her mind, along with dazzling visions of how her power might evolve once she mastered it fully.
“As long as I master electromagnetic force, I can manipulate photons at the very level of electromagnetic energy—instantly unleashing massive pulses that plunge cities and towns hundreds, even thousands of kilometers across into sudden blackout.
I could shape and direct any emission within the electromagnetic spectrum itself: visible light, radio waves, ultraviolet, infrared, gamma rays, X-rays, and more.
I could draw in lightning, lasers, or any radiant energy, then converge and redirect them into immense torrents of heat—rolling floods of infrared radiation capable of flattening an entire metropolis.
I could transform ordinary optical vision into electromagnetic sight, perceiving the very life force and radiant aura flowing around living beings.
I could even command the movements of others’ limbs, manipulating the trace iron within their blood and flesh. Pushing deeper, I could seize the iron-rich blood in the human brain—shaping thoughts and emotions, even seizing their consciousness outright.
Under the dominion of electromagnetic force, humanity, matter, and nature itself would all bend to my will.”
The dream was radiant. The reality, merciless.
At that time, she had no such command over electromagnetic force.
At that time, she was far too weak.
That fleeting glimpse, that yearning for power, had long haunted Seraphine—her frustration at failing to grasp it lingering like a thorn.
But as time passed, that thought slipped away. She couldn’t say when. At some point, her subconscious no longer lingered on the four fundamental forces at all.
Why?
Seraphine sank into deep reflection.
The answer surfaced in mere seconds.
Because her ascent had been too rapid.
“The power of time. The power of space. Alien technologies both mundane and miraculous. Mysteries pointing straight to the universe’s origin... all these had already filled my vision, already consumed my mind.”
Her voice fell low, steady. “And so that ancient yearning—to command the four fundamental forces—simply scattered into nothingness.”
Yet today, in a moment of idle contemplation, Seraphine paused. And realized.
For the self she had become—
To truly master the so-called four fundamental forces of the universe: Gravity, Electromagnetic Force, Strong Interaction, Weak Interaction...
It could no longer be called impossible.
Not effortless, no—but neither beyond reach.
Only a matter of focus.
Whether it was unleashing devastating electromagnetic pulses, commanding every wavelength of the spectrum, absorbing and redirecting lightning, lasers, and radiation, shifting between countless forms of vision, or even manipulating, twisting, overwhelming, and erasing the free will of intelligent life—Seraphine could achieve all of it, even without direct control of electromagnetic force.
Yet…
Seraphine frowned, her thoughts sharp.
“As someone at the Star-Busting level, not wielding the four fundamental forces feels… indefensible.”
Another thought stirred.
And at once, like a tidal surge, knowledge flooded her mind: definitions, applications, methods of control, advanced operations—every facet of the four fundamental forces surged through her mind in a single instant.
Gravity: Acts on all objects with mass. Infinite range. Relative strength: 10^-39. Propagates at the speed of light.
Electromagnetic Force: Acts on charges and quarks. Infinite range. Relative strength: 10^-3. Propagates at the speed of light.
Strong Nuclear Force: Acts on nuclei and mesons. Range: 10^-15 m. Relative strength: 10^-1. Propagates at the speed of light.
Weak Nuclear Force: Acts on most particles. Range: 10^-18 m. Relative strength: 10^-12. Propagates at the speed of light.
Gravity—she had already mastered it, almost inadvertently, by weaving the twists and vibrations of space itself.
Electromagnetic force—at a mere flicker of thought, it was hers to command.
In that moment, the techniques she had already pushed to their pinnacle—《Drifting Cloud Hands》 and 《Dragonwave Crash》—under the gaze of the Eye of True Revelation and the precision of Chaos Calculation, suddenly merged into one.
They transformed into a single cultivation system: 《Archetype Ascension》, a discipline of cultivation—enhancement—control, reaching into the microscopic realm and striking at the fundamental nature of electromagnetic force.
Its essence: to construct countless atoms within her body, forged not from matter but from Ether and pure high-dimensional energy, weaving them into pathways like macroscopic superconducting channels—yet infinitely more intricate, layered, and multi-dimensional, forming decaying quantum energy rays.
From the atomic level upward, these rays spread, layer by layer: to the molecular, the macromolecular, the cellular, multicellular, the organs, until they suffused her entire being.
And after some time—
When Seraphine poured endless torrents of high-dimensional energy into this construction, when every atom in every cell of her body stably pulsed with these multi-dimensional decaying quantum rays—
In that instant—
Thousands upon thousands of magnetic halos erupted around her, vast and radiant. Large and small, each halo was trillions of times stronger than Earth’s crystalline magnetic field—comparable even to the fury of neutron stars.
They flared with violent, fantastical brilliance, shimmering, encircling, and exalting her body in rings of living light.
For a brief moment, Seraphine’s arms, legs, torso, and neck—every part of her body—were wrapped in dense clusters of halos, tens of thousands of them, radiant and dazzling, each a different shape.
But soon, these layered magnetic halos—making her appear colossal, even cumbersome—began to shift.
Under her will, they moved like living things, merging, interlocking, reshaping themselves. Gradually, they became more refined, intricate, and deliberate—transforming into something armor-like.
The process was not mere stacking of light upon light.
Seraphine, drawing upon her vast knowledge of design, twisted and fused them into countless ethereal components. Each segment carried a function, a purpose—forming a lattice of phantom machinery.
Seconds ticked by.
Referencing a vast treasury of Emberlight and Earthly technologies, she calibrated, polarized, suspended, layered, embedded. Piece by piece, she painstakingly forged the tens of thousands of halos into a single suit—an armored form, radiant and terrible, like that of a seraphim.
It covered her completely from head to toe, its surface interwoven with patterns too complex to describe, glowing with crimson and azure divine light. From her shoulders and neck flared two streams of searing radiance, blood-red, stretching a thousand meters outward like roaring, serpentine dragons of fire—forming a living electromagnetic mantle.
From afar, Seraphine—clad in celestial-grade electromagnetic armor, face hidden behind a cold mask—looked unspeakably majestic.
Incredibly divine.
And, above all, impossibly cool.
Why did she care so much about the appearance?
Very simple. Power was one thing. But looking cool was a lifelong creed.
And yet, this was no empty facade. Even if a mere mortal were to don this armor—assuming they could survive it—they could strike down an entry-level Milky Way overlord-class Planet-Busting expert with nothing more than a sweep of the cloak.
In essence, this armor, wrought from electromagnetic force, was a Planet-Busting divine artifact.
Even the smallest fragment of it—a single light ring, engraved as nothing more than a decorative petal pattern—if torn from the suit and cast down upon Earth, would instantly unfold into a magnetic field of apocalyptic scale.
Without spell or incantation, its sheer existence would engulf and devour Earth’s magnetic field, birthing catastrophic storms, hurricanes, and unending tempests until the biosphere was erased.
From there, the light ring’s magnetic draw could strip iron from half a continent within a thousand-mile radius—ripping even the blood-iron from the veins of the mighty Aurora clan, draining them to pale husks.
And that was only the beginning.
For a cyclically shifting magnetic field breeds a cyclically shifting electric field.
And a cyclically shifting electric field, in turn, spawns a cyclically shifting magnetic field.
The loop feeds upon itself.
Thus, this single electromagnetic halo could unleash endless torrents of lightning, thunderbolts raining down in furious waves, scorching and melting nearly half a world’s surface into molten glass.
And still, it would endure.
Even without Seraphine’s high-dimensional energy to fuel it, the halo could remain stable for ages. It could outlast her, outlast kingdoms, outlast the very sky—searing the crust of a planet until nothing remained but a wasteland of storms, thunder, and magnetic fire.
A world remade into an eternal hell.
Not only in the material domain—the terrifying electromagnetic rings born from 《Archetype Ascension》 radiated a magnetic field so catastrophic that it shredded even souls at the most fundamental level of existence.
Lesser spirits, wandering monsters, ancient phantoms thousands of years old, even ghost kings that had lingered ten millennia since the return of Ether—none could withstand it.
All that awaited them was obliteration.
Even the King of Aurora, whose body endured at the atomic scale as a so-called immortal, would fall if he strayed too near. Unless he fled tens of thousands of miles, death was certain.
And the billions of humans on Earth, far frailer in body and soul, would meet an even crueler fate. Their iron elements would be wrenched from their blood in an instant, their flesh collapsing into dark, dissolving pools.
The souls that rose screaming at the moment of death would fare no better—torn apart into sparks of fleeting light, annihilated utterly from the mortal realm.
“Not bad.”
Seraphine brushed her hand against the feral beast-head pauldron on her left shoulder. It blazed with illusory light at her touch.
Buzz—
At that slight motion, the armor thrummed, releasing a surge of electromagnetic force. In an instant, every object within tens of thousands of kilometers—faint particles, drifting dust, fragments of meteor rock—was magnetized, transformed into glittering, flashing permanent magnets.
She smiled in satisfaction.
“Henceforth, you shall be called the 【Eternal Magnetron Armor】.”
As the name left her lips, a crystal-grade soul consciousness ignited within the dragon-head relief on the armor’s chest, as though woven together from uncountable lightning bolts.
Wisdom flared in the dragon’s eyes.
The armor stirred.
No longer a dead, inanimate shell of power, it moved with spirit, with life—like a Divine Beast, complete in form and essence.
For Seraphine had, with a single thought, condensed a soul so vast and powerful that it eclipsed billions of human spirits, exceeding even the Gaia consciousness of Earth itself.
At her present level, apart from the unfathomable Root, the mysteries of souls, spirits, minds, and consciousness held no secrets.
Whenever she wished, Seraphine could fashion new souls.
And once the Root was laid bare, she could mass-produce intelligent life itself—beings of terrifying talent, born already prepared to cultivate and evolve without limit.
The Eternal Magnetron Armor radiated waves of fierce, clinging affection, as a loyal beast to its master.
Through the magnetic mask, Seraphine ‘looked’ across the void to the gray planet drifting a hundred thousand kilometers away.
She murmured:
“Gravity and Electromagnetic Force are mastered. Only the Strong and Weak Nuclear Forces remain.”
Buzz—
Suddenly, the surrounding space warped, and a colossal vortex opened, swallowing her whole.
A heartbeat later, Seraphine emerged over one hundred thousand kilometers away—descending upon the reddish-brown polar ice cap of Charon, Pluto’s largest moon.
Her Divine Will swept outward in a single pulse, scanning the entire moon at once—atom by atom, inside and out.
The truth revealed itself instantly. Despite Ether now surging severalfold across the Solar System, despite countless planets showing the first stirrings of new life, this satellite remained barren. From its frozen crust to its buried depths, not a single bacterium had ever stirred.
“This moon shows almost no geological activity.”
She lowered her gaze—‘seeing’ through the ground to the stagnant core five hundred kilometers beneath her feet. The lifeless rock drew a faint shake of her head.
“The internal energy is far too weak. Not even a soft convective layer like Earth’s molten core. No... it likely cooled completely not long after its birth.”
Yet—
A slow smile curved her lips as she felt the whisper of air brushing faintly around her.
“There is an atmosphere here.”
She lifted her eyes to Pluto itself, looming enormous and heavy in the dim sky—its presence pressing down with sheer proximity, less than twenty thousand kilometers away. Then she turned, glancing outward into the abyss of the Solar System, where the Sun burned only as a faint, distant spark.
The answer was obvious.
Here, at the frozen edge of the system, sunlight was far too weak to warm Charon’s face. The cold was absolute—so absolute that even nitrogen froze solid.
And yet, that same polar cold trapped fugitive gases—methane, simple organics—that escaped from Pluto’s tenuous atmosphere. Over eons, ultraviolet light scattered from the distant Sun bathed them, reshaping them into denser, more complex molecules. Slowly, a thin, fragile atmosphere gathered around Charon, clinging where gravity alone could never hold it.
For in truth, with barely one-forty-fifth the mass of Earth’s Moon, Charon’s pull was far too weak to retain air on its own.
Seraphine surveyed the barren world with clinical calm.
“For experiments…” she said at last, her voice edged with satisfaction. “This will do.”
With that, she slowly lifted her palm.
CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK CRACK—
In an instant, the frozen ground convulsed. The vast, reddish-brown expanse of ice split apart and shattered, collapsing into endless shards of crimson debris. Hovering above a crater hundreds of miles wide, Seraphine crushed the fragments into a dense, blood-like, half-congealed fluid.
Under her will, the liquid gathered in midair, merging into a colossal river of red-black matter, kilometers thick and stretching over a thousand kilometers long. It surged upward into the void, like a roaring Blood Dragon, wrapping around Charon at incredible speed.
As the Blood Dragon circled the sky, the entire moon trembled violently. The surface sank, as though swallowed by apocalypse. Crystalline layers of Charon split open with anguished cracks, venting torrents of the same crimson fluid. They soared upward and fused seamlessly into the Blood Dragon’s vast body.
This blood-hued torrent contained methane, ethane, ethylene, acetylene, hydrogen cyanide, carbon atoms, benzene, a multitude of large molecules, nitrogen atoms, positive ions—an immeasurable ocean of raw material.
Seraphine intended to use this boundless mass in a grand experiment of life-creation, mastering the most fundamental essence of matter: the forces that act within and between atoms.
If one described particle motion and interaction through quantum field theory, then the particle wave function was nothing less than a “field” permeating the cosmos. Matter itself was composed of these fields.
The energy and momentum of a field manifest in quantized steps: 0, 1, 2, 3…—never 1.5, 2.3, or 4.7. Each rise in quantized energy corresponds to the birth of a particle in spacetime; each fall, to its annihilation.
At the lowest step lies the vacuum: the ground state of the field, where no particle exists. Thus, a field is more fundamental than a particle—particles are merely excited states of the field itself.
Interactions between particles—the strong force, the weak force—are ultimately interactions between fields, or field couplings.
Moreover, in sufficiently high-energy conditions, the “Weak Force” in its conventional sense ceases to exist. Instead, it merges with the electromagnetic force into a unified Electroweak Interaction.
And in theory, even the four fundamental forces themselves may unify into a single Grand Unified Field. To command it is to create all things—and erase all things.
With such power, the entire periodic table, every material object and natural phenomenon, could be summoned into existence with a thought—or extinguished just as easily.
Crack crack crack—
Seraphine’s Divine Will pressed deeper, reshaping the Blood River on a nuclear level. Within it, matter underwent rapid decay under force, exploding with thermal energy and shockwaves before transforming into entirely new atomic structures.
She wielded her Divine Will like a hand, simulating every step of force interaction. Simultaneously, the Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation spun ceaselessly, deducing and locking onto the “True Form” and “Essence” of the Weak Nuclear Force hidden deep in the nucleus.
Narrowly defined, the weak nuclear force governs interactions where charged leptons—electrons, muons, tau particles—and their neutrinos shift particle identities. Neutron decay, meson decay, nuclei absorbing neutrinos to spawn neutrons—all belong to it.
Broadly defined, Weak Interaction is the birthing of new fundamental particles, or new particle states, through weak coupling.
In summary: Gravity and Electromagnetism govern matter on cosmic and atomic scales. But the Weak Force rules the nucleus itself.
Put simply, it is the force that makes particles split—or change.
“Divine Will alone is not enough.”
Her eyes narrowed as she fixed on the writhing Blood River overhead, layering electromagnetic force and spatial interference into it.
Seconds passed. The ratio of Divine Will waned, while electromagnetic force and spatial interference grew dominant.
Soon, she no longer needed Divine Will to control decay and transformation. A moment later, she discarded even spatial interference. Through electromagnetic force alone, she grasped the Electroweak Interaction, collapsing old particles into decay and birthing countless new fundamental ones, releasing energy without end.
Time blurred into eternity…
“Particles are vortices of spacetime itself—not static, flat specks, but whirls with a natural drive to return to stillness. Particle decay is field decay.”
A sudden radiance blazed in Seraphine’s eyes. The corners of her lips curved as she whispered:
“Weak Nuclear Force… finally, it is mine.”