Only the most formidable remained—the Strong Nuclear Force.
Why was it called formidable?
Because the Strong Nuclear Force is not only the most powerful of the four fundamental forces, but also the one with the second-shortest range of influence.
It is the power that upholds the stability of the atomic nucleus, the bedrock from which all matter in the universe is built.
Its mechanism of action is this:
Quarks bind together through the exchange of gluons, producing strong interactions that forge stable composite particles—hadrons, the particles that form the atomic nucleus: protons and neutrons.
At the same time, protons and neutrons can be regarded as two different quantum states of the same particle—the nucleon.
Their transformation from one state to another is essentially a nucleon “jumping” between states, a process that emits electrons and neutrinos in the transition.
The driving cause of this transformation lies in the Weak Interaction between the electron and neutrino fields and the atomic nucleus—the counterpart, the younger brother, of the Strong Nuclear Force: the Weak Nuclear Force.
The stability of matter depends on both; neither can exist in isolation.
Simply put, the Strong Nuclear Force is the binding power that ties quarks into hadrons—protons and neutrons alike.
Together with the Weak Force, it is indispensable to the very framework of the universe.
In fact, one might say that the Strong Nuclear Force is the primal law ensuring the stability of all existence.
Even the immense energy unleashed by nuclear reactions at every scale ultimately traces back to the Strong Nuclear Force.
Theoretically, the very light and heat radiated by the Sun into the cosmos flow from this same foundation.
Acting in concert with the Weak Nuclear Force at the level of the nucleus, the Strong Force governs and regulates the stability of the universe’s microscopic domain.
From these uncountable tiny particles comes the vast macroscopic cosmos—its true diameter unknown, whether one hundred billion, one trillion, or even ten trillion light-years across.
“Unlike divine aura, which can only simulate all things for a fleeting moment... once I take the Strong-Weak Nuclear Force fully into my grasp...”
Seraphine lifted her gaze to the blood-colored river twisting through the dim sky—expanding, exploding, collapsing, decaying, only to twist and surge outward again. Her voice was calm, but carried absolute weight:
“All matter, in every world, will be mine to create, transform, unravel, or erase at will.”
“However...”
Her brow furrowed faintly.
“The Strong Nuclear Force exists only between the minute quarks bound within the atomic nucleus. To touch it, to experience it, and to inscribe it into myself, I must pry quarks from their prison. That means I must shatter 【Quark Confinement】 and release 【Independent Quarks】—entities that cannot exist under the laws of this universe.”
Seraphine contemplated, and with a subtle motion, sent a thread of Divine Will into the Blood River tens of thousands of meters above. From it, a spherical clump of murky matter peeled away—no larger than a fingernail.
She studied the fragment from afar. That small lump of jet-black substance, tormented by her for ages, now throbbed with heat, spitting radiation and crackling with arcs of electricity.
Her eyes suddenly flared, and with a thought, she drove her Divine Will into the realm of microscopic vision.
In an instant, the black mote swelled to colossal scale, transforming into a vast obsidian crystal-world pitted with countless craters and grooves—suspended within Seraphine’s “sight.”
Her focus shifted again, and the world shattered into trillions of dust-like particles.
She fixed her perception on one of them, magnifying endlessly.
Swish—
Magnification upon magnification, ceaseless and boundless.
At last, her awareness entered the heart of the atom.
And there, before her, was void. A boundless emptiness—yet not black, nor white.
In this place, color itself had lost meaning.
It was not true nothingness. Across the expanse, clusters of quantum fluctuations shimmered—possessing the faintest trace of mass, yet diffused into strange, vibrating currents that filled the entire abyssal space.
They existed here in a fixed position—yet simultaneously, in every position.
It was as though they superimposed dual states: present in one place, yet present everywhere.
Only when Seraphine’s “gaze” lingered upon them did they crystallize, expanding into concentric orbital states encircling the vast interior.
But when her attention drifted away, they melted back into haze—mist-like, cloud-like—distributed in subtle ratios across the emptiness.
“Electrons.”
Seraphine murmured softly, perceiving the quantum fluctuations. Her act of “Observation” collapsed their wave function, snapping them out of probability’s veil and revealing themselves as orbital electrons.
Electrons are not the solid beads ordinary minds imagine.
They are quantum beings—dual in nature, both particle and wave.
Not merely waves, not merely particles, but probability-clouds described only through quantum wave functions.
Even their mass, spin, and charge are not fixed entities, but diffuse attributes smeared through space.
Only within the embrace of the atom does the electron wave function stretch outward into an “orbital.”
And this orbital is not a shell containing the electron, nor the average path of its orbit.
Rather—the orbital is the electron itself.
It is this very property of electrons that underpins the electromagnetic force cultivation art, 《Archetype Ascension》—and also the foundation of the multi-dimensional energy rays and energy levels that blaze within every atom of a practitioner’s body.
The thread of Divine Will pressed on, diving deeper into the atom.
On a macroscopic scale, this search for the atomic nucleus was like combing the Earth—over 10,000 kilometers in diameter—for a nameless mountain only a few thousand meters high.
The difference was separated by magnitudes beyond reckoning.
Indeed, the nucleus—harboring 99.96% of an atom’s mass—occupied only a minuscule fraction of its volume, a speck of near-infinite density.
Theoretically, if the atom’s hollow were filled entirely with nuclear matter, its density would reach one hundred trillion tons per cubic meter.
Soon, that wisp of Divine Will discovered the nucleus—anchored at the atom’s heart.
An atomic nucleus, woven from protons and neutrons through the Strong Interaction, when balanced in even numbers, settles into its lowest-energy state: a perfect sphere.
But as proton and neutron counts shift, the nucleus deforms—stretching into elliptical forms.
Two shapes arise:
Oblate spheroids, flattened like disks.
Prolate spheroids, elongated like ovals.
These morphologies are governed by the inner symmetries and potential energy landscapes of the nucleus itself.
But the atomic nucleus that surfaced beneath Seraphine’s “gaze” was unlike any of the usual forms.
Its outward shape, though not as counterintuitive as the electron, was still something no ordinary mind could see—or even conceive—in daily life.
It was both prolate spheroid and oblate spheroid.
Not alternating—shifting from one form to the other in succession—but both at once, layered in quantum superposition.
This peculiar phenomenon, occurring within certain nuclei and embodying the coexistence of dual shapes, is known by a precise name—【Shape Coexistence】.
Not every atomic nucleus of every element displays such strangeness, but many do, exactly as Seraphine now beheld: two forms, overlaid, existing together.
Buzz—
Seraphine pressed forward without hesitation. Her Divine Will, already refined to its razor’s edge, condensed further still, driving itself with difficulty into the very heart of the nucleus.
At last—after straining her perception to its ultimate limit—she brushed against quarks themselves, entities far smaller than even the nucleus that contained them.
“Hoo—”
In the macroscopic world, Seraphine exhaled, rare fatigue showing in her voice. “That was truly exhausting.”
Yet she did not falter. The thread of Divine Will, which had pierced to the deepest microscopic domain, she now hurled forward with intent—to forcibly peel away a single quark.
Of course, precision alone was not enough. Even with her power, it was impossible to compress the titanic energy of a star into the cramped interior of an atomic nucleus.
Such a feat was absurd.
Even less could she inject a million tons, ten thousand tons, or even a hundred tons of force.
On this scale—smaller than the femtometer—any excess power would collapse the structure outright.
So Seraphine did the impossible within possibility. She bore down with all her control and drilled precisely eight tons of energy into the nucleus’s core.
In that instant—
Boom—
The microscopic realm, at once infinitesimal and vast, convulsed with violent upheaval.
The electrons, once lingering as probabilistic clouds, were blasted outward, scattering from the atom’s internal space.
The atom itself collapsed inward, shrinking by hundreds of billions of times, until only a frenzied, quaking bare nucleus remained.
But the collapse did not end there.
A heartbeat later, the nucleus, trembling with unbearable frequency, ruptured—its form dissolving into a storm of high-energy protons and neutrons, hurled like fragments of lightning through the void.
And at the center of this chaos, one solitary proton—her chosen target—remained bound in place, vibrating violently, its energy surging higher and higher, yet never breaking apart.
“As expected.”
In the macroscopic world, Seraphine shook her head lightly. “Even at this degree of precision—even with Divine Will at full force—it still cannot break 【Quark Confinement】.”
She frowned slightly, murmuring:
“The output must increase again. At least sixteen tons are needed to separate and break the Strong Nuclear Force binding quarks together.”
The Strong Nuclear Force that ties quarks is constant—its binding strength equal to 160,000 Newtons, or sixteen tons.
Yet the paradox deepens: when two quarks are pulled apart, the energy poured between them excites the vacuum itself, manifesting two new quarks out of nothingness.
Those newborn quarks then pair off with the separated ones, restoring the cycle of 【Quark Confinement】.
Theoretically, exerting such colossal energy at this scale is nearly impossible. And even if achieved, that very energy will rouse the void to birth replacements—undoing the separation in the very act of success.
It is as if the universe itself resists, refusing to allow the Strong Nuclear Force to be studied, let alone mastered.
But Seraphine had already forged her plan.
“Since Divine Will alone is insufficient…”
A ruthless glint flashed in her eyes.
“Then I will inject divine aura as well. I refuse to believe this tiny nucleus is so stubbornly unyielding.”
With that thought, threads of divine radiance unfurled into the microscopic realm.
These strands of light, taut as cords of celestial muscle, wove themselves into the Divine Will, layering over it, reinforcing it again and again.
A moment later, the once-slender strand of will had thickened—now an unbreakable cable of power. She lashed it around the proton and wrenched.
Boom!!!
A vast detonation erupted across the microscopic domain.
And in that same instant—
“Instant Time Compression.”
Buzz—
Time halted. All things fell silent.
Before Seraphine’s “eyes,” two 【Single Quarks】 appeared—entities that could only exist alone, drifting free in the unimaginably hot, high-energy sea of the newborn universe. Now, after 13.8 billion years, they reemerged.
Like electrons and nuclei, quarks themselves are bizarre beyond description.
They possess no definite volume. No human tongue can shape their form.
From the lens of quantum mechanics, they can only be treated as points of pure energy—points carrying fractional electric charge and a bounded range of action.
And like all particles of the microcosm, the higher their potential energy, the weaker their wave-like nature, the stronger their particle-like nature, and the greater their sphere of influence.
Seraphine seized the moment. For five frozen seconds, she studied with absolute focus, probing every detail.
Then the pause unraveled, and time roared back into flow.
The two Single Quarks instantly latched onto fresh quarks born from the vacuum, slipping back into confinement.
Seraphine wasted no breath. She snared another proton.
Tore it apart. Paused time. Five more seconds.
When the world resumed, she shook her head slightly.
“The paused span is too limited. Two attempts, two sketches of the model… and all I’ve gained is one ten-thousandth of progress. Hmph. Like grinding tofu by hand. Still, I’ll endure it.”
And so she continued. Again and again, breaking apart the force between quarks, halting time, and studying in slivers of frozen eternity. With patience bordering on infinity—just as when she had once awakened her high-dimensional senses—she pressed deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the Strong Nuclear Force.
Ten seconds. One minute. Half an hour. One hour…
Time slipped by—minute after minute, second after second.
Seraphine hovered high above Charon’s North Pole crater, tirelessly carrying out the tedious experiments on the Strong Nuclear Force.
An hour passed. Four hours. Eight hours…
At last, the moment came for her attributes to double once again.
【Host: Seraphine】
【Physical Strength: 6.4 Star】
【Soul: 6.4 Star】
She gave the attribute interface a brief glance before focusing her mind back on the proton, restrained and cocooned within her Divine Will.
Nine hours had flowed since her first breakthrough against Quark Confinement, and her mastery of the Strong Nuclear Force had climbed to 99.99%.
“One last time.”
Despite enduring nine hours of relentless repetition, Seraphine’s expression remained utterly calm—no impatience, no wavering.
Once more, she deftly severed the Strong Nuclear Force binding two quarks, activated Instant Time Compression, and slipped into that still, frozen world to study the two suspended, isolated Quarks.
The ‘long’ yet fleeting five seconds passed.
Swish—
Time resumed its current.
At that instant, Seraphine withdrew her Divine Will, finally releasing the proton that had endured so long under her hold.
Here and now, she truly mastered the Strong Nuclear Force.
At this point, Gravity, Electromagnetic Force, Strong Nuclear Force, and Weak Nuclear Force—the four fundamental forces underpinning the universe’s existence and motion—lay wholly within Seraphine’s grasp.
Through relentless effort, she had achieved the impossible: complete dominion over the forces that govern the cosmos.
Now, by her will alone, she could create, command, or annihilate all that exists.
Every object in the material universe lay open to her touch, to be shattered or shaped at her desire.
From this day onward, she would know no limits of lifespan, no bondage to environment.
Neither air pressure, atmosphere, radiation, nor temperature could bind her.
Not even supernova eruptions, Gamma-ray bursts, or the titanic rending of black hole gravity could touch her.
Within this universe, unless she crossed the event horizon itself to confront a 【Naked Singularity】, no force, no object could bring her harm.
And Seraphine—bearing the power of creation—suddenly fell into a profound, indescribable state of enlightenment, like drifting on the edge of trance.
From the depths of her Ocean of Knowledge, divine lights of intelligence burst forth—flaring insights of time, space, dimensions, matter, energy, information, causality, and beyond.
Her martial cultivation, already towering at the insurmountable Martial Saint Great Realm, surged yet higher in explosive ascent.
Her Physical Strength and Soul attributes raced forward like two untamed celestial steeds, galloping without reins.
Whoosh—
With a wave of her hand, the blood river stretched across the heavens dispersed into nothingness. Seraphine’s gaze swept downward to the scarred, crater-riddled moon beneath—Charon. Her eyes were distant as she spoke softly:
“The universe, from its fixed and consistent internal laws, gives rise to ordered, indeterminate, and self-similar structures.”
She extended her hand slightly, pointing into the emptiness ahead.
“This structure is chaos.”
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Instantly, vast expanses of warped indeterminacy emerged—threads of randomness, each carrying immense energy, shifting endlessly in unstable patterns until half the sky was consumed.
Seraphine stood in silence, watching the chaotic sky as if it were a colossal canvas of pigments swirling and knotting. Then, slowly, she spoke again:
“Similar cells form different tissues. Similar atoms become different elements. Rivers, blood vessels, tree branches—all share the same pattern.”
As she spoke, on the scarred, crater-marked surface of the moon beneath her, countless tons of pristine cerulean water appeared out of nowhere, surging into a restless ocean.
A heartbeat later, that ocean spread across all of Charon, its blue brilliance shifting into crimson. The blood-red tides twisted and writhed, sprouting countless veins that sprawled across the moon’s entire surface.
Another second passed. The dense forest of veins dried and hardened, turning from red to brown. In an instant, they became countless towering trees with bark like iron, roots driven deep into Charon’s frozen crust.
“Conversely, the cells within an embryo are all identical. Yet through repeated aggregation and differentiation, they achieve 【Self-organization】—transforming into a diversity of cells and tissues. Why is that?”
As time flickered within Seraphine’s eyes, every tree carpeting the moon detonated into a storm of microscopic plant cells.
The flood of cells blanketed Charon, evolving at the genetic level into more complex animal cells.
Cells clustered, merged, and in an instant gave rise to Tibetan lions, wild cheetahs, massive whales.
For a fleeting moment, countless living beasts filled the dim sky above Charon.
But the instant they appeared, they wailed in agony, froze to death, and fell one after another upon the cracked, crater-strewn surface—piling into mountains of corpses, rivers of blood.
Their creator, Seraphine, unmoved by life or death, remained deep in thought, murmuring:
“Because simple rules can naturally give birth to complexity.”
Boom—
The surrounding heavens shuddered.
The swirling chaos above ruptured, transforming into torrents of raw energy and particles that surged across the void.
They were countless, spilling outward until half the sky above Charon was drowned in their violent flood.
Their shapes defied Euclidean geometry—no lines or circles could hold them. They resembled jagged coastlines, broken mountain ranges, shifting horizons of sea and cloud, rivers coiling endlessly through deep valleys, even the vast starfields themselves.
And yet, upon closer inspection, each torrent obeyed a hidden order. Every section was a smaller reflection of the whole.
In theory, every torrent held the property of 【Self-similarity】—each one a fractal.
Hundreds of thousands of fractal patterns flickered, shifting endlessly—
From rough to intricate, from intricate to unfathomably complex.
Among them appeared some of the most renowned fractals: the Sierpinski Carpet, the Menger Sponge, the Sierpinski Triangle, the Koch Snowflake—alongside countless others, patterns even more dazzling and complex, saturated with explosive information. Some were so overwhelming that an ordinary person, upon a single glance, would be struck dumb, their mind reeling in indescribable shock.
Fixing her gaze upon these fractals, Seraphine lifted a single finger. From a distance, she “pulled” forth a colossal pattern shaped like a maple leaf, stretching nearly a thousand meters across.
It resembled a maple leaf in form, but its true identity was far greater.
This was the Mandelbrot Set—known to many as the very fingerprint of God.
Its essence was deceptively simple, defined by only a handful of numerical rules. Yet, when magnified without end, it replicated itself infinitely, its shape repeating on ever-smaller scales.
Buzz—
At Seraphine’s command, the Mandelbrot Set expanded, magnifying, magnifying, endlessly magnifying.
And through every stage of expansion, its form remained unchanged, the same eternal maple-leaf silhouette repeating into infinity.
It was in this infinite recursion that Seraphine’s voice resonated with revelation:
“From the simple emerges the complex. From chaos, fractals arise. The universe itself… follows the same law.”
Boom—
The fractal sky shattered into nothingness.
From the collapse surged a vast tide of energy, monstrous and uncontainable, rolling outward from Charon like a cosmic tsunami, spreading across the limitless dark.
“The evolution of the universe does not end here,” Seraphine declared, her eyes gleaming with divine certainty. “Chaos and fractal structures—under the dominion of time—give birth to mechanisms of 【self-execution and self-replication】. Upon this foundation, the seeds of life are sown, and from it, complexity is born.”
Standing unmoving amid the titanic eruption, she cast her gaze downward. Charon’s crust had been gouged thousands of meters deep by the torrent of unleashed energy.
Within her mind, countless sparks of inspiration ignited at once.
With a single thought, the moon itself ruptured. Its surface split apart, spewing hundreds of thousands of streams of molten, muddy material into the void.
Under Seraphine’s watchful eyes, the streams began to shift at the level of atomic nuclei.
In an instant, they reorganized into vast quantities of elemental matter—Sodium, Magnesium, Calcium, Phosphorus, Potassium, Sodium, Chlorine, Iron, Iodine, Zinc, Chromium steel, Cobalt, Copper, Fluorine, Manganese, Molybdenum, Selenium, and more.
Larger molecules followed—complex structures of increasing sophistication.
Lipids emerged: phospholipids, glycolipids, waxes, pure fats, sterols.
Amino acids bloomed next—over twenty kinds, including Lysine, Tryptophan, Methionine, Phenylalanine, Leucine, Arginine, Alanine, Cysteine, Aspartate.
Then came entire families of fluorinated compounds: Hydrogen fluoride, Silicon fluoride, Ammonium fluoride, Vinyl fluoride, Methyl fluorine, Ethyl fluorine, Oxygen difluoride, Difluorodibromomethane, Bromine trifluoride, Boron trifluoride, Carbon tetrafluoride, Vinylidene fluoride, Iodine pentafluoride, Arsenic pentafluoride, Hexafluoropropylene, Sulfur hexafluoride, Octofluoropropane, Octofluorocyclobutane, Perfluorobutene…
Whoosh whoosh whoosh—
The sheer mass and velocity of the cascading material was overwhelming, surging like a cosmic tidal wave and instantly engulfing the surface of Charon.
“Once life emerges,” Seraphine spoke, her voice echoing across the void, “it becomes the Hacker of the universe’s physical and mathematical laws—always searching for hidden backdoors, exploiting them to achieve replication.”
At her words, the immense clusters of matter, sprawling thousands of miles across, collapsed and liquefied, merging into a boundless gray ocean.
It was a paradox made manifest.
The sea was at once searing hot and bone-chillingly cold, both dispersed and congealed, fluid yet rigid.
Lightning tore across its surface, bolts arcing violently above and below, striking in relentless fury.
This environment could never exist in reality. It was contradiction incarnate, terrifying in its extremes.
Because this was no natural sea—it was the miraculous product of Seraphine’s will, born from the simultaneous manipulation of the four fundamental forces.
States that should never coexist had been forcibly spliced together, sustained in impossible harmony, imposed upon the macroscopic world in a miraculous superimposed state.
Beneath the weight of that vast gray ocean, life stirred.
Countless biological cells began to emerge, appearing like specks of dust against the cosmic tide.
They were not only carbon-based.
Silicon-based cells shimmered into being, alongside sulfur-based cells, and mercury-based cells capable of thriving in scorching, high-temperature realms.
There were also amino-based cells, nitrogen-based cells, and fluorine-based cells—forms that could only exist in frigid, low-temperature domains.
These incompatible biologies, which by natural law could never coexist, now thrived together. Under Seraphine’s immense power, they moved freely and joyfully, swimming in harmony through this impossible cold-hot, sulfurous sea.
From above, Seraphine gazed indifferently upon the turbulent, undulating gray expanse.
Her words fell like revelation:
“Life exploits the flaw that lies at the heart of 【Probability Theory】. For this reason, the phenomenon of life is not an accident—it is a universal law, grounded in 【Statistical Aspects】.
In other words, life is nothing more than a reliable ‘machine’ constructed from a vast heap of unreliable components. This ‘machine’ instinctively harnesses the laws of probability to statistically guarantee its existence, and upon that foundation, it evolves further.
Likewise, every organism capable of self-replication and self-execution possesses an inherent degree of complexity. That complexity is precisely what ensures its persistence and its evolution.”
As her words fell, the countless billions of cells within the gray ocean below suddenly stirred. They turned on one another, attacking, devouring, tearing each other apart.
In their frenzy, they plundered usable matter from their surroundings, assimilating it into their own fragile bodies.
Thus they grew—larger, stronger—and soon, from their chaotic competition, the first multicellular organisms emerged.
Once born, these new beings spread like an unstoppable tide, consuming and replacing the single-celled organisms that had come before, seizing the ocean’s entire living space.
And when they had culled the weak, they turned upon each other once more, devouring, attacking, engulfing in endless rounds of violence.
With each cycle, their complexity deepened. Their forms grew larger. Their presence more formidable.
Watching in silence, Seraphine’s gaze remained fixed on the turbulent sea below. Her voice rang out, cool and certain:
“Only organisms that surpass a threshold of complexity can exploit the hidden flaws of 【Probability Theory】. Only they can diffuse, mutate, and evolve into ever more intricate structures.
Those beneath this threshold are bound by the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy will erode them. Entropy will consume them. And in time, they will be mercilessly erased by the tide of 【entropy increase】.”
At that moment, countless identical organisms appeared beside the ones locked in struggle. They hurled themselves into the fray, viciously attacking with unnatural fury.
The war for survival—already fierce—was suddenly inflamed, as if drenched in burning oil.
The gray ocean that blanketed Charon boiled hotter, seething with violence, as the evolutionary war raged.
Organisms perished by the thousands.
Organisms evolved by the thousands.
And in scarcely ten minutes, the first dominant predator appeared.
A vicious, thumb-sized Black Swarm.
It devoured matter with ravenous hunger, tearing through its environment like a starving tiger. Through division of its own body, one became two, two became four, four became eight… until its numbers multiplied at a terrifying rate, spreading to cover the ocean entire.
Their bodies were harder than tungsten alloy—not uniform in composition, but forged from a chaotic blend of materials, harmoniously fused into one.
They consumed magic acid in freezing realms below -200° Celsius.
They devoured plasma arcs in searing heat of several thousand degrees, a force capable of evaporating all ordinary flesh.
They surged across seas and mountains at supersonic speeds, thriving even amid lethal radiation.
They needed no oxygen, no sunlight. They had abandoned the crude chains of chemical energy. They had evolved into nuclear-powered organisms.
Had such a Black Swarm arisen on Earth before the Ether recoveries, a single one could have exterminated the entire biosphere in mere moments.
Even now, in the present age—after three Ether recoveries—if a single Black Swarm escaped extinction in its early stages, civilization itself would collapse.
“Carbon-based, silicon-based, sulfur-based, alkyl, amino-based, nitrogen-based, fluorine-based, mercury-based… across all known foundations of life, this Black Swarm embodies them. There is no environment where it cannot survive—save for the heart of a black hole.”
High above, Seraphine shook her head slightly, her expression cold.
“But in their replication and evolutionary mechanisms, the efficiency remains far too low. Continue. Evolve.”
Boom!
It was as if the Creator Herself had spoken a divine decree.
At once, the countless trillions of Black Swarms within the gray ocean erupted into madness—attacking, devouring, dividing, reproducing.
Every minute, every second, trillions perished—ripped apart, consumed in frenzied violence.
Every minute, every second, trillions more were born—only to hurl themselves into the slaughter.
On and on the cycle raged. Minutes stretched into hours.
After five relentless hours, the chaos fell silent.
The gray ocean was gone.
Charon’s surface had returned—scarred, ravaged, desolate—but once more laid bare.
And upon its frozen wasteland, there now stood only one.
A single colossal Swarm, vast as the Everest range, its monstrous body bristling with jagged spines and armored scales. Its presence radiated a soul-shaking aura—half god, half demon—the unmistakable aura of a Milky Way Overlord.
The instant it was born, it sent forth waves of psychic messages, trembling with reverence, directed at the sky:
“Mother God! Mother God! Mother God!”
It was intelligent—terrifyingly intelligent.
Seraphine’s eyes narrowed.
“It did not rely on gifts arbitrarily bestowed. It shaped itself through its environment, step by step. And as expected, from such a soul emerges primordial spirituality… curious. The underlying mechanism remains a mystery.”
She descended slowly, alighting upon the apex of the great Swarm.
At its core—beneath the endless cells that could scatter or combine at will—she perceived a nucleus of super-high-energy particle clusters. Unlike Earth’s double-helix DNA, this life-core existed as a superposition of order and chaos. A single glimpse of it would cause an ordinary human brain to boil, rupture, and die instantly.
Seraphine smiled faintly.
“Not unlike John von Neumann’s self-replicating automata. From a single cell, it devours surrounding molecules and atoms, multiplying through fission-like division. Yet its cells also congregate—assembling into greater forms. From small bio-tanks to Swarm starships, every unit of war can be freely constructed.
And more—this entire species shares one singular consciousness. Its sole imperative is replication and evolution. It has even abandoned natural selection itself, evolving recursively by setting initial conditions, estimating adaptability, self-simulating, and calculating toward the optimal solution.”
Her gaze lingered on the monstrous form below. At last, she sighed.
“If I allowed you to reproduce unchecked, you would consume the entire Solar System in short order. Given time, even the Milky Way itself would fall to you.
Truly… a species that was never meant to be born.”
The colossal Swarm gave no reply. It only continued its innocent, joyous chant, echoing ceaselessly:
“Mother God! Mother God! Mother God!”
Seraphine lifted her gaze toward the desolate horizon and reflected:
“Charon… in ancient Greek myth, the ferryman of the River Styx.
Since you were born upon this moon, then so shall you be named: the Charon Swarm. And you—” her eyes narrowed, voice resonant with decree, “—you are the 【King】 of the Charon Swarm.”
Her words, carried by the weight of a Mind Suppression Seal, sank deep into the black Swarm King’s soul, imprinting upon its primordial spirituality.
Then, Seraphine’s figure blurred, reappearing in the skies above. She gazed down upon the silent, waiting King, and mused aloud:
“I should find a fitting place for you.”
With a flick of thought, she plucked a random spacetime coordinate from the weave of reality—its destination unknown.
Buzz—
Her hand stretched outward. In the vast interstellar dark, an immense vortex tore open, a gate of space spiraling into existence. Within it yawned only gloom, an abyss of shadow leading into some uncharted domain.
Her Divine Will stirred. The obedient Swarm King was driven into the ground as if pressed by a cosmic hand.
A command etched itself into its soul:
“Kill them all. Eat them all. Destroy them all.”
And in that instant, all of Charon was consumed by the vortex, transmitted through the Real Number Channel to a distant and unknowable elsewhere.
Floating in the void, Seraphine’s lips curved into a smile.
“You may arrive in some corner of this universe… or in another altogether. I look forward to our reunion, in the endless future.”
The Charon Swarm King—cast into an unknown spacetime—was no longer bound by the simplicity of carbon-based or silicon-based design.
Like the countless Black Swarms birthed in the gray ocean, it had frenziedly evolved along the chaotic, fractal, composite path, ascending into an ultimate lifeform, adaptable to almost any environment.
Its foundation was a fusion of carbon-based, silicon-based, sulfur-based, alkyl, amino-based, nitrogen-based, fluorine-based, and mercury-based matter.
Ordinary worlds posed no challenge: terrestrial planets, ocean planets, gas giants, frozen ice-worlds, burning magma-worlds, shattered asteroid fields, and the barren dust of nebulae alike.
Even the most terrifying realms could not reject it:
The heart of the Sun, where nuclear fire raged at tens of millions of degrees.
The surface of a neutron star, where temperatures also reached tens of millions, and gravity bore down with quadrillions of Earth’s acceleration.
Everywhere it went, the Charon Swarm adapted. Even at the cost of sacrificing countless sub-body cells, it would adjust, survive, and plunder.
All matter could be devoured. All matter could fuel its endless cycle of evolution, growth, and replication.
The Charon Swarm King’s colossal body—vast as a mountain range—was not a singular entity, but one capable of decomposing and dispersing into countless Sub-bodies, with the cell as its fundamental unit.
Each Charon cell, even when cast into the barren expanse of deep space, could survive in a state of profound hibernation. While dormant, it continually absorbed high-energy particles and cosmic radiation drifting through the void, sustaining both vitality and growth in size and number.
By Seraphine’s design, the true form of existence for the Charon Swarm was never a single, unified mass, but a dispersion into innumerable Sub-bodies. The Swarm King’s crystal-grade consciousness would detach from its physical form, instead taking eternal residence within the Sentience Realm’s Symbolic Domain.
The Sub-bodies themselves would retain only rudimentary intelligence, devoid of any independent will. Global control rested solely with the Swarm King, who directed them through specialized communication Swarms—divergent units optimized for transmitting information. These couriers traversed at nanometer-scale, thousands of times faster than light (within the Sentience Realm), functioning much like the Mercury Race’s ship communication pods, though endlessly refined and improved.
Admittedly, long-range communication delays between Sub-bodies and the Swarm King were inevitable until true superluminal messaging could be achieved. Yet, the Swarm had never depended on intricate strategies. Its power lay in the raw, merciless tide of numbers.
If an enemy fielded 10,000 Star Destroyers, the Charon Swarm would disassemble entire planets, forging biological warships not ten thousand, but a hundred thousand times greater in number—until the foe was swallowed whole, devoured, and reduced to nourishment for further evolution.
For the Charon Swarm, the word “nutrient” bore no special distinction. Every element in the periodic table, every molecule built from them, was food.
If a Charon warship was destroyed? Irrelevant. The fragments of its hull, scattered into thousands of shards, could rapidly evolve into new warships, fighters, or mechs, and rejoin the battle.
If only an antimatter engine remained? No matter. It would evolve into a singular antimatter cannon, unleashing a cataclysmic strike.
If the enemy dared approach? That same fragment could transform into a suicidal antimatter bomb—obliteration in exchange for mutual demise.
And even if reduced to a single surviving cell—just one—that cell could still plunder the surrounding matter, ignite fission-like division, and once more give birth to the infinite tide.
In a short span of time, it can reproduce vast interstellar Swarm fleets—each bristling with biological hot weapons, cold weapons, nuclear armaments, optical cannons, and electromagnetic strike systems. Their genetic matrices, infused by Seraphine with torrents of scientific and technological data, allow them to bombard enemies from afar or, in close quarters, shred them into countless fragments.
Should any interstellar civilization—no matter how advanced in biological sciences—attempt to use the Charon Swarm’s genes as a gateway to unravel its hidden mysteries, they would find only despair. At the core of every Charon cell lies a genetic information matrix so unfathomably complex that it mirrors the chaos of the universe itself: shifting, impermanent, impossible to decode.
Even forced decryption is futile. At the first sign of intrusion, that genetic core collapses like a microscopic bomb, disintegrating into a storm of particles scattered in every direction—its design inspired by the 【Anti-Theft】 genome of the Aurora Clan.
Absurd? Hardly. With Seraphine’s temperament, after painstakingly crafting a weapon of mass extinction, she would never allow even a trace of its benefit to fall into another’s hands.
And yet—even as it instantly reached Stage One of a galactic overlord, capable of annihilating Earth with ease when aggregated—the Charon Swarm was, in her eyes, nothing more than a prototype.
Through her engineered chaotic fractal composite genetic evolution mechanism, the Swarm was only at the beginning. In the far reaches of time, the very material foundation of Charon will burrow deeper—piercing into the atomic lattice itself.
No longer bound to carbon, silicon, or mercury-based architectures, no longer merely flesh-and-blood organisms, the Swarm will one day evolve into electromagnetic life, photon life, high-energy heavy-element life, antimatter life, dark matter life, dark energy life, Zero-Point Energy life—perhaps even into life woven from space itself, or from the currents of time.
Of course, such ultimate forms—spacetime and dimensional evolutions—will demand eons. The road is endless.
But even this debut form of Charon is already sufficient to play the ferryman of the Styx for all civilizations of the cosmos, dragging entire galaxies toward their inevitable salvation.
“Because of me alone, in the ages to come, thousands of civilizations will be wiped away in an instant—countless lives devoured in the Swarm’s maw. And when I think on that, I feel…”
Seraphine drifted in the boundless void, her gaze fixed upon the Pluto–Charon system, which had been thrown into chaos by the sudden disappearance of a moon. Abruptly, she spoke:
“Immensely empty!”
Her words faded, and her brow furrowed. She murmured to herself:
“Perhaps I’ve grown too arbitrary. Tsk… is this because my power has grown too vast?”
At a single thought, the attribute interface unfolded before her eyes.
【Host: Seraphine】
【Physical Strength: 195 Star】
【Soul: 195 Star】
Moments ago, upon fully mastering the four fundamental forces, her attributes had surged nearly twentyfold.
It still felt lacking—yet this was already the utmost limit of growth within her current peak, a realm that could advance no further.
With Chaos Calculation and the Eye of True Revelation running at full speed, Seraphine had comprehended the conditions for the next breakthrough beyond the Martial Saint Great Realm: the Divinitas Great Realm.
Two paths existed.
One: to completely unify the four fundamental forces, fusing them into an all-encompassing Grand Unified Field.
Two: to awaken and uncover a desire that transcends even her existing desires—such as the pursuit of eternal life, a concept higher than mere aspiration, capable of sustaining power yet greater still.
“The wish for eternal life… is that no longer enough?”
Seraphine frowned, her lips parting. After a moment of thought, her voice deepened:
“Indeed. Having mastered the four forces, I have already attained eternity in matter and energy.
What the strong require beyond desires and aspirations… is a concept.”
As her words faded, the 100,000 km gulf between her and Pluto folded in upon itself—compressed a trillionfold until the distant horizon shrank to a single step.
Buzz—
From the emptiness, a figure wreathed in divine radiance descended onto Pluto’s frozen surface.
It was Seraphine.
Standing with hands clasped, she gazed into the endless cosmos and spoke solemnly:
“The intelligent will always turn inward—toward reflection.”
“My very nature, under this explosive surge of combat power, has already expanded—and my rationality has begun to drift. Hoo—”
Seraphine exhaled, her voice tinged with irony.
“After all, I was once a lowly carbon-based human: fragile in structure, poor in energy, my psychological age no more than a handful of decades. To rely solely on desires and ambitions… is no longer enough to bear the weight of 【Endless, Unrestricted Power】.”
She stood dazed for several minutes before whispering, each word deliberate:
“Only a concept—only an unshakable concept—can sustain such power.”
With that, Seraphine stepped across 100,000 kilometers in an instant, returning to the vast reaches of space. Her gaze fell upon the dim blue dot billions of kilometers away—Earth—and she reflected aloud:
“Though this extreme advancement added little in raw attributes—merely twentyfold—in other aspects…”
She slowly raised her right hand and pointed into the void.
Buzz—
In the empty vacuum ahead, where no matter existed, a silver-gray metal plate appeared out of nothingness.
To ordinary eyes, it was just a single plate.
But to Seraphine’s eyes, that one plate was actually two—separated by only ten nanometers, about one hundred times the size of an atom.
She observed them in silence for ten minutes.
At last, she sensed it: a faint, inexplicable attraction between the plates, with a strength equal to one atmosphere of pressure.
This was the Casimir effect, born from Zero Point Energy.
When two uncharged plates are placed extremely close together, an attractive force emerges—arising from the difference in vacuum energy inside versus outside the plates.
The vacuum is never empty. Quantum fluctuations imbue it with energy: Zero Point Energy.
If we treat the energy of quantum fluctuations as the true “zero point,” then:
-
Any matter with energy higher than this baseline holds positive energy.
-
Any matter with energy lower holds negative energy.
Thus, the vacuum between those plates formed a Casimir vacuum, one charged with negative energy.
Negative energy can be understood as the energy of gravitational fields. Positive energy, by contrast, gives rise to particle–antiparticle pairs.
In principle, matter and antimatter should appear in perfect balance. But reality tips the scale: for every million pairs, there is one extra particle of matter.
Through annihilation, most vanish in violent bursts of heat. The residue of that heat remains as cosmic background radiation. The residue of that excess matter became the material universe itself.
Gravity is, at its heart, a manifestation of negative energy.
And negative energy, too, is a vital key—an indispensable step on the path to warp drive.
Now, under the supremacy of the four fundamental forces, the Pyramidal Civilization’s warp-drive barriers—and all their intricate prerequisite technologies—could no longer obstruct Seraphine’s expanding cognition.
With each passing moment, she drew ever closer to truly mastering the warp drive.
The threshold of vacuum light-speed was nearly within reach.
“The vacuum is not empty.”
She focused on the incredibly intricate spatial lattice hidden within the ten-nanometer gap between two metal plates—and the boundless, inexhaustible reservoir of energy contained within it: Zero Point Energy.
In the great enlightenment that followed her mastery of the four forces, her divine intelligence surged as though struck by lightning, flickering again and again at the very edge of its brilliance.
Where once she held only fragmented and uncertain knowledge of Zero Point Energy, now knowledge seemed to arise from nothing, as if the universe itself whispered truths into her mind.
The “Zero” in 【Zero Point Energy】 refers to this: even if the universe were cooled to absolute zero—the lowest possible state of energy—some energy would still remain.
That residue is Zero Point Energy.
As this understanding crystallized, her mind forged it into form, weaving a stark yet towering structure of cognition—desolate in its simplicity, yet unshakable in its strength. Upon it stood a single name: 【Zero Point Energy】.
Thus, beyond mastering the four fundamental forces, Seraphine had also seized the ability to draw upon and manipulate ZPE. She had not yet ascended to its pinnacle, nor attained true mastery, but she had stepped across the threshold and begun to refine her control.
In her flawless perception, she felt it: every inch of the surrounding vastness overflowed with a terrifying, immeasurable sea of energy.
By her rough calculation, a vacuum no larger than an atomic nucleus could contain energy equal to the entirety of matter in the observable universe.
Seraphine stood motionless in the void, her eyes blazing with twisted divine radiance that warped spacetime around her.
At last, she raised her slender arm, fingers spread wide, and her palm blazed with searing brilliance.
Buzz—
From the quivering fabric of the vacuum, infinite torrents of high-energy particles surged forth, summoned into being under Seraphine’s will.
These were no illusions, but truly existing particles—particles she had conjured by forcibly borrowing energy from the vacuum.
The moment they appeared, they condensed of their own accord, growing steadily from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale.
A hundred tons. Ten thousand tons. A million tons. A billion tons...
In short order, a colossal spherical mass—its weight nearly half that of Earth—materialized before Seraphine’s eyes, occupying the void.
“Not bad. Continue to compress it.”
At her command, the newborn planet shuddered, then collapsed inward, crushed beneath the immeasurable weight of her Divine Will.
Compression birthed chaos. Torrents of electromagnetic fields surged, temperatures soared, and blinding waves of light erupted outward in every direction.
Within an instant, tens of thousands of miles of space were drowned in pure white radiance.
In the span of a single minute, the planetary mass—once greater than the Moon—had been crushed into a searing white sphere no larger than ten meters across. Its surface blazed at temperatures exceeding ten million degrees Celsius, while each passing second unleashed concentric shockwaves of violent magnetic vibration.
It was a neutron star.
A neutron star that Seraphine had forged with her bare hands, using the vacuum’s Zero Point Energy as her inexhaustible reservoir.
As for whether she would ever “return” the borrowed energy?
Hah. If she could draw upon the void by her own will, then why should she return anything at all?
“This should be enough for a warp experiment.”
Her eyes gleamed as she studied the radiant star before her. With a casual snap of her fingers—
Bang!
The neutron star split cleanly in two, as if sliced by an invisible blade. From its riven core erupted a blinding sphere no larger than a fingernail, its radiance fierce enough to rival the hearts of suns. Temperatures soared past ten billion degrees.
It was Strange Matter.
Matter that normally slumbered only in the most perilous depths of neutron-star cores.
And this was precisely what Seraphine required—for to weave a functional warp bubble in the universe, Strange Matter filled with negative energy was the indispensable fuel for both creation and sustainment.