When the sentence concluded, the old “tablet” wedged into the bifurcation shimmered—then shattered into nothingness.

  As its body vanished, the three-dimensional alien script within Seraphine’s mind fragmented into countless luminous motes, scattering like shards of thought.

  The moment those glittering, data-laden particles appeared, they began to rapidly reassemble, twisting and folding as though alive, following some hidden rule.

  In an instant, a flood of images, visions, and streams of data manifested upon Seraphine’s Ocean of Knowledge.

  “Condensing information into a physical medium… clever.”

  Within the Ocean of Knowledge, Seraphine tilted her head in thought, then smiled faintly.

  “This technique mirrors the intrinsic structure of the Sentience Realm through mere technology. Impressive.”

  One glance, one second—that was all she needed to unravel their method.

  With a flick of her mental power, she tapped one cluster of information.

  Boom—

  The cluster detonated, and reality shifted.

  Seraphine now stood in a dim void spangled with endless stars.

  Beneath her, a small blue planet slowly turned—so distant it seemed no larger than a washbasin.

  “This is… Ancient Earth?”

  Her eyes narrowed. The continental outlines were subtly different from the Earth she knew.

  “Houiste Federation…” she murmured, recalling at once the memories of Cuan, King of Aurora—whom she had already crushed.

  In his recollections, the Aurora were not born but engineered, their makers a civilization called Houiste. Cuan had been the very first creation.

  “Saknussim… another of those so-called cosmic Sowers, then.”

  Seraphine clasped her hands behind her back, gazing serenely at the distant world. A soft laugh escaped her lips.

  “Very well. Show me the grand performance of your creation.”

  The instant her words faded, the blue planet swelled—expanding at a dizzying speed.

  Rumble… rumble… rumble!

  The Earth expanded until its horizons burst beyond her vision, dwarfing Seraphine to a mere speck of dust floating above an entire world.

  Then—a radiant, towering silhouette emerged before her, raising one hand to point at the planet.

  Boom!

  The Earth convulsed. A torrent of power poured into it, its temperature spiking in an instant.

  Forests erupted into flame, burning in unison across the continents.

  With the fire came strange, dust-like particles that spread through the air.

  The oceans—seventy percent of the surface—began to roil and boil like water on a furious flame.

  And the ape-men, who had fled desperately into the sea from the inferno on land, found no refuge.

  They screamed as their flesh seared and bones blackened, writhing in agony before sinking beneath the waves—never to surface again.

  Yet a few ape-men, gifted with rare innate talents, endured the torment differently. Some, whether by will or by accident, absorbed the strange substances saturating the air. Under their influence, their bodies frantically reshaped—skin thickening, nerves adapting—until they evolved heat-resistant flesh. Soon they were leaping and playing in the boiling sea as if it were their natural home.

  At that moment, the vision froze.

  Seraphine, finishing her viewing, spoke with calm insight:

  “This luminous figure must be Saknussim. His design mirrors my own creation of the Charon Swarm—sifting and selecting the strongest ‘seeds’ through brutal environments.”

  She paused, then added with certainty:

  “These seeds must have been the precursors that evolved into the Aurora clan.”

  With another flick of thought, she tapped a fresh packet of information.

  Immediately, a cascade of still and moving images bloomed before her eyes.

  There she saw Saknussim’s endless trials—forcing his seeds through glaciers, thunderstorms, raging winds, lethal toxins, searing radiation, warped magnetic fields, and crushing gravity.

  Under these crucibles, and under the ceaseless stimulation of those mysterious particles—suspected carriers of evolutionary catalysts—a new humanoid species emerged.

  They stood an average of three meters tall, with immense, armored frames, and every individual bore extraordinary abilities.

  Lightning, fire, frost, magnetism, illusions, gigantification, telekinesis—powers wondrous and terrible alike arose as if written into their very biology.

  These ancient giants carved out vast tribes across both ocean and continent.

  And it was then that Saknussim descended in person, beginning his experiments—refining and reshaping these super-powered ape-men as living raw material.

  The process was merciless. Through countless cruel experiments, their numbers dwindled. From an original population in the hundreds of thousands, they withered down to a bare handful.

  Near extinction.

  Yet it was in this abyss of survival that the last survivors unleashed their most miraculous evolution—the ability to absorb and store external energy.

  Those who awakened this gift consumed everything around them—swarms of insects, dense vegetation, wild beasts. They drank not only matter but also forces themselves: searing heat, radiant light, crackling electricity, even sheer kinetic impact.

  All became sustenance.

  Thus the prototype of the Aurora clan was born.

  Seraphine’s eyes gleamed as she whispered:

  “This alien did not merely craft the Aurora. By his actions, the very ancestors of humanity arose in that age as well. In truth, he may be considered humanity’s creator.”

  “Yet to him, those early humans meant nothing. At best, they were only fodder—meat for the Aurora’s table.”

  Having said that, she began opening the information packets one after another, rapidly absorbing every fragment left behind by the other party.

  She saw Saknussim descend upon Earth like a god, wielding unknown techniques to reshape the nascent Aurora clan.

  From these visions, Seraphine gleaned the outlines of cutting-edge biological technologies:

  — Superpower customization.

  — Artificial soul creation.

  — Living-body antimatter reactor fabrication.

  — Cellular Ether-Crystallization in detailed process.

  All of it streamed into her boundless Ocean of Knowledge, fusing with her existing archives of biological science, colliding and interweaving, evolving ceaselessly toward even higher forms of complexity.

  Then, when the last packet faded, a message of condensed light-words appeared before her eyes:

  【……The Senate commands all to immediately return to the homeworld……】

  【……‘Final Order’ must succeed……】

  【……Though the experiment failed, these specimens are also the work of my life……】

  【……This batch of lifeforms falls far short of the standard. When ‘Final Order’ succeeds, I will surely return to continue……】

  The message cut off there.

  “Final Order… Order?”

  Seraphine frowned, recalling the mention of the Order Vortex from the fat captain’s memory.

  “Well, the Abraham Machine is still sealed in Sapphire’s institute. I can examine it after this trip, once I return to Earth.”

  Her stride did not falter. She pressed deeper into the wormhole tunnel.

  The further she went, the more torrents of high-energy photons surged toward her—like unending streams of stellar lasers.

  Yet to Seraphine, they were nothing. She did not bother to shield herself, letting the attacks wash harmlessly against her form.

  After traversing several fractured regions—zones of twisted spacetime with expanded directional attributes and volumes hundreds of times greater than a standard world—she reached the deepest chamber of the wormhole.

  There lay the largest distortion: a space nearly 20,000 kilometers across, saturated with searing heat, lethal radiation, and monstrous magnetic fields.

  At its heart, wreathed in blazing light and riven with arcs of cosmic lightning, stood a nightmare.

  A being like a mantis of Earth, yet colossal beyond reason—its head crowned with three jagged horns, two pairs of titanic scythe-arms, and dozens of tentacle-like legs anchoring it in the void.

  It loomed 20 kilometers tall.

  This was the Milky Way Tyrant.

  Even at a range of over 10,000 kilometers, its presence burned. The creature’s surface temperature alone soared into tens of millions of degrees Celsius, warping spacetime around it.

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  With her mastery of universal gravity, Seraphine measured its mass effortlessly:

  One-quarter the mass of the Sun.

  82,500 Earths.

  This cosmic monstrosity, ranked among the Six Great Scourges of the Milky Way, was no mere neutron-degenerate lifeform.

  It was, in truth, a living neutron star.

  “The name Milky Way Tyrant is perfectly earned,” Seraphine remarked coldly.

  “Mass alone grants it the power to ravage the galaxy. No wonder the Mercury Race quailed before it. To ordinary interstellar civilizations, standing against such a creature is like bean sprouts resisting a storm—they could not endure even two casual gestures of its will.”

  Searching through the Mercury Race’s memories, she found rudimentary data on these titans.

  Their records claimed such compact neutron stars required no food. They contained unfathomable reserves of internal energy.

  Moreover, they wielded instinctual command of Ether, on a level surpassing the ultimate peaks of every cultivation path and evolutionary system known.

  With that gift, a Milky Way Tyrant could annihilate a planet without raising a limb—merely by directing Ether into a focused beam that tore worlds apart from across the void.

  So-called Star Destroyer fleets, even before closing the distance, would be erased—shredded and vaporized by heat, magnetism, and crushing gravity.

  As of now, across the entire Milky Way, the number of confirmed Milky Way Tyrants catalogued by all civilizations stands in the hundreds.

  This number may not seem high, yet each of these ferocious cosmic monsters roams autonomously. They are alive—and no one can predict which path they will take through the Sentience Realm Hallways.

  Wherever they drift, that civilization is already condemned.

  Some even speculate the true number of Milky Way Tyrants may exceed ten thousand.

  Why? Because the regions linked by Sentience Realm Hallways represent less than one percent of the Milky Way.

  Yes—only that much.

  The rest—those sectors with no Hallways, or with collapsed and abandoned corridors—remain light-speed blind spots: barbaric, unknown, unreachable.

  No one knows how many monsters lurk there, how many bizarre phenomena unfold, or how many civilizations have risen and fallen unseen in those darkened reaches.

  Fortunately, Milky Way Tyrants are solitary. They have no concept of clan.

  If they gathered in groups, the nightmare for all civilizations would be beyond imagination.

  They have no parents, no children, no gender, no reproduction.

  Each one is an ultimate engine of destruction, a lone butcher.

  Why? Because their birth defies ordinary life.

  The seed of a Milky Way Tyrant is often a natural neutron star.

  At some unknown trigger—some mysterious mechanism still beyond the grasp of galactic science—the star awakens. It manifests a low intelligence, no greater than a beast’s. And from that moment it becomes a Milky Way Tyrant, alive with a boundless hunger to destroy.

  From birth, they are already Stage Ten apex overlords.

  Their purpose seems singular: Destruction.

  To annihilate all life.

  To shatter all creations.

  Even… to rend entire planets to dust.

  Among low-level civilizations, they are feared as:

  Cosmic Assassins. Executioners. Ruthless Butchers.

  Even so, Seraphine discerned something more.

  In the fat captain’s memory, she uncovered a text titled 《Milky Way Scourge Research Records》.

  Within were unverified claims: that in several sectors where Milky Way Tyrants were born, travelers had found traces of the Cult of the Evil Eye.

  The Cult itself was also listed among the Six Great Scourges of the Milky Way.

  Yet regarding this religious sect, neither the fat captain nor any Mercury Race crew retained the slightest memory.

  That, Seraphine thought, was regrettable. She had been fascinated by the reading.

  “Majestic enough. Powerful enough.”

  Her gaze lingered on the motionless Tyrant in the distance. A faint smile touched her lips.

  “Not bad. Worthy of becoming my guard dog.”

  With that, she folded space beneath her feet, crossing tens of thousands of kilometers in a single stride, and appeared within mere tens of kilometers of the Tyrant.

  But at that range—face to face with the cosmic monster—she immediately sensed something was wrong.

  Seraphine narrowed her eyes, focusing on its colossal frame bathed in searing light.

  And then she saw it.

  The Milky Way Tyrant was wounded.

  And not in just one place.

  On closer inspection, its entire body—top to bottom—was scarred with the traces of bites, rakes, and claws.

  Though faint, the wounds flickered with bursts of blazing heat. Compared to the intact portions of the monster’s frame, these dim, black-hole-like patches revealed glaring weaknesses. It was as though some other titanic beast had ignored the Milky Way Tyrant’s searing body temperature and impenetrable hide, thrashing it mercilessly, over and over.

  And then Seraphine noticed something else, something that made her eyes narrow.

  “Too quiet. This Milky Way Tyrant is… unnaturally quiet.”

  Her brows knit as she studied the beast’s two enormous, compound eyes—one above, one below—set deep in its triangular skull. Those boiling, tyrannical orbs swirled with fury, proof that its soul and consciousness were fully awake, not dormant. And yet its actions… its motions… were lethargic, nearly frozen.

  Strange. Very strange.

  Out of caution, Seraphine refused to step even half a pace closer. Nor did she dare to cast her Divine Will directly upon it—for fear of being dragged into whatever had ensnared it.

  Instead, she abruptly withdrew several thousand kilometers. From that safe distance, she raised her hand, hooked into the beast’s gravitational field, and pulled.

  Hum—

  Instantly, the warped spacetime around the Milky Way Tyrant quivered. Its gravitational field rippled outward, trembling, and began to radiate waves of staggering magnitude.

  But these waves, which should have raced outward at the speed of light itself, instead crawled—agonizingly slow, like a crippled tortoise inching forward.

  “Indeed!”

  Suspended in the void, Seraphine’s voice sharpened. “Its speed has been suppressed—by some unknown power!”

  Her test revealed the truth: the gravitational waves generated by the beast’s titanic, star-crushing mass were spreading outward at a speed so absurdly slow it defied reason. Slower, even, than a human’s walking pace.

  They couldn’t even cross a single meter in a second.

  To take the natural propagation speed of gravity—a constant nearly equal to light—and strangle it down to this crawling pace… that was nothing less than terrifying.

  “A domain,” she whispered.

  Her expression hardened. “A Stagnation Field. A phenomenon that drags everything inside it—matter, energy, even information—into slowness a billion times over.”

  Her thoughts raced. A rare natural anomaly… or the work of something, or someone?

  With a flash, Seraphine unleashed her Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation, trying to unravel the source of the Stagnation Field and its mechanics.

  But before she could trace its roots, the void behind her split open.

  A colossal claw, a thousand meters long, tore into existence and lunged straight for her.

  “How audacious!”

  Seraphine’s eyes turned razor-cold. Divine Will surged through her entire being, lashing out at the colossal claw that had lunged from behind.

  Crack!!!

  Mind met matter. Her Divine Will remained unshaken—absolute—while the monstrous claw shattered instantly, splintering into dust-laden fragments that detonated with stellar force, scattering energy across the void like the aftermath of a supernova.

  A moment later, a soul-rending wail—Ao-woo!—shook the cosmos. Its roar was so vast it could have ripped Earth to pieces. Quantum fluctuations pulsed outward in all directions, infinite in reach.

  With that roar came endless energy, tidal waves of it, surging and enveloping a span of ten thousand miles. The warped spacetime region—stretching twenty thousand kilometers across—convulsed under violent, continuous tremors.

  At the same time, Seraphine sensed it: the high-energy particles and cosmic radiation that occasionally streaked past her had abruptly accelerated, magnified a billionfold.

  Her mind raced. Her calculations confirmed the impossible.

  The transmission speed of those particles… had surpassed the speed of light itself by a billion times.

  And the natural law—the light-speed barrier that should have stopped them—was gone. Absent. Broken.

  “Something’s wrong!”

  Her voice, low yet edged with alarm, carried across the void. “My flow of time has been slowed—by a billionfold!”

  The revelation was staggering, yet her composure held firm. She was not like mortals.

  For ordinary humans, a second allowed them to sprint perhaps five or six meters.

  For Seraphine, without the leash of the light-speed limit, her peak velocity reached a million times the speed of light. Faster, even, than the speed-cap within the Sentience Realm, which allowed no more than one hundred thousand times light.

  So even now—slowed a billion times over—her speed still translated to several hundred kilometers per second.

  In practice, if she sharpened her perception to its utmost sensitivity, a single “second” of her current time would grant her days—nights upon nights—worth of thought and calculation, far beyond mortal cognition.

  But the danger was equally dire. For if this stretched “second” truly passed, the external world—unbound, flowing in normal time—would lose thirty years in the blink of her stalled perception.

  And within those stolen decades, it was almost certain: the Shadow of the Unreal would descend.

  That was something Seraphine could not, would not, allow.

  Hum—

  The sigils etched across Seraphine’s forehead blazed with dazzling radiance.

  Her expression frosted over. In an instant, she unfurled her high-dimensional senses, sweeping the void for the unknown beast that had revealed only a claw.

  And within that infinitely intricate, super-spacetime vision, Seraphine saw—and what she saw was staggering beyond belief.

  Amid the countless overlapping seams of parallel realities, above, below, and in every direction, a six-legged, snow-white beast—tiger-shaped and colossal—flashed and darted.

  In one heartbeat, it appeared dozens of parallel layers away to her left.

  In the next, it vaulted hundreds of layers down below.

  As though the gulfs between universes meant nothing, the creature traversed them with ease, flickering between worlds like a housecat chasing shadows.

  Then—suddenly—it stood before her.

  A tiger-shaped monstrosity, taller than Everest itself, its feral face twisted into savagery. With a roar that split reality, it raised its claw and struck.

  Its velocity neared 99% the speed of light.

  A thousand times faster than Seraphine, shackled within the Stagnation Field.

  To her, its movement seemed almost cartoonishly swift—an impossible blur.

  And with that single strike, space within a radius of 20,000 kilometers crystallized into solidity.

  For an instant, Seraphine felt as though she had fallen into an endless torrent.

  This aura… the River of Time.

  Her eyes narrowed coldly as the realization struck.

  Across the boundless river, currents surged like lightning, its crashing foam thundered in her ears. Wave upon wave bore the eternal weight of time—time forever lost, never to be reclaimed.

  Those waves pressed downward, layer upon crushing layer.

  And because of the vast disparity in speed, Seraphine had no chance to react. No chance to defend.

  She could only be driven down, helpless, 'imprisoned' at the bottom of the infinite current.

  Roar!!!

  A tiger’s roar suddenly erupted, shaking the very mind.

  From the riverbank emerged a colossal, six-legged White Tiger, its aura vast and crushing as a mountain range.

  At its appearance, the River itself convulsed. From upstream to downstream, the current roared and surged in fury.

  Drops, streams, torrents—countless crystalline currents came alive, each strand suffused with killing intent, wrapping tightly around the “imprisoned” Seraphine.

  The weight of it was enough to annihilate and shatter nine great planets at once.

  The White Tiger crouched low on the bank, eyes blazing with feral brilliance. It fixed Seraphine in its cold, merciless stare, then raised its claw in a swift, cutting motion.

  Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh—

  The winds above the great river spun into a cyclone, gathering a momentum of slaughter to crown the strike.

  “Roar!!!”

  The beast thundered at the heavens, its eyes flaring with divine light. Its claw, carrying boundless destruction, tore downward—while the River itself surged, intent on binding and crushing Seraphine.

  At that instant, the two forces met.

  Universe! Explosion!!!

  Boom!!!!!

  In a single heartbeat, Seraphine was struck from above and below, caught between two overwhelming assaults—each powerful enough to shatter a million-kilometer Great Sun.

  It was like the detonation of a supernova.

  Boundless energy erupted, engulfing the entire twisted spacetime region.

  Meteorites, bacterial energy-clusters, molecules, atoms—every fragment of matter—was pulverized and vaporized into fundamental particles, flung outward in violent torrents across the void.

  Ten thousand kilometers away, the Milky Way Tyrant’s confining Stagnation Field cracked and collapsed beneath the onslaught.

  But the beast itself fared little better. Its colossal body split open with hundreds of gaping fissures, vomiting millions of degrees of Strange Matter plasma. The force blasted it backward, hurling the monster against the cosmic wall at the wormhole’s edge.

  There, it slammed into—and detonated—dozens of onrushing black starships, each a thousand meters long and spiked like shuttles, obliterating them in a chain of fire.

  Roar!!!

  The illusory River of Time dissolved, leaving only torrents of raw energy, flooding outward and engulfing the void.

  Believing its strike complete, the white tiger colossus loosed a triumphant roar and began to turn away—when suddenly, its body froze. Slowly, it turned its head back toward the blast zone.

  There, Seraphine still hovered in her original place, untouched. Small, radiant, unshaken—like the devastating, star-crushing strike from before had been nothing but an illusion.

  At the same instant, the Stagnation Field clinging to her cracked apart with a thunderous rumble, vanishing as completely as the Milky Way Tyrant’s had.

  “Two months have passed outside? …Good.”

  Her Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation whirred at full force. Having already unraveled the workings of the Stagnation ability, Seraphine narrowed her eyes, then smiled faintly at the mountain-sized tiger.

  “No one has ever made me suffer such a bitter loss. Kitty, you are the first.”

  Her voice rang with cold amusement.

  “By manipulating the River of Time itself, you cover a region—sealing its surface on all sides. Everything within becomes divorced from the outer flow, its temporal stream slowed, staggered… until it stagnates.”

  Seraphine tilted her head in grudging admiration. “Truly formidable.”

  Roar!!!

  Far off, the battered Milky Way Tyrant bellowed and hurled itself thousands of miles through the void, charging straight at the tiger.

  But the beast didn’t even bother to move. One cold glance—and the Tyrant froze in mid-flight, locked once more inside a Stagnation field, suspended helplessly.

  Clap. Clap. Clap.

  Seraphine’s hands came together in deliberate applause.

  “Impressive. It seems once someone has tasted your move, even once… you can simply will them back into temporal stagnation at any distance.”

  Roar!!

  The White Tiger roared in triumph, its colossal form blazing as it sought to drag Seraphine back into the frozen flow of time.

  But this time, Seraphine only laughed softly.

  “The same trick won’t work on me twice.”

  Her voice sharpened like a blade.

  “Instant Time Compression!!!”