“So this is the so-called Tractor Beam. High-density Gravitons are compressed into a beam and fired, generating a high-intensity gravitational field around the struck object, forcibly pulling it back toward the launch point.”

  As the radiant beam wrapped around her body, Seraphine slowly turned her gaze toward the colossal gray saucer-shaped craft, city-sized, floating in the void above.

  The layers of hardened alloy walls posed no obstacle to her vision.

  In an instant, she pierced through its shell and beheld the command center deep within.

  Inside the immaculate white hall, crammed with intricate machinery, several small gray-skinned aliens with bulbous heads fixed their sharp, arched, pitch-black compound eyes upon her—eyes brimming with arrogance and scrutiny—as they peered through a screen from tens of thousands of kilometers away.

  Seraphine lifted a single finger, brushing aside the Tractor Beam, and tapped lightly.

  “Casually shining lights on others is… impolite.”

  Hum—

  The gravitational field of the Tractor Beam twisted at once, redirecting its pull straight back toward the saucer.

  Bang! Bang!

  The massive gray vessel lurched violently.

  The smug composure of the small gray pilots shattered instantly, giving way to panic.

  Before their bewildered, terrified cries could even form words, the saucer was already hurtling across tens of thousands of kilometers, dragged helplessly toward Seraphine, who hovered calmly in the emptiness above the Moon.

  “Kajiwa?!”

  “Makka Pakka!”

  “Guagahaka!”

  Their frantic shouts were drowned as the ship was wrenched ever closer.

  Yet something stranger unfolded.

  As the saucer neared, its enormous bulk shrank at a rapid pace.

  By the time it touched Seraphine’s palm, the once-colossal craft had become no more than a silver-gray disc, palm-sized, with a slight protrusion at its center—like a perfect high-fidelity model.

  Without hesitation, Seraphine closed her fingers around it, summoned the entrance to her Dimensional Pocket, and casually tossed it inside.

  That Dimensional Pocket—its capacity now expanded to a celestial scale—had, under her endless construction, become a super-gigantic scientific research institute.

  Within it stretched over a hundred million laboratories, countless cloned scientists, tens of millions of synthetic beings, robots, and Gynoid technicians.

  Every artifact Seraphine had ever collected was cataloged there, under ceaseless study by those loyal scientists, engineers, and assistants who served her unto death.

  Having finished, she shifted her gaze back toward Earth, 380,000 kilometers away.

  By chance, the continent directly facing the Moon was none other than North America.

  Unlike other spacetimes.

  Clatter, clatter, clatter, clatter!

  A torrent of bullets swept savagely across the battlefield, brutally ripping apart a hulking green-skinned mutant—its body massive, grotesquely muscular, encased in crude plates of scavenged metal armor.

  Green blood and shredded flesh sprayed in every direction, yet the dozen nearby mutants did not recoil in fear. On the contrary, spurred on by the carnage, they roared from their trenches. With both powerful hands wrapped around rusty, oil-stained Gatling guns, they unleashed a rain of fire toward the cluster of armed humans huddled in trenches more than a hundred meters away.

  When seven or eight of their companions were torn to pieces, the remaining humans, horrified, ducked down, pressing their bodies deep into the soil of the trenches, too frightened even to return fire.

  “Roar!!”

  “Roar!!”

  “Roar!!”

  The green-skinned mutants, watching this pathetic retreat, bared their fangs and burst into savage laughter.

  But then—suddenly—a humanoid figure of light appeared at the very heart of the battlefield.

  He paid no heed to the storm of bullets clattering all around him and walked steadily toward the half-collapsed ruins of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial in the distance.

  The cratered earth and jagged trenches did nothing to slow his stride; he moved as if across smooth, level ground.

  The moment the mutants caught sight of this figure of light, panic seized them. They swung their spinning machine guns toward him and unleashed everything they had.

  But before their triggers had even cooled, their bodies froze. In an instant, their twisted frames collapsed, warped, and reformed—into massive white pigs. Fat and sturdy, they looked at once absurd and strangely suited for feasts.

  The transformation stunned the humans watching from afar. Their cries echoed in disbelief:

  “My God—what did I just see?!”

  “A super mutant… turned into a pig!”

  Unmoved by the mortals’ shouts, Seraphine—her blazing form of light slowly fading—stepped calmly into the hollowed memorial hall.

  Before her stood the famous gray-white statue of Abraham Lincoln. For a brief moment, her gaze lingered on it, and emotion welled up within her.

  “Truly wondrous.”

  After lingering on the statue, Seraphine shifted her gaze. Across the vast reflecting pool before the memorial hall, her eyes settled on the distant, grass-carpeted square—upon the tall, flawless, geometrically perfect obelisk.

  The Washington Monument.

  Carved from marble, its square base stretched 22 meters across, and it soared 169 meters into the sky.

  A famous landmark of America, and in many ways, a symbol of America itself.

  A memory stirred—of a game she had once played long ago: 《Fallout 3》.

  That game had its own Washington Monument.

  Back then, in order to complete an NPC’s mission, she had guided the protagonist to climb that very obelisk.

  The scene in-game mirrored the one before her now.

  Both Washingtons. Both ruined, collapsing beyond repair.

  Only—one was illusion, the other reality.

  What thread tied them together?

  The world is like a game, always with protagonists and supporting characters.

  Everyone in youth once imagined themselves the protagonist, saw others as mere extras, believed the entire stage existed only for them.

  The thought welled within her, and Seraphine’s voice flowed softly into the air:

  “But when they grow up, people learn the truth.

  Though each begins from their own vantage—first-person vision, through their own eyes—they come to realize they are not the stars. They are only supporting roles, fragile weeds clinging to the edge of the backdrop.”

  Then her lips curved upward in a smile, haughty and absolute:

  “But I am different.

  The fantasies of youth—I will make them real.

  I am the sole protagonist!”

  As the words resounded, she felt it—the principle that had long incubated deep in her soul stirred, growing stronger yet again.

  She could sense it clearly.

  If that principle, transcending even the wish for eternal life, were to be born, then the bottleneck binding her at the peak of the Martial Saint Great Realm would shatter in an instant.

  And the higher path—the four-dimensional Divinitas Great Realm—would lie open before her.

  “Let’s go.”

  Seraphine gathered the Astralglow Tiger in her arms and slowly bent her knees.

  Crack, crack, crack, crack!

  An immense, terrifying force erupted from beneath her feet as she squatted down, ripping apart the earth in all directions. Layers of soil and stone split open in violent fissures, spreading wide.

  Crack, crack, crack!

  The unstoppable vibrations raced outward, violent and unyielding.

  “What the fuck?!”

  “What’s happening?!”

  “Ahhh—save me!”

  The armed humans crouched in the muddy trenches hadn’t even grasped what was happening before the widening fissures split beneath them and swallowed them whole.

  Rumble rumble rumble!

  At the same time, violent air currents burst outward with Seraphine at their center, tearing through everything nearby and grinding it into dust.

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  Buildings near and far—the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Obelisk—collapsed one after another beneath the apocalyptic tremors and the searing wind.

  In an instant, this already-ruined Washington crumbled into an even deeper ruin.

  And at the epicenter of the world-shattering destruction, Seraphine slowly lifted her gaze to the pale, vast Moon hanging at the edge of the heavens.

  Then, she leapt.

  Boom!!!

  The entire world seemed to convulse.

  The atmosphere split as Seraphine’s body pierced it in a single bound, vanishing in an instant.

  The endless banks of cloud above shattered into fragments in her wake.

  And with that leap, the fractured earth, split into tens of thousands of jagged fissures, drank in immense energy.

  From Washington’s annihilation, the devastation spread outward at hundreds of miles per second, engulfing wider and wider territory.

  This was the result of Seraphine’s mastery over the basic electromagnetic force—channeling the power of her legs evenly across the land.

  Otherwise, with a single stomp, she would have plunged clean through to Earth’s core.

  But now, as fissures multiplied by the tens of thousands, towns across the wasteland fell. Dilapidated towers, residential zones, camps, strongholds, power plants, dams, signal towers, ruined parks, train stations, subway tunnels, pre-war monuments, museums, and even dozens—hundreds—of pre-war underground shelters, all collapsed, buried in a heartbeat.

  The aberrant civilization of the nuclear wasteland, lingering for two hundred years, was extinguished in an instant.

  Time slipped by. From orbit, looking down from the dark beyond the atmosphere:

  In one corner of the North American continent, tens of thousands of miles across, the land had caved in beneath Seraphine’s stomp. The crust had ruptured, birthing a crater a thousand miles wide, magma pouring upward in torrents. Distant stretches of North America had turned into barren, reddish wastelands, pockmarked with craters and fissures.

  Meanwhile, Seraphine had already breached the atmosphere and entered the silent vacuum of space.

  Her momentum did not falter. She sped straight toward the Moon, 380,000 kilometers away—traveling at 99% the speed of light.

  In just over a second, the scarred surface of the Moon loomed vast in her vision.

  Boom!!!

  In the vacuum, the silent explosion of her collision was no less cataclysmic—only robbed of sound, deceptively muted.

  Seraphine, carrying immeasurable Joules of kinetic energy, ripped clean through the Moon, hurtling on toward the far starfields.

  The Earth’s satellite offered no more resistance than a block of soft tofu.

  Boom!

  Tens of thousands of kilometers beyond, the Astralglow Tiger suddenly stirred awake. Instinctively, it triggered its spacetime traversal ability. Linked to it, Seraphine vanished as well, slipping free of this spacetime.

  In the vast dark of the cosmos, Seraphine reappeared, clutching the weakened Astralglow Tiger in her arms.

  “Hmm?”

  Upon entering this unfamiliar spacetime, Seraphine instantly sensed that the interstellar structural constants here—

  That is, the fundamental, immutable quantities defining the strength of electromagnetic forces and the bedrock parameters of physics—

  Were distinctly different from those in Emberlight’s spacetime.

  The anomaly was not so severe as to cause her, with her boundless power, to collapse and unravel on the microscopic scale.

  Yet it left her deeply unsettled. Her divine aura faltered, and her mastery of the four fundamental forces felt sluggish, requiring ceaseless, moment-to-moment adjustments just to function naturally.

  This was the first time such conditions had greeted her, even after traversing hundreds of thousands of spacetimes through the Astralglow Tiger’s ability.

  And still—she was not surprised.

  “A universe of anomalous parameters… so, I’ve come to such a place.”

  Her brows knit as she shifted her perception to the microscopic realm, probing and measuring the surrounding spacetime, mapping its constants and the hidden architecture of its forces.

  That different parallel universes might obey different physical rules—she had long anticipated.

  For though meticulous research and observation had suggested that all realities across the grand multiverse stemmed from a singular 【Source Point】…

  Conventional logic would insist that such a common origin demanded a single shared set of physical laws.

  Yet, back in Emberlight’s spacetime, Seraphine had already uncovered evidence to the contrary. By analyzing light from a distant quasar thirteen billion light-years away, she had extracted precise data on the clouds, galaxy clusters, and filamentary structures scattered along its path.

  From this she deduced a startling truth:

  That in regions hundreds of millions of light-years from Earth, the structural constants and fundamental parameters of the universe diverged significantly from those in the Solar System Sector—and even the Milky Way as a whole.

  It was highly probable, then, that these distant reaches harbored vast quantities of anomalous matter and phenomena that no existing model of physics could yet describe.

  Building on this, Seraphine pressed further, deriving an even more audacious possibility:

  That the principle of 【Isotropy】—the uniformity of all things across the universe—might break down entirely when stretched across distances sufficiently vast.

  Previously, Seraphine had believed that the physical and chemical properties of all things in the universe would never change because of direction or distance—that they were uniform.

  This included the electron’s charge, the speed of light in vacuum, and other constants. As long as they belonged to the same parallel reality, such rules were fixed and immutable.

  But after multiple analyses of quasar light from the depths of space, the data revealed something different. Seraphine realized the universe held far more possibilities—exhibiting non-uniformity across its vastness.

  That is, in a universe sufficiently immense, two spacetime regions separated by extreme distance might—across physical parameters, chemical properties of matter, interstellar structural constants, and countless other values—display wholly distinct properties.

  And on the macro scale, between the more “distant” parallel realities, the differences would be greater still.

  “So…”

  Seraphine lowered her lashes, divine light flickering faintly within her eyes.

  “The unknown Twin Grand Universe, existing outside the boundless web of integrated parallel realities of the Grand Universe, might—at its most fundamental level—not even be composed of quarks, protons, or neutrons. Its building blocks might instead be something stranger, more primordial… ether? Or primal elements, older than matter itself?”

  She lifted her gaze toward the vast, endless deep sky and let out a profound sigh:

  “This Grand Universe… it is truly too immense.”

  After the sigh faded, Seraphine shifted her sight to the dark expanse tens of thousands of kilometers away.

  There, a breathtaking emerald planet turned slowly on its axis.

  Without invoking Divine Will—relying only on the reach of her own overwhelming senses—she felt the massive, dense tide of life-energy radiating from its surface, faintly staining the surrounding void.

  That world teemed with life.

  “It seems… even more suited for habitation than Earth.”

  Seraphine extended her Divine Will, spanning the distance in an instant, piercing the atmosphere of the green world, ready to gather information.

  But then—

  A colossal torrent of spatial waves surged from behind her.

  “Hm?”

  She turned slightly, her eyes tracing the ripple back to its source, one hundred thousand kilometers away.

  There, a gray, machine-forged planet—over one hundred kilometers in diameter—had materialized from nothingness.

  At first glance, its technological nature was obvious. A massive equatorial superhighway girdled its surface, linking north and south poles and splitting the artificial world neatly into two hemispheres.

  Beneath its layers of dark alloy armor, Seraphine’s gaze pierced effortlessly. She saw thousands of colossal fortresses hidden within its shell—an intricate lattice of machinery and power.

  Their construction revealed their purpose: clustered, parallel laser cannon arrays.

  And more—besides these fortresses clearly designed for surface combat, she noted a perfect saucer-shaped depression carved into the planet’s northern hemisphere, a geometric valley.

  From within this valley emanated an immense, ever-churning energy, so concentrated that even at a hundred thousand kilometers away, Seraphine felt its destructive potential—an energy capable of erasing a planet.

  Far within Nova Star, in a vast meditation chamber.

  A man clad in a black cloak radiating a suffocating aura stood silently. Beneath it, a black form-fitting undersuit hugged his frame. His face was concealed by a helmet with a curved visor and a strange black mask. Before him loomed a vast screen like a window into the void.

  The display currently showed the image of Odron.

  At that moment, a slender, silver-haired middle-aged man in formal uniform approached the cloaked figure. Bowing deeply, he spoke in a tone of respect:

  “Lord Dark, we have reached Odron.”

  “Hum ~ Hoo ~”

  The heavy, mechanical cadence of breathing filled the meditation chamber.

  Dustin Dark did not reply at once.

  Beside him, the silver-haired middle-aged man waited in silence, his posture perfectly patient.

  “Hum ~ Hoo ~”

  The slow, rhythmic breath continued, metallic and oppressive.

  At last, a voice emerged—low, resonant, tinged with iron:

  “Mr. Tajin… destroy it.”

  Tajin inclined his head. “As you command.”

  He turned and departed, leaving Dustin Dark staring at the radiant world of Odron displayed across the vast screen, his thoughts unreadable behind the curved visor.

  Moments later.

  In the northern hemisphere of Nova Star, deep within the colossal sunken valley-structure, the super laser cannon—which had long been locked on target—completed its final charge sequence.

  Its colossal banks of reactors surged to their peak.

  Then, with a thunderous hum—

  A searing crimson beam erupted, cutting across the void, racing toward the green planet tens of thousands of kilometers away.

  But almost immediately—something went wrong.

  The beam advanced only a few thousand kilometers before… halting.

  Then, impossibly, it reversed course—collapsing upon itself, folding backward through space, and surging back toward Nova Star.

  Not a single erg of energy was wasted.

  The reversed torrent re-entered the vast cannon’s barrel, cascading through its magnifying crystal arrays, streaming downward into the eight massive transmission conduits beneath the launch system.

  Step by step, the power unraveled its journey, tracing backward along every circuit and reservoir, returning flawlessly into Nova Star’s super-matter reactor, the heart that forged its cataclysmic fire.

  Even the kyber crystal repository—drained heavily to fuel the annihilation shot—was mysteriously replenished, as though its depletion had never occurred.

  The entire process unfolded like time itself running backward.

  And indeed, it was.

  Seraphine had invoked her spacetime skill: Astralglow Reversal—a technique that had evolved through countless traversals.

  Its scope was no longer limited to a single strike.

  She had turned back the operation of Nova Star’s super laser cannon, along with vast swathes of its infrastructure: green-scale plating, thrusters, sensor networks, fifteen thousand Turbolaser batteries, and more than seven hundred tractor beam projectors.

  Even more, she rewound the thoughts and actions of over two million personnel spread throughout the artificial planet—returning all of them to the moment five minutes prior.

  Deep within Nova Star’s meditation chamber.

  “...Destroy it.”

  Tajin gave a silent nod.

  “As you command.”

  He turned and left.

  Only Dustin Dark remained, standing before the massive screen. He gazed quietly at the green planet displayed there, wordless.

  One minute later.

  Tajin suddenly rushed back into the meditation chamber, stumbling to his side, stammering:

  “L… Lord Dark!

  The laser cannon malfunctioned during activation…”

  “Then reactivate it.”

  Dustin Dark’s half-mechanical voice carried a sharp edge of displeasure.

  “Do you really need to report such a trivial matter to me?”

  “No, Lord.”

  Tajin panted heavily, his face twisted in disbelief.

  “Earlier, Odron was already locked by the fire-control system. The fortress turrets, running under dynamic system targeting, had entered a state of high readiness.

  But just now… just now, Odron inexplicably missed its target! This caused the fire-control system to fall into obvious autonomous chaos, which led to—”

  “Missed its target?”

  Dustin Dark suddenly turned, staring at the silver-haired man with cold disbelief.

  “Mr. Tajin, perhaps you don’t understand the words leaving your mouth.

  This weapon cost the Empire 100 billion units of energy. From the moment it was forged on Geonosis, it has stood as the greatest weapon in the entire Milky Way!

  And you claim it failed to hit such a massive planet?!”

  Scolded into silence, Tajin’s face twisted bitterly.

  “But Lord Dark, the data is undeniable. According to control room feedback, Odron’s core system failed to process calculations in the tiniest instant—less than one millionth of a second—and in that gap, it missed the target by over 10,000 kilometers!”

  “Nonsense!”

  With a gesture, Dustin Dark seized Tajin by the throat with a force choke, lifting him into the air. His voice was ice:

  “If what you say is true, then only two explanations exist.

  First: the NS-1 main system, along with every monitoring node spread across this entire planet, is riddled with flaws—and the entire Nova Star requires a complete overhaul. Or else it belongs in the smelting furnace.

  Second: Odron’s geocore has been replaced with a hyperspace engine, allowing that massive planet to achieve superluminal flight!”

  Bang!

  Tajin crashed heavily to the floor, coughing and gasping before he managed to speak, voice broken:

  “Lord… there is… there is another explanation—a hypothesis proposed by the Academy’s scholars.”

  “Speak.”

  Still on the cold floor, Tajin drew several breaths before forcing the words out:

  “By comparing the new spatial marker of the backup fire-control system with the old marker, they discovered Odron’s deviation was exactly 10,590 kilometers. Odron’s orbital velocity is 35.3 kilometers per second.”

  Dustin Dark froze, then spoke in a low voice:

  “The missed distance matches precisely the ground Odron would cover along its orbit in 300 seconds.”

  Tajin’s throat bobbed, and he nodded rapidly.

  “Yes… yes, Lord.”

  “There are no coincidences in the universe. Especially not at such a crucial temporal nexus.”

  Dustin Dark fell silent in thought, then asked:

  “The photon stopwatch data…?”

  Tajin replied:

  “It’s five minutes slower than the supercrystal spatial stopwatch.”

  “Hmph… Hoo… Hmph… Hoo!”

  Dustin Dark drew several deep breaths, his voice heavy:

  “The supercrystal space and external timeflow are always synchronized. And the quantum stopwatch—unless under extraordinary conditions—will not deviate by even a second in a hundred million years.”

  Tajin spoke gravely:

  “There is only one explanation. Including Nova Star itself… all our time was frozen for a full five minutes!”

  “No. No, you are wrong.”

  Suddenly, a clear female voice rang out, also speaking in the common tongue of the Galactic Empire.

  Dustin Dark whipped around, his shout echoing harshly through the vast chamber:

  “Who is it?!”

  “Hahaha.”

  A figure of pure white light, shimmering faintly, stepped out from the dark corridor.

  It was Seraphine.