"Primal Force Push!"

  "Primal Force Lightning!"

  "Primal Force Choke!"

  The moment they clashed, the grim-faced Dustin Dark immediately hurled a barrage of Primal Force skills at Seraphine from afar.

  Yet these very skills—capable of instantly erasing ordinary humans—seemed to recoil from Seraphine’s presence. After traveling less than half a meter, they inexplicably turned back, slamming straight into Dustin himself.

  Tajin, who stood too close, was caught in the backlash. Lightning engulfed his body, hurling him through the air together with Dustin, both smashing hard into the giant display screen behind them.

  Bang!

  Bang!

  The screen burst apart in a rain of sparks. In that instant, Primal Force Choke twisted Tajin’s neck into a bloody vapor, tearing his body in two.

  His remaining limbs were scorched into charred fragments by Primal Force Lightning, leaving behind only a broken, blackened skeleton that slid down the shattered screen. His lifeless head, eyes still glassy, rolled onto the ground beside it.

  “Ahhh!!!”

  Dustin Dark screamed as he crashed down.

  Though not killed outright, the vital life-support systems embedded in his chest and waist were shredded by Primal Force, plunging his body into catastrophic decline.

  Seraphine approached with unhurried steps. Extending one slender finger, she pointed from a distance.

  Hum—

  At once, Dustin shrieked in agony, his body convulsing as torrents of thick, black fluid spewed violently from his pores.

  Its particles were impossibly fine, so the mass resembled a glistening slick of crude oil.

  “So this is the Primordial Injector….”

  With a light gesture, she drew the viscous substance together. Thin black threads coiled into a dense sphere, settling calmly in her open palm.

  It was the size of a tennis ball. Her gaze sharpened, instantly piercing through to its true form.

  At the microscopic scale—

  It was a living colony, an aggregate of microorganisms even smaller than mitochondria.

  Seraphine lowered her eyes toward Dustin Dark.

  “Within your body, each cell houses over one thousand Primordial Injectors—around sixty quintillion in total. Truly impressive.”

  “Hhh… Hhh…”

  Dustin rasped through his mechanical lungs, his mind fogging. At her words, he nearly screamed inside: You’re the one who’s not simple!

  Barely lifting his trembling voice, he croaked:

  “All the great Primal Force users in the galaxy… I know them all. But you… who exactly are you?”

  Seraphine only smiled.

  She had no need to answer an insect.

  Hum—

  Her fingers closed. The countless Primordial Injectors, saturated with dark Primal Force, collapsed into a singular essence—tiny, yet wrapped in a warped spatial layer. It drifted beside the dormant Astralglow Tiger.

  With that done, she spared no glance for the fading Dustin Dark. Her form blurred, vanishing without a trace.

  Whoosh—

  Outside the colossal super-matter reactor—nearly ten kilometers across—a radiant figure appeared out of nowhere.

  It was Seraphine, who had passed effortlessly through layers of alloy bulkheads and decks to arrive here.

  Before her, the vast energy core churned with ceaseless fusion reactions.

  She frowned, muttering with disdain:

  “Is this it? Aside from not boiling water for power, how is this heap of scrap any different from a nuclear fusion plant on Earth?”

  With a small shake of her head, she extended her Divine Will along the reactor’s intricate lattice of energy conduits. It quickly traced out several embedded hyperspace engines, hidden deep within Nova Star, designed to drive the entire planet into faster-than-light travel.

  But their workings posed no mystery. Seraphine’s Divine Will—already refined to probe the most fundamental layers of matter—saw through them instantly.

  After fully grasping the mechanism behind this artificial war-planet’s superluminal drive, she could only scoff:

  “Crude.”

  Nova Star’s so-called FTL method could be dressed up in grand terms, but in truth it was simple: a localized, directional Hyperspace drive field was generated by the engines, then strung together by a chain of field generators into a unified guidance matrix.

  That “matrix,” in essence nothing more than bundled energy and magnetic flux, was enough to nudge the entire planet into a higher-dimensional layer—the Hyperspace known from the records of Nova Star Academy’s scholars.

  Inside that domain, the speed of light was magnitudes greater than in normal space.

  And every particle of real matter had a unique anchor point, a mirrored connection within Hyperspace.

  Thus, every body in realspace—star, planet, asteroid—possessed a corresponding 【Shadow Mass】 in Hyperspace.

  By charting these reference points and riding favorable Hyperspace currents, a vessel could navigate safely at superluminal speeds.

  “This universe makes faster-than-light travel far too easy.”

  Seraphine shook her head once more. With a wave of her hand, a magnetic field coalesced at her fingertips.

  “Magnetic fields, electric fields, gravitational fields… in the end, they are all energy fields.”

  Hum—

  She began to draw in energy.

  In an instant, the magnetic field in her palm swelled to contain the equivalent of one million tons of TNT.

  Yet even with such a relatively small amount of power, the field seemed to brush against a strange, unfamiliar dimension.

  Noticing this, Seraphine shook her head with a faint laugh.

  “The entry point for this so-called energy-field technology is absurdly low. By this logic, even a fledgling 21st-century Earth civilization could stumble into faster-than-light travel and call itself interplanetary.”

  Following the magnetic field’s surface—its faint interface with Hyperspace—Seraphine extended her Divine Will into the rift.

  The moment her consciousness touched that higher dimension, an uncanny familiarity struck her.

  “What… is this?”

  Her sharp brows arched. Raising both hands, she seized the faint shimmer between realms—then pulled.

  Whoosh—

  From nowhere, an expanse of illusory radiance tore open at the heart of Nova Star.

  The moment the void appeared, a turbulent, chaotic energy flooded outward. Surrounding pipelines groaned and twisted, delicate machinery warped and split apart, sparks scattering in showers.

  “Symbolic Domain?!”

  Seraphine’s laughter rang bright and fearless.

  “So that’s the truth.”

  Without hesitation, she stepped forward, leaving behind the colossal Nova Star—a war-world now locked into cascading failure at its core, fated to collapse into self-destruction.

  Crossing the threshold, she immediately sensed the nature of this dimension. This Symbolic Domain was utterly unlike the spacetime of Emberlight.

  In that parallel universe, the Domain’s depths had once been connected to the innermost strata of the Sentience Realm—a superluminal curvature field buried beneath the thickness of a Projected Layer.

  But here… there was no such layer.

  The Sentience Realm lay exposed—pure, unfiltered—and only a single Symbolic Domain existed.

  “And as for the curvature of space itself…”

  Seraphine sensed the surrounding space and mused,

  “It’s completely synchronized with the external universe. That means, during superluminal travel, starships don’t need to worry about drifting endlessly off course. A flawless pathway beyond light itself.”

  As the thought crossed her mind, her body erupted in vast divine light. In a single instant, she entered a superluminal state—rumbling, surging swiftly into the boundless, infinite void.

  On her flight, Seraphine discovered that this immense Symbolic Domain, so eerily similar to the real universe, was not truly empty despite its appearance.

  She could distinctly feel that, scattered across the endless void, certain entities existed.

  They resembled clusters of illusory projections, unresponsive to light, drifting freely or else held in stable motion.

  With a sweep of Divine Will, she probed them briefly and immediately understood what they were.

  These projections were nothing less than the shadow masses of countless real celestial bodies in external reality.

  Even the smallest meteorites, comets, and cosmic dust each had their corresponding shadow mass within this Symbolic Domain.

  Though ethereal and indistinct, these shadows still reacted to both gravity and electromagnetic force.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Theoretically, if a starship were unlucky enough to collide with a shadow planet, it would be annihilated—its crew perishing instantly. Even mere proximity could drag a ship into destruction.

  “That’s why Hyperspace currents exist—to navigate safely.”

  Seraphine, blazing like a humanoid sun, fearlessly pierced through one shadow body after another, accelerating without pause.

  Meanwhile, in real space, the corresponding celestial bodies trembled as though struck by invisible attacks. Their cores fractured, their crusts collapsed, triggering massive oscillations and reshaping through orogenesis.

  Smaller satellites fared even worse—rumbling into collapse, their fragments scattering. Under the relentless pull of gravity and time, they began to evolve into fresh asteroid belts.

  Within the Symbolic Domain, Seraphine accelerated again and again.

  Whoosh!!!

  A hundred times. A thousand times. Ten thousand times.

  Before long, her speed had climbed to 1.2 million times the speed of light.

  Ordinarily, warp required a Lorentz-like bubble. Even after Seraphine’s countless optimizations and upgrades, her maximum remained around 200,000 times light speed.

  But here? She was soaring at 1.2 million.

  Utterly illogical.

  At that velocity, she could traverse three hundred sixty billion kilometers in a single second.

  Faster even than the negative-energy warp bubble, which tore space apart as it burned through.

  Yet with this level of speed came the creeping onset of the Sentience Collapse Effect—twelve times greater than the speed threshold allowed by Emberlight’s spacetime Symbolic Domain.

  “This spacetime is strange. The light speed limit shatters effortlessly, and its ceiling stretches impossibly far beyond reach.”

  Seraphine shook her head with a soft sigh as she streaked through the void at high speed.

  “The intelligent species born here are truly blessed.”

  The thought drew her mind back to the Milky Way of Emberlight’s spacetime.

  Compared to this realm, the civilizations there were pitiable. Tens of thousands—even millions—were shackled by the speed-of-light barrier, imprisoned within their homeworlds or star systems, their growth fractured and incomplete.

  They possessed no superluminal Sentience Realm corridors to join the wider cosmic community.

  They lacked the technological strength to search for, harvest, and wield the exotic matter buried within neutron star cores—matter necessary to pioneer warp.

  And fortune had never gifted them a stable wormhole in their own systems, one that could be used to leap across the stars.

  Instead, they faced the slow death of planetary resources, the torment of collapsed civilizations, the gnawing despair of endless internal strife. Day by day, year by year, their anguish only deepened.

  Under such grim circumstances, the branches of their technology trees warped endlessly—internalized, bent, diffracted—until at last they twisted into hopeless, negative, cybernetic civilizations.

  Thousands, tens of thousands of years later, the tides of time would grind them to dust—forgotten, nameless, never remembered.

  Born into this vast cosmic region, yet until their extinction, never once permitted to truly behold it.

  Their lives were meaningless.

  Their deaths… equally meaningless.

  “Primordial Injector.”

  The tiny substance drifting beside Seraphine suddenly expanded, swelling into a flowing, dark, viscous stream.

  Hum—

  As her eyes gleamed, the dark fluid—condensed from countless Primordial Injectors—merged into one, forming a turbid yet dreamlike field of energy and information, vibrant and ever-changing.

  Gazing at the distinct little field, Seraphine spoke slowly:

  “So, this is a Projected Layer… a personalized, localized layer of projection, existing within an intelligent lifeform’s Physical Strength and bound tightly to its soul.”

  At last, she had clarified several of this spacetime’s intrinsic properties.

  “Many parallel realities, built from the same fundamental particles, may differ locally. But overall, they still operate under one unified material system. The principles remain the same—the differences lie only in their forms of expression.”

  Seraphine mused quietly,

  “But why? Why is this spacetime so similar to the movie 《Incantation Wars》? What is the underlying principle?

  Emberlight’s spacetime mirrors 《Dragonblood》, and this one mirrors 《Incantation Wars》. Then what about Earth, from my previous life…?

  Were all the stories I experienced after gaining the system also based on some narrative from the old world?”

  A profound fear gripped her. Her thoughts spiraled beyond control, her eyes vacant, her spirit sinking into an abyss of dread.

  Just then, the Astralglow Tiger—beaten relentlessly by Seraphine’s hundreds of true clones, its spacetime powers forcibly suppressed, its body collapsing under constant traversals until it hovered at the edge of death—suddenly stirred awake.

  “Ah, you’re awake.”

  Seraphine turned her head and chuckled.

  “Is this your last burst of life? I’ve already grown bored of this place. Hurry, tell me how many more traversals you need before you can finally die.”

  “Meow… oh…”

  Its dull, lifeless eyes flickered with sorrow and grievance, a weak cry spilling forth.

  That sound seemed to carry the weight of fate’s cruelty, mourning its own misfortune.

  With that final mewl, the last glimmer of light faded completely from the kitten’s eyes.

  At the same time, deep within its soul, a black-golden feather-shaped light pattern tore free. It leapt instantly into Seraphine’s waiting palm, which she had already raised in anticipation.

  And in that instant, as death claimed the Astralglow Cat, instinct compelled it to attempt one final traversal.

  Hum—

  The surrounding spacetime twisted violently, condensing into a colossal vortex of chaos that swallowed Seraphine whole.

  She made no effort to resist. Instead, she smiled faintly.

  “Then let’s play one more time.”

  The vortex collapsed around her in an instant, consuming her entire form. She vanished from the dim, endless parallel universe—leaving behind only the corpse of the Astralglow Cat.

  Its body, saturated with immense energy, swelled rapidly beneath the erosion of time.

  Boom!!!!

  A cataclysmic explosion—strong enough to annihilate millions of stars—suddenly erupted, its light and heat racing outward at superluminal speed across the dim, endless void. All surrounding shadow masses within countless miles, and even those in far-distant regions, were erased into nothingness.

  Simultaneously, in the external, real universe, the star system of Odron met its fated doom.

  Every planet—including Odron itself—was obliterated. From surface to core, each world collapsed and shattered beneath the destructive wave unleashed by the Astralglow Tiger’s self-detonation at the moment of death.

  Thus ended the existence of the Astralglow Tiger—a mysterious lifeform that had once roamed freely across endless timelines, carefree for hundreds of thousands of years.

  Meanwhile, Seraphine—hurled across an unknown number of parallel spacetime layers—suddenly found herself standing within a strangely familiar universe.

  “The surface of a star…?”

  Her hands folded calmly, Seraphine stood upon the boiling, seething sea of endless light, her gaze lifting to the heavens above.

  With her all-seeing, divine sight, she pierced through layer after layer—thousands, perhaps tens of thousands—of vast, circular mechanical rings that revolved like mountains around the radiant sea of fire. Her gaze did not stop until it reached the starry expanse trillions of miles away.

  There, a familiar blue planet rotated in tranquil silence.

  Seraphine’s eyes trembled. Surprise flickered across her face.

  “This is… an anomalous-spacetime Solar System?!”

  Suddenly—

  “ROAR!!!!!”

  A monstrous bellow thundered from the depths of the blazing ocean, tearing through hundreds of thousands of miles of molten current. The sound shook the heavens themselves.

  Within that roar—carrying the searing fury of tens of millions of degrees Celsius from the Sun’s own surface, echoing across the cosmic void—Seraphine discerned a message steeped in killing intent and abyssal malice:

  “You heavy, cold, dark maggots—you shall be seared by light for all generations, burned to ashes!”

  Then came the tremor.

  At the edge of her vision, a titanic tidal wave of fire—hundreds of miles high—erupted suddenly, devouring arcs of blazing light and torrents of molten plasma. With thunderous force, it spread outward in every direction, engulfing the Sun’s entire surface.

  The violence of the surge tore apart the star’s outer layers, rending them nearly to shreds.

  In an instant, countless sunspots appeared—some spanning thousands of miles, others scarcely larger than a hundred meters—flickering across the tortured surface in rapid succession.

  The magnitude was so great it seemed the whole Sun itself shuddered.

  As though some colossal thing was clawing its way grimly up from the star’s abyssal depths.

  And then—

  At the edge of Seraphine’s sight, a colossal eruption of plasma burst forth, far larger than any solar corona. It boiled out from beneath the Sun’s surface with a deafening rumble.

  Within that searing plasma—millions of degrees hot—a reddish-brown, fleshy tentacle slowly uncoiled. Its diameter exceeded that of Earth itself. Like a mythical serpent that devoured the heavens, it rose from the infinite sea of fire, piercing the blazing sky with an aura of unspeakable grandeur.

  Rumble—rumble—rumble!

  Perhaps because the tentacle was so vast, its mere act of extending sent the Sun’s magnetic field collapsing in destructive waves across a massive region.

  In an instant, trillions of plasma bodies—once tightly bound by the star’s magnetism—were loosed, surging skyward like high-temperature demons freed from a ten-thousand-year seal.

  A new cycle of solar flares began to gestate and erupt in quick succession.

  The tentacle, after stretching tens of thousands of kilometers, finally halted.

  “A Solar Squid… again. Those star-thieves evolved to their very limit.”

  At the sight of that colossal, near-celestial appendage, Seraphine recalled fragments of imagery and text concerning the species.

  Solar Squid—cosmic monsters driven by an insatiable hunger for stellar energy. Within the Milky Way alone, estimates place their numbers in the hundreds to thousands, rivaling the count of the dreaded Milky Way Tyrants.

  Unlike the solitary, low-intelligence Neutron Star Mantis, this high-temperature cephalopod possessed consciousness no less intricate than ordinary intelligent life. And unlike the mantis, it never acted alone.

  They moved in groups, stretching and contracting their bodies by tens of thousands of times, easily compressing themselves to slip through “holes” only a few kilometers wide.

  Like cosmic cockroaches, their presence multiplied quickly. Find one in a sector, and a second—or a third, or more—would inevitably follow.

  Records tell of one unfortunate aquatic interplanetary civilization whose home star system once suffered the simultaneous appearance of ten Solar Squids.

  That grim “Guinness record” of the Milky Way has yet to be broken by any other species or event.

  Though, needless to say, the devastated aquatic civilization that bore the brunt of it would hardly wish to claim such an honor.

  What Seraphine had not expected, however, was that this unfamiliar spacetime contained the same species as Emberlight’s realm.

  “Which means,” she thought, “this spacetime and Emberlight’s spacetime are not as 'distant' as they appear.”

  Standing in the surging, shimmering sea of light, Seraphine clasped her hands and gazed toward the distant colossal tentacle, a pillar rising between heaven and earth.

  High above, tens of thousands of kilometers overhead, layer upon layer of titanic mechanical structures revolved slowly around the Sun. Cutting through them, hundreds of mountain-sized interstellar warships surged forward, converging on that monstrous appendage.

  On the largest of those warships—

  Inside a pristine, brilliantly lit conference chamber, at the head of a long, narrow table, a tall, broad-shouldered, strikingly beautiful woman in magnificent heavy armor was unleashing her fury upon the gathered officers:

  “Is the Wormhole Oversight Division asleep at their posts?! And the Solar System Patrol Fleet—are they blind?! How could such a colossal thing slip into the Sun without raising a single alarm?!”

  “L-Leader…”

  A middle-aged senior officer in a dark-blue shoulder-marked uniform spoke carefully, “This Solar Squid did not come through the Oort Cloud’s Wormhole. According to Helioward surveillance, a Wormhole abruptly manifested in interstellar space just 20 million kilometers from the Sun—ten minutes ago—and then vanished. Intelligence suggests the squid most likely emerged from there.”

  “Enough. After this crisis is over, I will hold every one of you accountable. No one will escape.”

  She turned her glare upon the row of Federal Defense high command in their fitted uniforms and declared, voice cold and absolute:

  “In this battle, you will serve as wings. I will be the spearhead.”

  The officials paled. Fear rippled across the room.

  “Leader, you can’t!”

  “That’s an overlord-class species!”

  “You’re no match for it!”

  “Silence! Not another word!”

  The armored woman’s gesture cut them off. Her tone rang like steel:

  “The devastation this disaster threatens is no less than the Mercury Race invasion that raged for decades.

  And I am the Human Federation’s strongest combatant. If I don’t go—who will?!”

  The room fell into uneasy silence. At last, the gathered officers exchanged reluctant looks and bowed their heads.

  “…Sigh.”

  The woman exhaled heavily, her resolve unshaken.

  “I may not have reached the Overlord tier… but I am a true Transcendent, Stage Ten. Against this octopus, I can still hold the line for a few exchanges.”

  Having said this, she turned her eyes to the rotating projection of the Solar Squid on the conference table, its attributes and combat statistics streaming alongside. Her voice dropped to a murmur:

  “Not even a hundred warships would be enough. A thousand? Ten thousand? Still far too lacking…”

  Rumble… Rumble… Rumble!!

  Far away, millions of kilometers out, a hundred warships unleashed their firepower against the tentacle.

  They were teardrop-shaped vessels—sleek, balanced, exuding both artistry and lethality. Watching them, Seraphine’s eyes narrowed with faint amusement as she speculated:

  “This aesthetic is unmistakable—purely human. Yes… these must be human warships.”

  Her gaze shifted outward, to the colossal ring-shaped megastructures encircling the Sun. A faint smile curved her lips.

  “A Dyson Sphere, classic. But… how did they gather the raw matter to build it?”

  Her eyes, bright with an explorer’s curiosity, swept across the vast heavens beyond the Sun.

  Soon, the emptiness of the Solar System unfolded before her.

  Only Earth remained.

  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn—every other planet had vanished without a trace.

  “Ruthless,” Seraphine remarked with a nod, the smile never leaving her face. “Pulverize every planet worth destroying, and recycle them into a Dyson Sphere. Efficient. Not bad at all.”

  Just then, the colossal tentacle at the far end of the sea of light seemed to sense something. Its aura suddenly flared, vast and violent, as though it meant to smash the cosmos itself, and it hurled straight toward Seraphine.

  “Ho.”

  Seraphine blinked, calm in the blazing tide. “I haven’t even come looking for you, and you deliver yourself to my door…”

  A sudden cry rang out.

  “Stormlord—Thirty-Six Skycleave!!!”

  BOOM!!!

  A blazing torrent erupted—millions of thunderbolts and sword qi braided into a roaring river—slamming hard into the titanic, reddish-brown tentacle.

  Crack!!!

  The impact split the void like a storm of lightning tearing across Earth, like millions of nuclear detonations colliding at once. The strike carried an edge so sharp it could grind continents into dust.

  “The swordplay’s not bad.”

  Seraphine gave a nod, her form flickering, blurring—and in an instant she crossed hundreds of thousands of miles, emerging within the Sun’s searing atmosphere.

  There, a young girl in resplendent heavy armor turned sharply, having felt the disruption ripple through the burning air. Her gaze fell upon Seraphine—and her slender frame shuddered violently.

  Her lips quivered, crimson against the firelight. In disbelief, she whispered:

  “Father…?”