Marie’s small mouth hung slightly open as she stood blankly upon the gentle, mirror-like sea.

  Before her, there was no fierce wind, no crashing waves—only faint ripples, like soft blue silk unfurling beneath her feet.

  The surface spread outward, flowing endlessly.

  Mist blanketed the ocean, vast and boundless, until at last it fused with the heavens.

  Sky and sea, both glimmered in the same transparent blue.

  At the horizon where sea and sky blurred together, clusters of white cloud drifted slowly, like drifting snow. Suspended above, or perhaps rocking below—Marie could not tell.

  Everything was vast, silvery, infinitely distant.

  Then, far away, the outermost cloud began to glow, warming with translucent red.

  The water shifted into fresh green, the heavens into pale blue.

  Light quietly spread, brightening all things.

  Marie suddenly realized:

  The long night had ended—dawn was coming.

  The Sun was about to rise.

  And then—

  A crimson orb emerged slowly beyond the horizon.

  Radiance flared around it, flooding everything in its glow.

  The smooth ocean blazed with gold, shimmering with prismatic light.

  For a moment, she could no longer tell where sea ended and sky began.

  She saw only brilliance—splendid and serene.

  Infinite splendor, infinite peace.

  Everything felt pure, untouched by the mortal world.

  “Oh…”

  Marie covered her mouth, her eyes wide, tears spilling down her cheeks in heavy drops.

  “Gurgle—”

  Just then, a seagull swooped overhead and dropped a clump of dung squarely onto her forehead.

  But Marie didn’t mind at all. Instead, she burst into laughter, wiped it away, and with a casual wave, drew the startled bird into her arms with telekinesis.

  Holding it tightly, eyes closed, lips trembling, lashes fluttering, she whispered:

  “I missed you all so much.”

  She pressed a gentle kiss to the seagull, then let it fly free.

  At once she turned and wrapped Seraphine—who stood quietly nearby—into a sudden embrace.

  “Father! I love you!” she cried.

  Seraphine, caught in the sudden embrace, lost her usual indifference at once.

  “Cough, cough—”

  A little unaccustomed, she tried to gently push the girl away, but Marie clung stubbornly. Seraphine’s lips twitched, forming something that could barely be called a smile.

  After Marie had held her for quite some time, Seraphine finally patted her shoulder and spoke softly:

  “Alright, alright. This new world… consider it my gift to you.”

  The girl instantly looked up, her smile radiant with dimples, and suddenly planted a fierce kiss on her cheek, laughing:

  “Best Father ever!”

  “Er…”

  Seraphine froze for a moment, then sighed helplessly. She reached out and lightly tapped Marie’s forehead with a finger, saying with rare tenderness:

  “You, you.”

  “Hehehe.”

  Marie’s wide eyes blinked, and she gave a sweet, mischievous smile.

  The next day.

  On endless rolling pastures of green, beside a row of pure white houses gleaming with soft light, Seraphine sat cross-legged on a warm carpet. She slowly opened her eyes, turning her gaze toward the attribute panel she had not checked in a long while.

  Since passing through the Wormhole and fighting the Astralglow Tiger, though she had traversed countless layers of space-time, the time she personally experienced was only three days.

  Adding in the day of her arrival in this timeline, when she had first rested—

  That made a total of four days.

  And in those four days, her attributes had doubled four consecutive times.

  Together with her steady comprehension of space-time skills over these days—which had also nudged her cultivation slightly higher—

  Since leaving Earth, Seraphine’s two attributes had already expanded more than sixteenfold.

  【Host: Seraphine】

  【Physical Strength: 6156 Star】

  【Soul: 6156 Star】

  With the power of over six thousand suns, Seraphine felt, at every instant, that all surrounding matter, energy, information—even space-time and dimensional fabrics—were faintly yielding to her will.

  Of course, those “things” had no consciousness.

  It was only a sensation—an awareness that, if she willed it, she could remake, spawn, or obliterate anything at whim.

  But then Seraphine recalled the system’s ruling on 【time】.

  Earlier, the Astralglow Tiger had ‘time-stalled’ her for two months. Though she personally experienced only a blink, the outside world genuinely advanced by two months. Why, then, had the system’s attribute-doubling not triggered?

  She remembered the experiment when she first gained Instant Time Compression—【Self-time expanding fivefold】.

  Suddenly the system’s time judgment hit her as a serious puzzle:

  “My subjective time can change while the external world stays fixed, and the system ignores it. The external flow can change while I’m fixed, and the system still ignores it.”

  She frowned, staring at the crimson sunlight pouring through the broad window, and murmured,

  “What standard does the system use to judge time loss? Do both flows have to be synchronized for it to register?”

  After a long pause she set the problem aside for now, speaking softly to herself: “Until I figure this out, I’ll leave it be.”

  At that moment, Seraphine’s 【Three Realms Domain】 detected a colossal intrusion.

  The Three Realms Domain leverages the Symbolic Domain’s top allowance—100,000× the speed of light—and consists of innumerable communication nodes wired by the 【Point-to-Point Connection — Line-to-Line Interlink】 protocol. It forms a spherical Divine Will monitoring net spanning 30 billion kilometers in actual-universe diameter, projecting across the Sentience Realm’s two tiers and achieving second-level spirituality.

  In plain terms: within one second, Seraphine can perceive every particle of matter, every packet of information, every shift in energy, and even changes in space-time and dimensionality inside a 30-billion-kilometer radius, all via the Three Realms Domain.

  The Domain’s complexity defies simple three-dimensional description—an outcome of Seraphine’s relentless research centered on the 【Light Speed Shackle】.

  “One corpse isn’t enough; they’ll want a few more before they’re satisfied.”

  A few hours later —

  On the grassland, inside one of the pure white buildings.

  In a wide living room.

  “Leader, ten minutes ago the Federation headquarters received a Sentience Realm pod from the monitoring station near the Oort Cloud Wormhole. It used the station’s only pod capable of transmitting at fifty times the speed of light.”

  Marie sat upright at the long, heavy table, fingers interlaced, her gaze fixed on the figure at the opposite end—an old man in a Federation officer’s uniform, his form shimmering as though composed of holographic light.

  Her tone was low and steady:

  “What’s in the pod? Did an outsider breach the Solar System?”

  At this, the holographic old man let out a heavy sigh and nodded.

  “The station’s AI detected an enormous tentacle forcing its way out of the Wormhole. Then the system shut down. The likelihood is extremely high—it’s a juvenile Solar Squid.”

  He paused before continuing, voice weighted:

  “The Wormhole lies seven trillion kilometers from the Sun. Based on that, the Solar Squid should have entered the system thirteen hours ago.”

  “Therefore…” His expression darkened. “Your Excellency Leader, I believe we should begin discussing a battle plan.”

  “Hm… no hurry.”

  Marie brushed her fingers across the reddish-brown bracelet at her wrist. A faint smile tugged at her lips as she lifted her hand slightly.

  “Uncle Liu, take a look at this. Do you know what it is?”

  The old man’s brow furrowed, his voice sharp with displeasure.

  “Leader! That creature—young as it may be—is larger than the moon! It could even be a Milky Way Overlord-class beast! And yet at such a time… you still want me to look at your hand?”

  Suddenly, the old man’s eyes widened, a burst of violet light igniting within them as he unleashed his most renowned ability—【Eye of Extreme Micro-Vision】.

  He fixed his gaze on the reddish-brown, speckled bracelet around Marie’s wrist. Four or five thin black lines split evenly along its ends, the texture eerily organic, as if it were alive.

  To an ordinary observer, it was nothing more than an oddly styled bracelet.

  But through the old man’s magnified sight, the truth was staggering: those black specks were colossal eyes, vast as mountains and lakes. And those faint cracks were not cracks at all—they were enormous tentacles, sprawling like mountain ranges.

  Which meant… the object on the Leader’s wrist was—

  “Solar Squid?!”

  The old man’s voice broke into disbelief, his shock nearly a whisper.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  “How… how could this be possible?!”

  “Heh heh.” Marie smiled lightly. “Father did it.”

  “Father? The Second Generation Leader?!” the old man gasped. “He has such power? This… this is like something out of legend!”

  In the boundless vastness of the universe, Seraphine moved with unshackled ease.

  Each step she took caused the trillion-mile expanse beneath her feet to collapse and contract into near-nothingness, allowing her to stride effortlessly across it.

  And when she passed, the crushed void rebounded in an instant—an endless stretch of space snapping back like a rubber band pulled to a single point, suddenly springing outward to its natural state.

  During this entire “springing” process, the ever-present quantum fluctuations of the vacuum were forcibly pulled by her footsteps toward nearly a single point. There, through countless layers of superposition, quantity transformed into quality, spontaneously oscillating into torrents of intensely high-energy particle streams that erupted in all directions.

  Thus, after some time, from a far enough vantage one would see discontinuous trails of radiant light stretching from within the Solar System toward the distant reaches of space.

  Between each brilliant, star-like flash lay a gulf of a trillion kilometers.

  It was as though some deity had descended into the void, and with every step across the cosmos, was kindling luminous stars into existence along the expanse of space-time.

  This was the phenomenon Seraphine had forged—after enduring thousands of space-time traversals, repeatedly grasping and refining temporal skills, combining them with deep study of the Astralglow Tiger’s enigmatic space-time state, and finally uniting warp technology, zero-point energy extraction, gravitational manipulation, and other profound sciences and abilities—into the superluminal art: One Step Beyond.

  Under the stride of 《One Step Beyond》, a trillion kilometers could be crossed in an instant.

  Beyond leaving only a fleeting, highly radioactive halo of light, the disturbance caused by this ability was far gentler than that of warp—warp which might cut through stars without warning and extinguish entire civilizations.

  Yet in speed, warp still held supremacy. At its peak it could reach 200,000 times the speed of light, far eclipsing One Step Beyond, which achieved only several thousand times light-speed.

  And so Seraphine, strolling leisurely with hands clasped behind her back in the boundless void, gazed into emptiness and sighed:

  “The civilizations of the 《Dragonblood》 universe… to develop and expand, the road they walk is truly arduous.”

  If it is merely a Broken Civilization, though it has lost its potential for growth, it also sidesteps countless dangers.

  For once a fully operational Sentience Realm Hallway manifests within a Civilization Sector, the path to the wider cosmos is technically opened early. Yet as with all things—where there is light, there is shadow. To gain the boon of the Sentience Realm corridor is, inevitably, to suffer its backlash.

  If the civilizations within a Sector can step outward through the corridor into the cosmic expanse, then countless malevolent forces beyond may also intrude through that same passage.

  Space pirates without number. Greedy alien empires. Milky Way Tyrants who annihilate indiscriminately. Sinister and unfathomable Cults of the Evil Eye. Colossal Solar Squids that devour stars and reduce civilizations to dust…

  Even without invoking top-tier scourges like the Solar Squid, its prior evolutionary stage—the Transcendent-class Energy Monster—is already more than enough to wipe out a fledgling interstellar society barely taking its first steps.

  There are also alien races driven by relentless expansion, such as the Mercury Race. In eradicating weaker civilizations, their methods are even more thorough and ruthless than those of Energy Monsters, which only harvest energy and move on.

  Thus it can only be said: to embrace the convenience of the Sentience Realm Hallway is to accept all the crises it might summon.

  Buzz ——

  Not long after, within the vast and lightless depths of the Oort Cloud, a figure blazing with divine radiance surged forth from the void.

  It was Seraphine, who had crossed seven trillion kilometers to reach this point with One Step Beyond.

  Her gaze settled on the Wormhole, tens of thousands of miles ahead, half-shrouded by swarms of shattered meteoroids. She mused quietly:

  “The Solar System’s boundary in this timeline also holds a Wormhole… but its position has shifted. Has what lies within shifted as well?”

  Having spoken, Seraphine took a single step—and in that instant, crossed tens of thousands of miles straight into the very mouth of the Wormhole, where space itself was twisted into extremes.

  Upon entry, just as in the main space-time, she was surrounded by a sea of glimmering stars.

  The passage, too, lacked any sense of up, down, left, or right. There was only forward and backward.

  With each stride she made, the trillions of rays of starlight radiating from her form swirled close around her, spiraling rapidly, as if she herself stood at the heart of an infinitely magnificent and resplendent cosmos.

  Yet after some distance, Seraphine noticed a peculiarity.

  The internal diameter of this Wormhole’s passage… was three kilometers wider than that of the main space-time’s, and its tortuosity was markedly less.

  Moreover, in the main space-time, the Wormhole’s inner wall branched into countless side paths of space-time, while here there were none.

  As expected, the ancient stele of the Cosmic Sower Saknussim, along with the Aurora Clan’s research inscriptions, were absent.

  Likewise, where the main space-time’s Wormhole had contained countless knots of twisted space strung together by its winding channel, here they were nowhere to be found.

  Thus, the dormant Milky Way Tyrant was not present. Nor was the Astralglow Tiger, that phantom beast capable of traversing endless parallel realities.

  “So…”

  Her gaze shifted to the Wormhole’s opening ahead, where torrents of high-energy photon beams surged without cease. Seraphine mused aloud:

  “This Wormhole, though a naturally stable anomaly of immense worth—rarer still even across the Milky Way—is, in the end, only an ordinary Wormhole leading to a single fixed destination. It is not the vast ‘honeycomb’ network of the main space-time that interlinks countless realms.

  By that measure, this place must belong to the third type of space-time.”

  Since beginning her space-time crossings, Seraphine had categorized the realities she’d encountered into six distinct types.

  The first type: The Prime space-time — her original timeline. No further explanation required.

  The second type: Space-times where Monroe Holmes’s consciousness descended through Laocoon’s Eye. These are likely parallel branches that split after Seraphine activated her Infinite Attributes system and made divergent choices. Apart from 【Chaos Calculation】, the versions of “Seraphine” in those branches are extremely similar to her.

  The third type: Realities where Emberlight exists, the Aurora Clan exists, the Mercury Empire exists, the Six Great Scourges of the Milky Way exist—and where “she” exists as well. This is the current space-time; however, the “she” here only possesses the Eye of True Revelation and lacks a system.

  The fourth type: Space-times without Emberlight but with an Earth—yet their histories, species, civilizations, cultures, technological development, and even evolutionary pathways are radically different from the Prime space-time, sometimes wholly transformed. Examples include the first and second space-times Seraphine traversed. This variety was the most frequently encountered on her journey.

  The fifth type: Realities without Emberlight, without Earth, and in some cases without the Milky Way itself. Their physical constants and cosmic rules diverge so far from the Prime that—even if a Milky Way exists there—the competitive dynamics and evolutionary trajectories of civilizations are utterly distinct. The Incantation Wars space-time is one such example. Across all her crossings, she had encountered this type only once.

  The sixth type: A class of space-time Seraphine had never personally traveled to, but had only imagined.

  “Perhaps the ‘Endless Glaciers’ I glimpsed in that super-space vision were merely a tiny cross-section of the true Grand Universe. In space-times that are conceptually more distant, the physical laws and worldscapes may differ so radically from the Prime that I might not even be able to sustain ordinary material existence there.”

  Just as Seraphine was absorbed in her contemplation of the endless Grand Universe, a seething mass of reddish-brown flesh—blazing hot and drenched in lethal radiation—suddenly forced its way in from the Wormhole’s exit ahead.

  The tissue, so compressed that its true form was indiscernible, radiated a tyrannical and brutal aura—an oppressive pressure that could crush stars—as it pushed forward through time itself.

  The moment this energy field appeared, it stirred chaos: clouds of cosmic energy-absorbing bacterial dust swirled violently through the Wormhole passage, while torrents of high-energy particle streams along the inner wall ricocheted back and forth in turbulence.

  “Did I just kick over a squid’s nest?”

  Seraphine instantly recognized the truth. This flesh was no random intrusion—it was a segment of a Solar Squid’s tentacle. Her expression soured, a frown of distaste crossing her face.

  “Really? Isn’t this over already? Two dead aren’t enough, and now another comes?”

  With that, she lifted a single finger.

  Boom!

  The surging mass of flesh froze in an instant—then atomized into nothingness.

  And the rest of the tentacle, still pressing forward, collapsed and disintegrated in a heartbeat.

  The unleashed tide of raw force—woven from concentrated strong nuclear and weak nuclear disintegration—surged like an ocean current. It roared through the passage, annihilating every last trace of reddish-brown flesh before bursting outward through the Wormhole.

  In the same instant, the beam speared clean through the colossal body of a Solar Squid struggling to force itself inside from the alien outer cosmos—piercing it from head to tail.

  Even after felling this stellar leviathan, the power Seraphine had released so casually hardly diminished. It raced on at light-speed, tearing apart several silent comets in succession before vanishing into the boundless cosmic dust.

  Barring unforeseen events, that lance of matter-shattering force would continue hurtling forward forever.

  Only after obliterating countless fragments of matter and erasing thousands upon thousands of planets—burning through every last trace of its energy—would that unleashed force finally perish.

  And in this unfamiliar universe, there stretched a ghostly stream of matter, glowing in shades of blue-violet. It originated from a hazy, infinitely distant point of light on the far left, flowed horizontally past the Wormhole’s mouth just tens of thousands of kilometers away, and extended rightward for an unfathomable number of trillions of kilometers.

  “Proto-Nebula.”

  With a single step, Seraphine emerged from the Wormhole and stood beside that sparse, blue-violet river of matter—its breadth wider than the moon itself.

  She recognized it at once: a charged Nebula cluster, born of the violent interplay between stellar radiation bursts and the surrounding clouds of cosmic dust.

  Driven by the forces coursing through it, the cluster drifted ceaselessly through the void. Within tens of thousands of years, it would wither away into nothing, spent by mass loss and the gradual draining of its electric energy.

  The source of that vast, charged cluster lay in the hazy point of light far in the distance, hundreds of billions of kilometers from where she stood.

  That light was the core of this immense proto-Nebula—its radius stretching across trillions, even tens or hundreds of trillions, of kilometers.

  A primitive star, still in its infancy, condensed from ancient nebular matter and nurtured over uncounted ages.

  And that newborn star—was Seraphine’s target.

  Swoosh ——

  She moved against the flow within the ten-thousand-mile-wide, violet-blue, band-shaped Nebula.

  With One Step Beyond, Seraphine crossed several hundred million kilometers in a single stride.

  As she walked, her thoughts drifted back to Marie’s explanation of the Dyson Sphere.

  “...I witnessed the birth of the Dyson Sphere.”

  “At that time, I was only seven years old.”

  On the green grassland, the girl sat with her knees drawn up, gazing blankly at clouds drifting lazily across the sky.

  “After Earth fell, fewer than six hundred thousand humans remained. For safety, they were scattered across different corners of the Solar System.

  In the decades that followed, Uncle Kael risked his life more than once, sneaking into the Wormhole right under the Mercury Race’s nose—only to gauge their true power and search for any possible weakness.”

  Seraphine, standing quietly not far away, spoke with a detached tone:

  “Did he discover anything?”

  Marie shook her head.

  “Beyond the Wormhole, one had to travel another one hundred forty light-years to reach a Sector with a Sentience Realm Hallway. And only after passing through that corridor could you travel another three hundred light-years to actually set foot in Mercury Empire territory.

  It was far, far too distant. All of this was discovered later. At that time, Uncle Kael emerged from the Wormhole completely blind to where he should go, and could only hastily probe the surrounding cosmos.

  It was during those expeditions that he stumbled upon a dormant colossal machine—the Alefen Colossus—lying at the edge of the violet Earth cloud on the Wormhole’s far side.

  Humanity built its final home upon the foundation of that very machine.”

  Swoosh ——

  Five minutes later, Seraphine finally reached the far end of the long violet-blue Nebula.

  There, over a hundred thousand kilometers away, shone a hazy yet dazzling primordial star.

  At the Nebula’s hazy, indistinct edge, a colossal pitch-black mechanical dragon lay in silence.

  Over 2000 kilometers long and more than 300 kilometers wide, its vast bulk rivaled the Himalayas, waiting wordlessly amid sparse, high-temperature, highly radioactive dust clouds.

  “The Alefen Colossus. One of the six great scourges of the Milky Way.

  Its true numbers remain unknown. Each unit can disassemble and reconfigure itself into a Dyson Sphere capable of entrapping a star. After consuming immense quantities of stellar matter and energy, it can rapidly evolve—and divide into new individuals.”

  Seraphine’s gaze lingered on the lifeless dragon drifting in the distance. Her voice was quiet, almost detached:

  “A purely mechanical collective, crafted by some unknown civilization of unknown origin, persisting for an unknowable span of years. From the moment of its creation, it carried nothing but boundless malice toward every form of life—organic or inorganic—that was not itself.

  Each of these machines radiates what is known as an 【Interference Field】. Within that field, all machinery—no matter how complex or trivial—will eventually transform into killing instruments.

  Even an electric toothbrush becomes a high-voltage, high-frequency executioner’s brush.”

  She slowly raised her palm.

  In that instant, the mechanical dragon—drifting for ages among the colossal, searing dust clouds—suddenly collapsed, its mass compressing down into a string of “exquisite bracelets” barely a dozen miles long. The object shot across hundreds of thousands of kilometers, landing in Seraphine’s open hand.

  By now, Seraphine’s mastery over space and dimension had advanced to the point where she could 'compress' any physical object countless times over.

  Even a planet ten thousand kilometers in diameter—if Seraphine willed it—could be compressed in an instant into a mini-world no larger than a basketball.

  “Clearly, its consciousness must have collapsed to near extinction for some unknown reason.

  Otherwise, how could it have been manipulated so obediently into constructing the Dyson Sphere? That same collapse explains why its interference field has been reduced to such an extreme—almost nonexistent.”

  Lowering her gaze to the “bracelet” resting in her palm, she speculated:

  “And when Kael once attempted every possible method to harness this colossal mechanical lifeform for deconstructing worlds and building the Dyson Sphere, it was precisely because the interference field pervaded every component of its body that, out of caution, it was exiled once more into the depths of this Nebula.”

  Kael’s fears, in that timeline, had been justified.

  For the Alefen Colossus is not merely some powerful AI.

  Strictly speaking, its design is anything but advanced; one might even call it crude—like a patchwork monstrosity, assembled from countless machines of differing origins and crudely spliced together.

  It resembles less a deliberate creation and more a twisted lifeform masquerading in mechanical guise.

  At its core, it is closer to a plague—an infection capable of twisting all machines into savage mechanical demons.

  Thus, even the most formidable starfleets, once encircled by swarms of Alefen Colossi, could find themselves trapped in a nightmare: the harder they fought, the more enemies arose, until at last came tragic annihilation.

  And Seraphine could sense, deep within the husk of this titanic mechanical beast, the faintest flicker of thought—a ruthless, tyrannical spark of consciousness beginning to stir.

  As that wisp of awareness trembled awake, its strange interference force also began to recover, slowly but inexorably.

  Buzz ——

  A Mind Suppression Seal lanced into its core, striking that nascent consciousness with perfect precision.

  Satisfied, Seraphine tossed the “bracelet” into her Dimensional Pocket, then turned and departed.

  Yet as she stepped toward the Wormhole’s entrance, the black-gold feather-shaped divine pattern she had long kept hidden deep within her Dimensional Pocket suddenly began to vibrate violently.