Buzz buzz buzz ——

  Visible ripples of distortion appeared.

  At that instant, centered on Seraphine, the entire elongated, abyssal Wormhole passage seemed to resonate with the violent tremors of the feather-shaped divine pattern, vibrating in sync at blistering frequencies.

  Even the countless brilliant stars scattered across the “inner walls” of the passage—above, below, left, and right—seemed to be provoked, each blazing forth with dazzling light, eerily orbiting around Seraphine as if of their own accord.

  Red giants, neutron stars, main-sequence stars, white dwarfs, colossal nebulae—countless celestial bodies—through some unknowable mechanism, cast endless beams of blue, white, yellow, orange, and red light into the Wormhole passage from light-years away.

  For a fleeting moment, the universe inverted. Stars shifted from their places.

  Seraphine, standing at the very center of this endless “universe,” was framed like a divine being descending into the mortal realm.

  Yet she ignored the magnificent spectacle, so radiant it bordered on light-pollution.

  Instead, she focused her mind, lowered her head, and studied the black-gold divine pattern trembling between her two fingers. Her expression remained solemn as she said coolly:

  “After being tempered with pure willpower for so long, you finally show some reaction.”

  Ever since the Astralglow Tiger had been beaten to death and “burst” forth this mysterious black-gold light pattern, Seraphine had relied on her Eye of True Revelation + Chaos Calculation to devise a method.

  No power, no energy—only the purest, most ethereal willpower. By using it to “temper” the pattern, she sought to extract the latent space-time fundamental force that might be hidden within.

  For in the judgment of Chaos Calculation, this divine pattern leaned toward Spirituality—an existence even more elusive than the soul itself.

  Thus, it could hardly be moved by ordinary matter, energy, or fields of force.

  The pattern behaved more like a vague subconscious, responding only to information steeped in raw emotion, deep concepts, and fervent aspiration.

  And the so-called “tempering with willpower,” in practice, was deceptively simple.

  Seraphine would unleash her domineering will—transcending mortals, bordering on the divine—treating the ephemeral light pattern as though it were a living entity, possessed of thought and consciousness.

  She would first assign it a preset stance and identity, implanting fabricated memories, then place herself firmly in opposition.

  Through propaganda, ridicule, and judgment, she would subject it to tyrannical, cruel, and utterly unrestrained mental torture.

  Under this relentless flood of high-frequency, domineering information, the light pattern’s simulated identity and stance would collapse within seconds, its defenses shattered.

  Then Seraphine would forge for it a new identity, a new stance—only to continue the “torture” anew.

  Within these fabricated identities, the light pattern sometimes took the form of a tyrannical old man who would simply lie down and complain; sometimes a petty, greedy old woman forever looking for advantage; sometimes an arrogant, willful young woman; sometimes even a mischievous child—a grade-schooler, a “p-boy,” a “run-man,” a “kneeling basket-case,” a “show-off,” a “little animal protector,” a “fandom anti,” a dutiful son, a pet, a Post Bar general, one of the seven great original critics, a martial artist, a fanatic, a gambler…

  Each time she imposed a new role, Seraphine would leave a deliberate flaw within its fabricated memories and reasoning, ensuring she could shatter its defenses in one precise strike.

  And yet, strangely, these flaws always felt perfectly consistent with the logic of whatever identity it had been given.

  Thus, after breaking it down thousands—perhaps tens of thousands—of times, the black-gold light pattern was finally tortured into collapse, forced to pour forth an endless surge of space-time energy.

  “Perfect.”

  With that cold self-appraisal, Seraphine immediately began absorbing and analyzing the miraculous energy—an essence capable of easily disrupting the surrounding space-time dimensions.

  Under its nourishment, her arsenal of space-time techniques—Instant Time Compression, Spacetime Waypoint, Astralglow Reversal—rapidly advanced and evolved.

  Before long, the torrent of energy spewing from the feather-shaped black-gold divine pattern began to weaken, becoming intermittent.

  It was clear Seraphine was close to draining it dry.

  But in that moment, the divine pattern—grown faint, almost transparent—suddenly pulsed with a message that struck directly into her mind.

  “Hm?”

  Engrossed in the unfolding evolution of her space-time skills, Seraphine froze. She focused intently, reading the stream of information.

  If rendered into words, it would say:

  【Place this space-time pattern upon the root Spirituality. Allow it to merge and integrate, and you may be reborn as a space-time Familia—become a great executor of time-space authority, or a Rule Enforcer, or a Causality Maintainer, or a Dimension Traverser. Choose for yourself.】

  “Ah, Familia?!”

  Seraphine sneered.

  “Spirituality is the deepest, most vital core of intelligent life. And you dare talk about ‘merging’ with it? If I were foolish enough to set this worthless thing upon my root Spirituality, I’d be replaced within minutes.”

  At this point, her expression turned cold, her voice cutting like ice:

  “As for space-time authority, I will seize it by my own hand. And as for the one hiding behind this divine pattern—hmph, audacious beyond measure.”

  【Is... not...】

  The divine pattern flickered between her fingers, transmitting its protest.

  “Choice?”

  Seraphine smiled faintly. “I don’t care for choices.”

  At once, a boundless eruption of pure willpower burst forth from her body—unyielding, reality-warping, spirit-shattering, yet untouched by any power or energy. In an instant, it crushed the black-gold divine pattern into a minuscule, nearly invisible void point with a sharp crack.

  Immediately, the shattered pattern released another torrent of space-time energy, blazing with a purer, sharper radiance than before. This energy was unmistakably of higher quality—the root of the divine pattern itself had been wounded, forcing it to bleed essence from its very source.

  Divine light flashed across Seraphine’s eyes. Power rippled around her as she devoured the energy without hesitation.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh ——

  The surrounding space-time grew translucent, like an endless ocean, swelling and heaving.

  Buzz ——

  A force took shape within her—a force capable of traversing and roaming across countless parallel realities—sprouting, growing, and coming alive in her body and soul.

  In that moment, she had forged her fourth space-time skill.

  A parallel-universe shuttle ability, akin to that once wielded by the Astralglow Tiger.

  “This sensation…”

  She half-closed her eyes, quietly savoring the streams of time and space, flowing across her skin like clear water.

  Then, abruptly, her eyes snapped open.

  At the same instant, a high-dimensional sensory organ manifested upon her forehead—etched as a glowing light pattern—flaring into sudden activation.

  Whoosh ——

  Layer upon layer—endless, yet each layer vast and boundless—parallel-universe “oceans” unfolded before Seraphine’s “eyes.”

  Her gaze, as if given substance, plunged straight into that infinite lattice of overlapping space-times.

  Dozens of layers. Thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Millions of parallel realities…

  In a single instant, Seraphine’s vision pierced through countless veils, spanning innumerable worlds.

  Until—

  In the immeasurable void of the universe, a colossal blue planet slowly turned.

  “This is…”

  Within the Wormhole passage, Seraphine’s pupils widened.

  “Earth.”

  From an infinite gulf across parallel dimensions, she had used Spacetime Waypoint to lock onto the Prime space-time, glimpsing Earth from afar.

  “I must return. This is not, and never was, my true homeland.”

  She exhaled softly, and a spatial vortex bloomed around her.

  At the same instant she beheld the Prime Earth, she had seized its space-time coordinates.

  With but a thought, she could leap across the endless strata of parallel realities, returning through a Real Number Channel.

  There was no need to crawl layer by layer like the Astralglow Tiger, nor to gamble on random teleportation by chance.

  And yet—just before departing—Seraphine turned her head toward the opposite end of the Wormhole.

  “Perhaps… I should leave something behind for Marie.”

  As the thought surfaced, energy welled forth. In an instant, matter and energy converted, coalescing into a massive Sentience Realm information pod before her.

  Into it, Seraphine inscribed 《Archetype Ascension》—a peerless cultivation method that pointed straight to the primal great path of the electromagnetic force.

  Swoosh ——

  The Sentience Realm information pod shot toward the far end of the Wormhole passage, bursting out of the entrance in a streak of light.

  Seraphine allowed herself a faint smile—then vanished into the spatial vortex.

  Buzz ——

  In an instant, Seraphine emerged from the void into a vast domain seething with ultra-high temperatures, searing radiation, and ferocious magnetic fields.

  “Hm…”

  She felt the environment press against her, harsh enough to bake Earth’s crust into glassy crystal. Her gaze lifted toward the colossal Wormhole entrance, suspended more than 10,000 kilometers away.

  And there, anchored at the threshold, a neutron star no more than ten kilometers across blazed furiously—its dazzling blue body spinning at over a thousand rotations per second.

  Because its magnetic axis and rotational axis were misaligned, beams of radio waves lanced from its magnetic poles, sweeping space with clockwork precision like the turning of a cosmic Beaconreach.

  With every spin, it scattered staggering torrents of heat into the void.

  Seraphine’s pupils narrowed, taking in the sight with detached amusement. She let out a soft chuckle:

  “So that’s it. The so-called Milky Way Tyrant was struck by the Astralglow Tiger, half its body blasted apart. It must have lost the strength to stabilize its form and surrendered to gravity—collapsing at last into a neutron star. However…”

  Her eyes roved over the warped, desolate region of twisted space-time surrounding her.

  “I had intended to teleport straight to Earth. So why… did I arrive here instead?”

  It must be understood that the Spacetime Waypoint ability is rooted in the law of causality. Thus, when Seraphine awakened this ability in that alternate space-time, she inevitably forged a profound, anchored bond with Earth—the place most deeply entangled with her fate—through principles she could not yet parse, transcending countless parallel realities.

  By all logic, when she activated Spacetime Waypoint, the Real Number Channel should have conveyed her directly to Earth, not into the interior of this honeycomb-shaped Wormhole.

  But such a question could hardly trouble Seraphine, whose wisdom soared to the heavens.

  The boundless Ocean of Knowledge within her mind stirred for but an instant—and the answer surfaced.

  Quite simply, she had opened a Real Number Channel, a passage with similar space-time properties, from within an already-transiting Wormhole.

  Interference was inevitable.

  A deviation of seven trillion kilometers was trivial; she might just as easily have been flung into some uncharted parallel universe.

  So why this particular twisted region?

  “It must be your doing.”

  Her finger lifted, poised toward a faint, almost imperceptible haze of light between them. Her eyes sharpened.

  “Behind you… what exactly hides there?”

  At once, the ethereal mote shuddered violently.

  Buzz buzz buzz ——

  Her gaze sharpened. The void point—condensed from the black-gold divine pattern and pinched lightly between her two fingers—suddenly grew impossibly faint, as though it might dissolve into nothingness at any moment.

  In the very next instant, Seraphine sensed an immense surge of power: the River of Time itself rising from nowhere to engulf the space around her.

  “This aura… the River of Time?! Is it truly about to traverse time?”

  Buzz ——

  Almost instinctively, she invoked Instant Time Compression, shifting her perception to the perspective of pure time in order to trace the precise trajectory of this so-called space-time pattern.

  Stopping it was never her intention—or perhaps, before such an ethereal, almost illusory existence that barely even qualified as information, even she had no viable method of halting it.

  Swoosh! Crackle!

  The faint point of light dissolved in an instant.

  Splash, splash ——

  At the very same moment, a chorus of crisp splashing sounds echoed in her ears.

  Seraphine, having fully activated Instant Time Compression and now existing as a shadow of time itself, drifted above the boundless River of Time.

  “Where did it go?”

  Her gaze swept toward the ‘left’ and ‘right’ banks of the river—the countless parallel universes existing in this present moment.

  She turned toward the ‘downstream’ flow—those universes ceaselessly surging into the future.

  It was in neither.

  At last, she turned upstream.

  And there it was.

  “So… it intends to flee into the past, does it?”

  She saw the divine pattern, which had already reverted into the form of a feather—no, a black-gold feather. As it streaked through the void, its body was clad in countless thorn-like luminous plumes, endlessly expanding and contracting.

  As the divine feather shot forward, vivid three-dimensional images unfurled in the river it carved through.

  Each image marked a fragment of its history:

  There was the moment it had first returned to the twisted domain within the Wormhole.

  There was the scene of it being mercilessly crushed by Seraphine, wracked with agony as torrents of space-time energy spewed from its body.

  There was the vision of it being pitilessly “tortured,” thousands upon thousands of times, beneath the sheer weight of Seraphine’s willpower.

  There was the sight of the Astralglow Tiger, savagely tormented to death, and of the feather being wrenched from deep within its very soul.

  Then came the tragic succession of battles—Seraphine, the central figure, locked in relentless struggle with the Astralglow Tiger, clashing across countless space-times, and that cataclysmic duel that raged beyond the bounds of time and space itself.

  These images did not simply flicker and fade. Instead, like a row of dominoes, they stood aligned in perfect order behind the retreating black-gold feather.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  It was as though an invisible line bound them together, preventing them from collapsing, scattering, or breaking apart.

  Gazing upon this tableau of neatly ordered memories, Seraphine—standing in the future, looking back upon the past—could not help but whisper:

  “This invisible line… is causality.”

  Swoosh——

  The divine feather’s rapid flight pressed onward.

  The gaps between images grew vanishingly small—at times nonexistent—detailing even the most infinitesimal instants.

  It resembled a complete, three-dimensional epic film, its frame rate so impossibly dense that, to someone with Seraphine’s temporal mobility sense, it was an overwhelming, ultimate visual experience.

  Yet this film, spanning both past and future, was playing in reverse.

  “Now, it has returned to the moment before I entered the Wormhole.”

  Seraphine stood at the river’s future bend, watching this backward-running chronicle with calm intensity, curiosity stirring fiercely within her heart—the mystery of the Astralglow Tiger’s birth.

  All things possess both beginning and end.

  Even if the Astralglow Tiger had likely been born of the black-gold divine feather, how had the process truly begun?

  It was a priceless question, one that could unravel countless secrets of time itself.

  As she pondered, the black-gold feather slipped past that tragic era and entered another—when the Astralglow Tiger roamed carefree across endless parallel universes, mischief in its wake, savoring years of unrestrained joy.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh——

  Sheets of glittering foam rose and fell in unseen waves.

  The feather’s path remained straight, but from the upstream of parallel universes—both near and distant—images erupted like birds or bolts of lightning, snared by invisible threads of causality trailing behind it, then aligned neatly one by one.

  Within them, Seraphine witnessed a kaleidoscope of the Astralglow Tiger’s encounters:

  —A gargantuan blood-red celestial organism, tens of thousands of kilometers long, its face marred by a gaping concave wound and a crimson tongue lashing endlessly. It drifted sluggishly in the dark, until the Astralglow Tiger froze it in a time-stall, then plunged straight into the wound to unleash havoc.

  —Thousands upon thousands of colossal, decaying, cuboid war-machines cloaked the Earth, unleashing a barrage to reduce the planet to ashes—only for more than half to be obliterated in an instant by a brilliant blue light pillar roared forth by the suddenly appearing Astralglow Tiger.

  —Two legions of half-mechanical, dinosaur-like warriors clashed in Beaconreach XX City, their Lasguns blazing, when the Astralglow Tiger plummeted from the sky. It crushed them outright beneath its weight, collapsing the entire city into the ground.

  —Red, white, and blue mechs dueled ferociously with plasma swords in the vast void, until the Astralglow Tiger burst onto the scene. With a single savage kick, it hurled both mechs into a distant roller-shaped space station, shattering its hull and inflicting devastating damage.

  This dead Tiger—its countless scenes of havoc across myriad space-times—converged into endless whirling currents. These torrents surged from every direction of the River of Time’s sky, collapsing toward the streaking divine feather. In an instant, they aligned in perfect order, compressing into a vast, unbroken dragon of ‘images’ that stretched endlessly, coiling down to Seraphine’s feet in the future, tens of thousands of years ahead.

  She gazed upon the Astralglow Tiger’s inverted life, her smile soft, her tone faintly amused:

  “Though unrooted, it was quite a flavorful life for a Tiger.”

  The divine feather tore onward, time unraveling in reverse.

  It slipped past tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands… two hundred seventy thousand years…

  From a distant canvas of the past:

  A striking youth with long hair sat in meditation, eyes closed, deep within a pool. Suddenly, he erupted with a roar and struck with his fist. The waterfall towering above him instantly reversed its flow, surging upward.

  Exulting in triumph, he had no time to savor it—before a colossal laser, kilometers wide, speared down from orbit and vaporized him on the spot.

  The blast was so devastating that both waterfall and pool were obliterated in an instant.

  But the world itself convulsed violently. From the planet’s surface, more than a dozen towering men clad in resplendent golden armor rose into the sky. Their very aura could have torn a star asunder. With thunderous roars, they unleashed their supreme techniques, battering the Astralglow Tiger—the very beast that had fired the malicious orbital strike—nearly to death in the boundless cosmos.

  Mangled, with only half its body intact, the Tiger staggered away, fleeing madly from that parallel space-time, clinging desperately to its last scraps of life.

  Before it departed, on the surface of that planet—which bore a faint resemblance to Earth—a few godlike beings, their aura far surpassing that of the golden-armored men, observed the struggling Astralglow Tiger from a distance with chilling indifference. The mere sight of them drove the Tiger to accelerate its escape to impossible speeds.

  That grievous wound forced the Astralglow Tiger into a period of rest equivalent to five thousand years of human civilization before it finally returned to peak form.

  It was that encounter which instilled a lasting fear into this now-dead Tiger, shaping its behavior for tens of thousands of years.

  From then on, it only dared to frolic within this twisted region, occasionally tossing hapless starships that wandered into the Wormhole—among them… a quadrilateral spaceship that appeared to be made entirely of crystal.

  After repeatedly hurling that craft around, the bored Tiger finally flung it casually with a single claw, ejecting it from the Wormhole.

  That moment occurred roughly three hundred and thirty thousand years ago.

  “Oh?! That Pyramid spaceship? It was the Astralglow Tiger that threw it out of the Wormhole!”

  Seraphine narrowed her eyes, pondering.

  “In the King of Aurora’s memory, that Pyramid fell 150,000 years ago, was later discovered by a prehistoric optical civilization, and sparked the genesis of its first scientific system. That civilization was eventually annihilated by the Aurora clan, and the Pyramid ultimately ended up in their hands.

  If I calculate correctly… hmm, this Pyramid spaceship drifted powerless through space for a staggering 180,000 years—traversing the Oort Cloud, Kuiper Belt, the outer and inner Solar System, and the asteroid belt—before finally reaching Earth. And then, after another 150,000 years, it fell into my possession. Truly, it was no simple journey.”

  As she pondered, the black-gold divine feather continued its reverse flight, accelerating faster and faster.

  Three hundred fifty thousand years… four hundred fifty thousand… five hundred fifty thousand…

  At last, nine hundred fifty thousand years in the past, the feather’s self-propelled speed finally slackened. It began to contort violently, folding into a tight sphere, as if preparing to transform into a completely different entity.

  From her vantage in the distant future—950,000 years removed—Seraphine beheld the original form of the ‘mischievous’ Astralglow Tiger.

  Still within the twisted Wormhole region, an egg dozens of kilometers wide cracked with a spiderweb-like luminescence. From within, a colossal claw, radiating intense heat and radiation, suddenly shot outward.

  Yet this image was not the terminus of the time-reversal journey.

  In Seraphine’s vision, the object that had emerged from the divine feather unfolded like a cascade of reverse-flowing images, tracing the Tiger’s earliest history.

  The egg nurturing the Astralglow Tiger gradually shrank.

  Meanwhile, the object condensed from the divine feather expanded, rounding and swelling until, in its rapid flight, it became a colossal egg—the very egg from which the Astralglow Tiger would emerge.

  This titanic egg came to rest at last.

  The final three-dimensional image slowly ascended from the River of Time.

  Seraphine, observing from the future, fixed her gaze intently on the scene—a million years ago.

  The twisted Wormhole region was dark and desolate.

  No Milky Way Tyrant loomed, no shattered starships littered the void.

  Within the entire narrow 20,000-kilometer expanse, there was… nothing.

  Except, gliding smoothly from the Wormhole, came a familiar shape—a Pyramid spaceship.

  “Another Pyramid…”

  Seraphine’s pupils contracted slightly, her gaze slicing through a million years of time, reaching into the far, distant past.

  Her perspective compressed, entering the Pyramid.

  Inside, a half-human-height figure in white robes—a cat—gently tapped a black, spherical crystal, no larger than a quail’s egg, floating atop a pointed platform before it, claws poised with precision.

  This entirely white alien cat, staring intently at the black star stone, murmured in a tone brimming with greed.

  After a long moment, as if having made a decision, it snatched the black star stone from its platform. Its form flickered vaguely, passing through the heavy glass partition walls, and its body shifted into the vacuum beyond.

  Once outside, the white cat crushed the star stone with a claw, extracting a corporeal black-gold feather from within.

  The moment the feather appeared in the external void, it began to vibrate violently.

  The cat’s body froze. Its eyes widened, revealing a mixture of intense excitement, suspicion, and caution.

  Seraphine peered into the past and whispered softly, “Did it face a choice as well?”

  In the image, the white cat deliberated for a long time. At last, its gaze swept upward. It shouted something to the black-gold feather floating before it—words Seraphine could not comprehend.

  At that instant, the Black Feather’s vibration ceased. Solid form dissolved into ethereal essence, plunging directly into the alien cat’s forehead.

  The cat’s expression froze in shock. The spiritual light of wisdom in its eyes dimmed instantly, and it slowly closed its eyes.

  The cat’s entire body slowly curled into a ball, rapidly enveloped by streams of pure energy emerging from the void, forming an egg-shaped sphere of light.

  Seeing this, Seraphine finally understood the Astralglow Tiger’s birth story.

  Like solving a grand case, she chuckled softly, satisfied:

  “So, the Astralglow Tiger, before its reincarnation, was the owner of the Pyramid.”

  At the same time, the object that had transformed from the divine feather above the River of Time condensed into a plump, dazzling white giant egg.

  In the next instant, fissures appeared across its surface, drawing Seraphine’s attention. She immediately shifted her gaze back to the past.

  A million years ago, in the sky above the river, the giant egg cracked with countless variegated fractures, vibrating with a deep, resonant hum.

  From within the vibration, a colossal Phoenix, black as the universe and adorned with intricate golden patterns, burst forth from its shell.

  The sounds of water splashing continuously echoed.

  The mighty River of Time flowed like liquid silk.

  Seraphine, standing calmly at the river’s future bend a million years later, gazed upstream at the colossal Phoenix emanating an overwhelming aura of time and space, and sighed:

  “So the Astralglow Tiger’s birth came from merely a single phoenix feather.

  Judging by this, that Phoenix itself must be only a fraction of its true power.”

  As her words faded, the deep, enigmatic Phoenix—like the universe incarnate—slowly opened its long, narrow eyes, glittering with ancient, profoundly weathered light. It calmly surveyed the four directions and the eight wastes, observing past, present, and future with detached poise.

  Finally, its indifferent gaze even fell upon Seraphine.

  Seraphine did not flinch. She smiled gently.

  “What’s wrong? Feeling annoyed?”

  The colossal Phoenix across the River of Time gave no reply. It merely lifted its head slightly—and suddenly unleashed a clear, piercing cry into the heavens.

  Bang!!!!!

  Following that melodious, resonant, yet immeasurably vast and chaotic cry—sharp and crisp—everything shifted.

  In an instant, above the vast expanse of the River of Time, the entire segment composed of countless three-dimensional images—an endlessly long dragon of pure temporal essence, depicting the Astralglow Tiger’s entire past and present across a million years—

  Shattered.

  Bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang bang!!!!

  As if countless stars across the universe had erupted and collapsed simultaneously.

  In a flash, streams of brilliant, illusory light radiated from the infinite explosions, cascading in every direction, from the ancient past to the present.

  The sound was immense. Even Seraphine, standing in the distant future, felt it echoing in her ears as layers upon layers of shattering reverberations—cool and crisp like cracking glass, yet muffled and ultimate, like a detonation inside solid rock.

  Amid this incomprehensible explosion, the sky-spanning Black Phoenix, stationed in the distant upstream of the River of Time, suddenly unfurled its colossal wings, as if attempting to cover the entire sky.

  In the next instant—

  Boom!!!

  A monstrous wave surged beneath the Black Phoenix.

  Once formed, the great wave thundered with universe-overturning force, sweeping down the vast River of Time from the distant past and surging into the endless future, its descent rumbling and unstoppable.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh——

  Endless great waves enveloped everything; countless droplets splashed violently in all directions.

  Every timeline, every parallel space-time, after being engulfed by this titanic, world-shattering tide, silently transformed.

  Hundreds… thousands… tens of thousands…

  Millions… tens of millions… billions…

  Countless parallel realities that the Astralglow Tiger had traversed, each having formed causal links, creating karmic events and situations through its very existence—all were altered, reshaped, and transformed by this surge of countless strands of pure, intense light.

  In other words, from the moment the Phoenix took its place a million years ago, it became the origin point of all that followed.

  Thousands of years… tens of thousands… hundreds of thousands.

  Everything connected to the Astralglow Tiger…

  No!

  It was everything that, because of that phoenix feather, had triggered countless events and situations across innumerable space-times.

  All the myriad good and bad 【Outcomes】 born from those causal links—and even the original one-million-year span in which the phoenix feather had endured within the surging River of Time—were instantly cleansed by the overwhelming sweep of this titanic tide.

  It was as if, through these transformations of space-time, the Astralglow Tiger had never existed.

  The planets it had destroyed, the lives it had extinguished, the civilizations it had annihilated… all reappeared, restored in the re-flowing, reshaped stream of time.

  “What a grand gesture! What formidable majesty!”

  Standing at the very downstream of the River of Time, Seraphine gazed at the colossal wave roaring from upstream, enveloping everything, her eyes alight with infinite yearning, and laughed with abandon:

  “Merely a small phoenix feather, manifesting as a phantom body, wielded the magnificent power to shatter and reshape a million years of time across countless space-times.

  Even if the shattered and altered portions represent only the tiniest corners of events wherever the Astralglow Tiger roamed, it is still overwhelmingly terrifying—and it makes one’s heart ache in awe!”

  Indeed, even confronting such a world-shaking, incomprehensible force, far beyond her own scope, no trace of panic touched her heart.

  Not because of some ultimate reliance, but because she possessed a tyrannical will, power beyond human comprehension.

  A true overlord is never satisfied with the status quo, never fears gain or loss.

  Step by step, having reached this point, Seraphine’s mind and will had become terrifying in their own right—akin to that of a deity.

  Even if a being far more powerful than herself—beyond imagination—suddenly appeared before her, she would feel not an ounce of fear or hesitation.

  Instead, a boundless, surging yearning ignited in her heart.

  A yearning for power, a yearning for transcendence, a yearning to reach the summit!

  Two beams of seemingly corporeal light shot from her eyes, piercing through the ever-approaching great tide, transcending a million years of time, and striking directly into the cold, solitary golden-red eyes of the black-gold Phoenix stationed upstream in the River of Time.

  Seraphine, her gaze boiling with even greater madness, grinned and shouted:

  “Come on, unknown giant! Come and engulf me!

  I will continue to grow more powerful—powerful enough to treat all calamities, all confinements, all impermanence, as mere topics of conversation and scenery beneath my feet!

  Of course… that includes you!!”

  Perhaps having comprehended these arrogant words, the pair of indifferent phoenix eyes from a million years ago suddenly narrowed, glinting with cold, dangerous light.

  In a sense, the Primordial Demon’s assessment of Seraphine was accurate.

  She was indeed a madwoman.

  She was a… peerless lunatic.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh whoosh!!!!

  The great tide surged ever closer.

  Finally, it was within arm’s reach.

  And then…

  Suddenly!

  Buzz buzz buzz——

  The boundless great tide that had been rumbling forth froze abruptly.

  It had transformed into an infinitely vast ice sculpture, its left and right ends stretching beyond sight, its forward crest jagged with varying heights.

  No, it was not just the great tide.

  The entire boundless River of Time had suddenly stalled, crystallizing into an infinite sphere of ice—boundless to left and right, with no upstream or downstream.

  The black-and-gold Phoenix, journeying through the flow of time, suddenly sensed an anomaly. Its phoenix eyes widened abruptly, scanning the surroundings, filled with sheer confusion.

  Clearly, this was no ordinary event—so far beyond its comprehension that it completely shattered its understanding.

  Then.

  Just as both the human and the phoenix were trapped in bewilderment…

  Buzz ——

  Suddenly!

  A colossal, radiant hand appeared from the infinitely distant downstream of the River of Time, reaching out with astonishing speed. Sweeping past Seraphine, who was equally startled and glancing around, the hand surged directly toward the black-and-gold Phoenix upstream in the river of space-time.

  As the blazing hand streaked forward, it skimmed the river’s surface; everything that had been ‘frozen’ within the great tide instantly collapsed into nothingness.

  Bang!!!

  And just as the Phoenix let out a sharp, terrified shriek, the hand had traversed a million years of time. In that moment, its thumb and middle finger curled, and when it reached the Phoenix’s face, it flicked with effortless precision, striking it squarely.

  Boom!!!!!

  In an instant, the upstream segment of the River of Time convulsed violently, sending waves of turbulent space-time chaos rippling outward.

  The turbulence was so intense that even Seraphine, far downstream, could feel the river churning around her.

  She could even vaguely perceive that many of the river’s normally steady currents had fractured, some even flowing in reversed arcs under the chaos.

  As the storm subsided slightly, Seraphine’s divine gaze swept across the scene again. The black-and-gold Phoenix had long since shrieked in agony, flung far away by that titanic hand, hurtling toward an even older, more distant stretch of the river upstream.

  Clang clang clang clang bang!!!!!

  Its agonized wails echoed endlessly.

  As it scraped against the river’s surface, streaking frantically away, the colossal body of the Phoenix disintegrated, dissolving into boundless specks of radiant light, vanishing into nothingness. Only a faint, ethereal black-and-gold spark remained, shot passively at impossible speed upstream along the River of Time.

  In a flash, the speck traversed countless years, vanishing completely from Seraphine’s sight, disappearing into the infinitely distant and unknowable past.

  “This… great hand…”

  Gazing at the slowly dissipating hand far upstream, Seraphine frowned. Her voice was calm, deliberate:

  “It came from the future. But who… could wield it?”

  Buzz buzz buzz ——

  At that instant, the River of Time beneath her feet shimmered, becoming ethereal, indistinct.

  A subtle, almost imperceptible aura of repulsion pulsed around her.

  “Is it… time to return?”

  Seraphine lifted her eyes toward the infinitely high, boundless chaos of the sky.

  Countless illusory lights and luminous currents churned and boiled above, surging in chaotic torrents.

  Within the collisions of light and energy, waves of cold, piercing force radiated outward. Streams of energy twisted, condensed suddenly into dense, murky masses.

  From the mingling of clear and turbid flows, endless chaotic air currents were born.

  And at the center of the colossal vortex formed by those turbulent winds, a gigantic, fractured bronze arrow—half the sky in scale—hung silently, incomplete and scarred.

  “Bronze Arrow…”

  Seraphine gazed up at the boundless sky and spoke softly:

  “This universe holds far too many secrets.”

  Deep within the Oort Cloud, amid dense cosmic dust and countless silent, drifting comets, a godlike figure materialized.

  It was Seraphine’s true form.

  “Here…”

  She observed the slowly drifting shards of shattered asteroids and clusters of turbid dust, her mind clouded with doubt.

  “Where did the Wormhole go?”

  Instantly, Seraphine activated her Three Realms Domain, scanning every particle within a 30-billion-kilometer radius in a single second.

  Nothing. Nowhere.

  The massive, honeycomb-shaped Wormhole had simply vanished—as if it had never existed.

  In a heartbeat, Seraphine formulated a possibility:

  “Could it… have been caused by the space-time turbulence unleashed by that colossal hand from the future, when it flicked the Phoenix?”

  No one answered; it was merely a conjecture.

  Yet another thought gnawed at her mind. Regarding the identity of that hand…

  “Could it… be my own future self?!”

  The more she pondered, the more plausible it seemed.

  Yet still, no definitive answer surfaced.

  “Forget it—overthinking changes nothing. Let’s return to Earth and take a closer look.”

  With that resolve, Seraphine instantly enveloped herself in a warp bubble, invoking the negative energy capable of annihilating all things. She chose a random trajectory and ‘burned’ forward through space-time.

  As she advanced, her eyes half-closed, she silently examined her own body and soul.

  This journey through space-time was circuitous, yet it offered opportunities to evolve several of her space-time skills.

  Spacetime Waypoint required no further explanation.

  Instant Time Compression, her earliest acquisition, had evolved dramatically.

  Originally able to halt time for five seconds, it now extended to three hundred seconds—a full five minutes.

  Beyond mere duration, its operational mechanism had also transformed.

  Previously, activating the skill forced Seraphine into a phantom-light form, drawn above the River of Time. Once the simulated temporal domain was created, she was involuntarily pulled into it.

  Now, however, the evolved Instant Time Compression allowed her full control. She could choose whether to enter the simulated time domain. Even if she declined, she would not be forcibly ejected; she could linger above the River of Time for the full five minutes at will.

  Her previous ability to remain detached from physical reality for extended periods relied precisely on this repeatedly evolved skill.

  Then there was Astralglow Reversal.

  Through multiple evolutions, its range had expanded from 10,000 kilometers to 100,000 kilometers. Its temporal reversal span had grown from ten seconds to a full three hours.

  Theoretically, when Seraphine activated Astralglow Reversal, all objects, energy, and information within a 100,000-kilometer radius could, under her will, revert to any chosen moment in the past three hours.

  Though she couldn’t fully annihilate that wisp of Phoenix divine feather, Seraphine extracted an incredibly vast reserve of space-time energy from it.

  Finally, there was the most crucial skill: space-time traversal.

  Unlike her previous abilities, this skill was fundamentally different. Despite painstakingly evolving it, she discovered she could not wield it arbitrarily.

  “Could it… be tied to that so-called space-time 'authority' ?”

  Seraphine stood quietly within the warp bubble, hands clasped, and pondered aloud:

  “The Phoenix feather once offered three paths of reincarnation: Rule Enforcer, Causality Maintainer, and Dimension Traverser.

  A million years ago, the predecessor of that Astralglow Tiger clearly chose the path of a Dimension Traverser.

  Could it be… that the ability to freely traverse space-time carries some form of authority?

  Could such a restriction—a kind of cosmic law—be linked to that Phoenix?

  Or is there a key, some catalyst, capable of bypassing this limitation?”

  As she contemplated, her Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation operated autonomously.

  Compared to before, Seraphine now possessed far more detailed knowledge of space-time mechanics.

  Almost immediately, an answer crystallized in her mind:

  【Using crystallized space-time energy as fuel, space-time traversal can be initiated and maintained.】

  “Space-time crystal…”

  At that moment, a black rune diamond, hidden in a secluded corner of the Ocean of Knowledge within her brain—the Witch King Mycenae memory packet—vibrated violently, shattering and spilling fragments of broken information.

  A wisp of it was quickly captured by Seraphine.

  【…Witch Continent…space-time treasure…ethereal starstone…primary ingredient for Regret Potion…auxiliary ingredients…】

  “Ah! So that’s it.”

  Seraphine halted the warp bubble, drew a small vial from her Dimensional Pocket, gently twisted off its cap, and extracted a Regret Potion, a crystalline diamond-like elixir.

  Immediately, a familiar space-time energy fluctuation radiated slowly from within.

  Her space-time traversal ability seemed to resonate, rapidly entering a semi-activated state.

  She only needed to absorb the energy contained in the potion to proceed with full space-time traversal.

  “One potion is enough for a single traversal; two potions would cover a round trip.

  Hmm… there’s still a long road ahead if I’m to freely traverse infinite parallel realities.”

  Rubbing the Regret Potion between her fingers, she mused:

  “As for this so-called Witch Continent, it must be Mycenae’s homeland. But where exactly is it?

  Is it a civilization within the Milky Way? Tsk… their power system is clearly nothing like the civilizations here. Could it be another galaxy? Or even a parallel universe?”

  Her Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation reactivated instantly.

  They calculated and deduced for a long while… but found nothing.

  The so-called Witch Continent seemed to exist neither as a planet, nor within the Milky Way, nor in any parallel dimension…

  Buzz ——

  Chaos Calculation suddenly produced a faint hint:

  【Not in this universe, nor in any parallel universe.】

  “Never mind.”

  Seraphine shook her head slightly, opened a new warp bubble, and streaked toward the distant Earth.

  Moments later, 100,000 kilometers above the slowly rotating blue planet, she materialized.

  After a quick glance toward the Emberlight direction, Seraphine activated One Step Beyond, appearing instantly deep within Ashara’s Imperial Palace.