Although Seraphine kept a tight rein on the intensity of her strike—having no present intention of erasing the entire world—the shockwaves that erupted after she utterly annihilated the Eliondra continent still raced around Earth without end, circling it countless times.

  The impact left senior dignitaries and magnates across the globe reeling—dizzy, breathless, and utterly terrified.

  Some even feared that Earth itself had become like a cracked eggshell, on the verge of collapsing into pieces.

  Of course, such extreme thoughts, born of panic and overexcitement, were soon dismissed by geologists.

  “Earth is nowhere near that fragile,” they explained. “Yes, this catastrophe was immense, but it is far from enough to destroy the world outright. However...”

  Their tone darkened.

  “We cannot be sure that individual was using her full strength. If she had, it’s entirely possible Earth would be exactly as you imagined—reduced to rubble.”

  Faced with such grave warnings, high-ranking officials from every major power immediately convened a flurry of secret meetings, urgently discussing countermeasures.

  At their core, the agendas were strikingly similar:

  How should they respond to such a terrifying being—Seraphine—who could obliterate an entire nation single-handedly?

  Could they respond?

  If not... where could they possibly run?

  In one meeting, a delegate tentatively suggested: “What if we just kept hammering her with high-yield nuclear strikes? Would that work?”

  A counterpart shot to his feet, face flushed with fury: “Are you serious? That seismic wave is still circling the planet—and its peak hasn’t even diminished yet! How could something like that be harmed by your so-called nuclear bombs? This isn’t a joke worth telling.”

  Another voice asked bitterly: “Then what? Do we just... surrender?”

  In nearly every meeting, someone would voice this same bleak sentiment.

  And in nearly every meeting, no one objected.

  Heads bowed. Silence reigned.

  In that suffocating air of despair, the once-weak faction of peace advocates among the world’s ruling elite began to swell rapidly. In short order, they eclipsed the hot-blooded war hawks who clamored for a fight, seizing control of each nation’s major military and political levers.

  And truly, no one who had climbed to the apex of power in their country could afford to be a fool. Even if fools existed among them, the others—thinking of their own safety and interests—would never allow reckless hands to act in such a life-and-death crisis.

  Thus, every plan, whether fantastical or cautious, painstakingly drafted by Earth’s clandestine agencies to target Seraphine, was scrapped outright after these meetings ended.

  Every file, every backup—physically destroyed, erased without a trace, lest even a fragment plant the seed of future disaster.

  As for Seraphine’s homeland—the Emberlight Empire—it was perhaps the most bewildered of all.

  They had always known their heir was strong.

  They had never imagined she was this strong.

  Outrageously strong.

  The kind of strength that could wipe a continent clean from the map. How many tons of TNT was that worth? A billion? A trillion? Or... even more?

  It was terrifying to contemplate.

  Enough power to erase any nation on Earth with ease.

  Meaning the fate of every nation now balanced on Seraphine’s whim.

  An utterly irresistible force.

  Realizing this, they descended into panic.

  They had thought to carry on as before. But in the present climate, such a move would be suicidal. Those newly promoted young officials—who had risen suddenly after the Ether tide wiped out much of the old guard—would gladly “sell” them out to the new Empress, hoping to earn favor and secure their own positions as her loyal subjects.

  Sigh~

  And that was that.

  All the old plans, all the grand strategies—discarded without ceremony.

  As for the previous disputes and political tangle, they would treat them as if they’d never happened.

  From this moment on, Seraphine alone would be their supreme commander.

  The Divine Continent began to change—rapidly.

  Meanwhile, across the rest of the globe, panic simmered.

  The sudden disappearance and catastrophic collapse of the Eliondra continent sent ocean currents and atmospheric patterns spiraling into chaos. Even the planet’s crust shifted, triggering constant earthquakes.

  Massive tidal waves, tornadoes, sandstorms, blizzards, and other extreme phenomena tore through the world.

  Only after one or two days did the disasters begin to subside—yet human society, already in turmoil from the Ether’s return, became more restless and unstable than ever.

  And it wasn’t just the global elite or national leaders who were shaken to their core.

  The common people—ordinary humans—were equally stricken with fear.

  In this era of hyper-connectivity, even those tucked away in remote valleys could access vast amounts of information online if they wished.

  From the simplest rumor to the most complex analysis.

  An event as monumental as Seraphine’s annihilation of the Eliondra continent could never be covered up—not by any organization, nor by any nation.

  It was, quite simply, impossible.

  Within just half a day, aside from the most impoverished villages buried deep in remote forests and mountains without internet, and a few isolated aboriginal tribes lost to the wilderness, ninety-nine percent of humanity knew Seraphine’s name—and had at least a rough grasp of what had happened.

  The tale spread like wildfire: a single figure had flown high above the Eliondra continent and, with one decisive act, erased it from existence—two billion souls gone in an instant.

  "….."

  On Earth, billions stood frozen, minds utterly blank.

  Only when the first wave of disbelief began to ebb did the realization sink in.

  From this day forward… a true god now walked among them.

  A god of destruction—Seraphine—who could, alone, reduce an entire continent to dust.

  Since the dawn of history, humans had dreamed of gods. Out of that longing, countless sects arose. They invented deities of every shape and nature. And for those imagined gods, humanity bled in endless wars.

  Yet those so-called gods had never appeared.

  Until today.

  Now, she was real.

  She was Seraphine.

  The shockwave of her existence spread even into destitute, forgotten corners of the world. Small, impoverished nations began to see the birth of illegal cults, all devoted solely to her worship.

  Events this surreal make people question not just reality, but the very structure of the world.

  And so, from the highest halls of power to the most ordinary homes, every nation sank into a fog of suffocation, confusion, and fear.

  Anyone with a shred of sense understood:

  【The fate of the world is no longer ours to decide.】

  That choice now belonged to Seraphine alone.

  If she wished to rule, she would rule. If she chose seclusion, she would vanish. If she desired to act without restraint, she would act. If she willed the world’s end, it would end.

  No one could stop her.

  No one even dared speak against her.

  Because when a single person’s martial might can sweep across the globe, the human concepts of order, law, morality, and ethics cease to have any weight.

  She was beyond them—free to do as she pleased.

  This… was absolute power.

  Under such power, no one could guess whether the future would turn toward light or darkness.

  They knew only this: the shape of the future rested entirely in Seraphine’s will.

  Some sociologists, speaking in public forums, voiced their bleak forecasts:

  "It is highly probable that in the near future, nations will dissolve. The entire Earth will bend beneath her and those loyal to her. Even this planet may become nothing more than her toy, spun casually between her fingers."

  While the rest of the world drowned in fear and uncertainty, Seraphine stood in the skies where the Eliondra continent had been, her gaze fixed on Mycenae—the one who had “died” in the cataclysm.

  Hoo hoo hoo—

  Scorching winds laced with embers howled from the horizon, as if trying to tear away the oppressive stillness and deep sorrow smothering the land.

  Bathed in boundless divine light, Seraphine hovered beneath a blood-purple sky, her head inclined slightly as she looked down.

  The land she saw had once spanned tens of millions of square kilometers—a realm of cities, towns, deserts, lakes, oceans, hills, forests, and grasslands. Now, it was nothing.

  Whoosh, whoosh—

  Waves of searing aura rolled across an endless wasteland. The ground was cracked and blackened, rivers of molten rock winding through it, the surface pocked by hundreds of thousands of craters glazed to glass.

  Her mental power swept outward.

  In a heartbeat, the full scope of the Eliondra Caldera—now the largest in the world by both area and depth—filled her mind.

  What remained was a valley thousands of square kilometers wide, nothing but lava fields, scorched plains, and crystalline craters plunging hundreds, even thousands of meters deep.

  In such a place, not even the simplest bacteria could survive.

  Several thousand kilometers away, at what had been Eliondra’s coastline, a tsunami over a thousand meters high roared forward, its mass shaking the heavens and cracking the seabed. In time, hundreds of billions of tons of seawater would pour into the depression, merging it with the Atlantic and erasing all trace of Eliondra from the map.

  Perhaps one day geographers would name this new expanse the Eliondra Sea. But all the history and glory of its civilizations would be lost beneath the waves, as if they had never been.

  The reason was simple: after enduring a million beams of killing energy, the continent had lost such an immense amount of mass that its average height now lay more than a kilometer below sea level. Gravity was drawing the oceans in to fill the void.

  Seraphine, her thoughts colder than ever, ignored it all. She had already found Mycenae’s exact position.

  In her mind’s eye, her opponent was alive, but in a pitiful state.

  "I must catch him before he can flee again."

  With a thought, the air around her warped, parting into a vacuum corridor that reached to the horizon.

  Whoosh!

  Her figure vanished.

  Several hundred kilometers away, Seraphine appeared again, descending in silence and raising a storm of dust as she landed.

  The land here was dead—a barren wasteland stripped of life.

  She exhaled softly.

  "A perfect field for slaughter without restraint."

  Then, her mental power surged like a hundred steel cables through the air, tearing something from deep underground.

  From several kilometers down, an ancient fortress emerged, its charred walls as black as a Coal Mountain.

  Crack—crack—crackle.

  The earth inverted. Tens of thousands of tons of rock and soil exploded upward, like a storm of heavy artillery, scarring the land for dozens of miles in every direction.

  Rumble—rumble—rumble!

  The ancient fortress, wrenched from the earth by sheer mental force, tore free with a deafening roar. Its jagged base scraped across the blackened ground and shattered bedrock, shrieking and cracking as it was dragged through the air toward Seraphine.

  Bang!

  The colossal, timeworn stronghold slammed down before her. The earth shuddered under the impact; a choking cloud of dust rolled outward in all directions.

  Deep within the ruin, Seraphine sensed a fading consciousness — faint, almost extinguished. The corners of her lips curved ever so slightly. She lifted one hand.

  Whoosh—

  In an instant, the massive stone bastion — seven or eight hundred meters across — disintegrated like a child’s sandcastle struck by the tide. It collapsed into a maelstrom of dust and rubble, the debris scattering on the wind. From its remains, a crimson, desiccated corpse tumbled violently toward the ground.

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  This corpse was Mycenae — barely clinging to life after the destruction of Lazarus’ Pool.

  Before the body could fall more than a few meters, an immense telekinetic field snapped into place around him, locking him in midair. The mental force constricted like an iron vice, bones splintering and joints tearing under its crushing grip.

  Seraphine pressed harder, channeling her mental power directly into Mycenae’s skull. She had used this maneuver before — bypassing words entirely and plunging straight into a soul search.

  But this time, she paused. Eyes narrowing, she honed in on a hidden presence: a Dimensional Pocket buried deep within Mycenae’s soul.

  Under normal circumstances, such a vault could never be forced open by an outsider. But Seraphine was no ordinary mind-binder — armed with the Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation, she regarded such barriers as little more than puzzles. It was only a matter of time.

  Still, stealth was critical. If Mycenae realized her intent, he might, in desperation, destroy the Dimensional Pocket outright — obliterating whatever lay inside.

  And then—

  "You destroyed everything of mine!"

  Mycenae’s head jerked upward in the air, the shriveled sockets seeming to glare despite their emptiness. His voice was a rasping blade:

  "I want you to… pay a heavy price!"

  Seraphine ignored the threat, fingers of her will continuing to unpick the locks on the Dimensional Pocket.

  Whoosh!

  Mycenae’s form blurred. With a sickening crack, half his skull detonated, blasting him free of Seraphine’s mental grasp. He reappeared several thousand meters away in the blink of an eye, the remnants of his head already swelling grotesquely, ballooning hundreds of times in size.

  Then, the surface split open in a thousand ragged wounds. From each rupture slithered an unholy torrent — countless skinless, blood-slick serpents, thin and writhing like worms, each one hissing in agony.

  Screee— screee— screee— screee—!

  The air filled with a shrill, overlapping cacophony as the creatures swarmed together, biting, devouring, and fusing into a single horrific shape: a towering Demon. Its face was flat and featureless, yet its pallid, corpse-like skin was carpeted in hundreds of millions of tiny, human faces — each twisted in pure hatred.

  The psychic venom radiating from those miniature visages bled into the very air, staining the world a suffocating, blood-red for a thousand meters in every direction.

  For any ordinary soul, even a glance would mean madness. A mind crushed. A heart stopped. A body dead before it hit the ground.

  The faces all opened their eyes at once. A billion pinpricks of malice locked on Seraphine from afar.

  Boom!

  An avalanche of darkness slammed into the world — cold, soul-rotting, and utterly profane.

  Then came the voices.

  A tidal roar of agony and rage.

  "Wuwuwu!"

  "I don’t want to die!"

  "Lord, save your lamb!"

  "It hurts— it hurts so much!"

  "I hate you! I will never forgive you!"

  "Why?! Why is this happening?!"

  "You will burn in hell! I curse you!"

  Billions of screams, curses, and sobs layered over each other, rising like a storm tide through the writhing tapestry of faces — all hurtling straight for Seraphine.

  She did not flinch. Her mind remained locked in calculation, unshaken.

  "Arrogance," Mycenae spat.

  The world warped. The horizon dissolved into a choking wall of black mist. It poured over the land like a living thing, twisting reality wherever it touched.

  The cracked, barren ground softened into wet, bubbling muck that spewed gouts of blood.

  Overhead, the sky dimmed to a bruised haze, and a single blood-streaked dagger appeared — hovering in place, gleaming with malice.

  Mycenae’s voice drifted through the mist, guttural and ragged:

  "Two billion people. You killed two billion people!"

  His tone sharpened into accusation.

  "How cruel… Tell me, was it satisfying to kill?!"

  He emerged from the fog like a nightmare, his broken form backlit by its seething gloom.

  "You’re powerful — so powerful that even I fear you. But can you shoulder the rage, the hatred, the regrets of two billion dead? Can you carry their grief, their broken loves, their shattered lives?"

  He leaned forward, his grin skeletal and joyless.

  "Can you bear the weight of the mortal world’s greatest sin?"

  Bang!

  The dagger hanging in the heavens suddenly rumbled with a deep, resonant roar. From within, the muffled wails and wrathful bellows of billions seemed to echo faintly.

  “You cannot!!”

  The hatred compressed into that sharp, surging cry was so intense that even the clouds above quivered—splintering apart into rain laced with flecks of crimson, pattering down in an eerie hush.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh ——

  In an instant, the blood rain veiled the entire human world.

  “Only the weak cling to hatred. The strong... only stillness.”

  Seraphine cast the scene a brief glance and said slowly,

  “Sin? You’re extracting the 【Negative Definition】 from 【Alaya】—the collective consciousness of all humanity hidden deep in the Sentience Realm—and turning it upon your enemy. It’s a way to weaken their fortune, their form, even their life. Clever... a truly ingenious ploy.”

  Having instantly deduced the nature of her opponent’s spell, she went on:

  “You’ve anchored the enemy’s root in the chain of causality, blurred the boundary between reality and the Sentience Realm for a long-range spatial leap, and gained the Realm’s blessing to largely ignore physical attacks. Ah... and you’ve forged a miniature Alaya from the resentful souls of two billion Eliondrans. Crude in construction, but functional—and quite effective against the weak-minded.”

  “Such genius in witchcraft! To grasp the horror of it at a single glance... I almost envy you.”

  Within Mycenae’s billions of eyes, a strange, unreadable light flickered. His gaze on Seraphine was cold, complex—and steady.

  “You’re correct,” he said evenly. “【Execution of All Sins】 strikes at the root of your will. No matter how strong your body or soul, it won’t matter. The moment you harbor even a flicker of guilt, hesitation, or regret—your will turns to ash, and your form and spirit...”

  “Finally... open.”

  Seraphine raised a slender index finger and drew a delicate line through the air.

  Whoosh!

  A glowing fissure split open in the void.

  “Hm? This fluctuation—?”

  Mycenae’s pupils shrank. “That’s my Dimensional Pocket! You—?!”

  He reached out with his senses, only to find emptiness—gone, as though it had never existed.

  “You... How is this possible?!” His voice trembled in disbelief. “The Box of Hephaestus can’t be opened by anyone else! This defies every law!”

  But Seraphine was already flooding the pocket with her mental power, stripping it bare of every last possession.

  “Wait—stop! What are you doing?!” Mycenae’s roar was ragged with both shame and fury. Even so, he dared not emerge, keeping his true form hidden within a shroud of dark, demonic mist that blurred physical assaults.

  Before Seraphine floated a bounty of stolen items:

  Hundreds of strange tools wrought from pulsating metal, glass, and wood; over a hundred thick tomes bound in blood-black covers; heaps of bone and leather ornaments steeped in a murderous aura—and finally, the most precious prize... the Regret Potion.

  Buzz —

  Seraphine’s own Dimensional Pocket yawned open, swallowing everything whole in a single gulp.

  “Damn you! That was a thousand years of my savings!”

  Mycenae’s shadowy face twisted with rage in the mist. Snapping, he launched an attack.

  “Execution of All Sins...”

  Whoosh!

  The dagger plummeted like a divine guillotine, slashing toward Seraphine.

  Whoosh!

  But at that exact moment, the Seraphine it struck shimmered, turning insubstantial. The blade passed clean through, meeting no resistance.

  “Your root... isn’t here?!”

  Seraphine studied the diamond-clear, shimmering Regret Potion in her hand. Without looking up, she said mildly:

  “Of course. This is just a clone.”

  “Haha... so that’s it,” Mycenae sneered. “Pointless. The Execution of All Sins will trace your root automatically—like a slingshot. You and I are on the same bowstring. This ‘rubber band’ of causality will follow you anywhere—thousands of miles if it must—until the execution platform tears open a Sentience Realm passage to reach you. There’s no running.”

  As he spoke, the void behind him ripped apart, revealing a black hole exhaling the foul aura of the Sentience Realm.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh ——

  The dagger and the surrounding Abnormal Domain—formed from his reality-twisting mist—came alive, coiling into a colossal vortex. It spun faster and faster, dragging Mycenae headlong into the black hole.

  Watching her enemy so eager to rush headlong toward her main body, Seraphine merely tilted her head, glanced once—and lost interest.

  Inside the winding spatial corridors of the Sentience Realm, Mycenae, swallowed within the whirling vortex of black smoke:

  “Let me find your true body... and I’ll carve you to pieces, until nothing remains.”

  Buzz!

  Bound by the unseen chains of causality, Mycenae’s “flight” toward Seraphine’s true form was blisteringly fast.

  Within minutes, beyond the shroud of his demonic mist, a vast expanse of desolate, gray-white land came into view.

  Bang!

  The clump of demonic mist slammed onto the ashen lunar soil, sending clouds of dust and debris swirling upward. Strangely, the drifting particles seemed to move in slow motion, their descent back to the surface unnaturally delayed.

  From within the mist, Mycenae emerged—billions of eyes rippling across his body’s surface, all flickering in unison as he stared blankly toward the horizon, where half of a blue planet was rising into view. His voice shook with disbelief:

  “That’s Earth?! Then this… this is the Moon! Her main body… it’s actually on the Moon!”

  He felt it then—light blooming behind him.

  Freezing mid-step, he turned, stunned and uncertain, his gaze drawn toward the source.

  And there, filling nearly her entire field of vision, upon the thin, gray, dust-covered lunar plain in the distance, a figure sat upright in perfect stillness—a figure like a deity sculpted from pure sunlight.

  Her entire form radiated a brilliant, golden luminescence, as though a second Sun lay resting upon the Moon’s surface. Even without moving, she emanated a power that shattered the limits of Mycenae’s mental comprehension.

  Around her, even space itself warped and shifted—twisting, stretching, expanding—as if some unfathomable, primordial force flowed down from beyond the world. In the boundless black behind her, countless stars flickered more brightly, drawn into an invisible gathering around her form.

  She was the center of the world. The axis of the universe.

  The sheer, crushing weight of her existence flooded through Mycenae’s consciousness, pressing down until breathing itself felt like a labor.

  This… was Seraphine’s true body.

  “This… this, this…”

  Mycenae’s entire form quivered, stammering in awe. “This is… a god?”

  In that instant, the dagger that had barely wriggled free from the black hole found its mark. It shot skyward, then arced down like a meteor, descending toward Seraphine’s main body in a savage, cleaving strike.

  As it flew, two billion screaming, raging souls twined around the blade, their collective anguish forming the faint silhouette of Eliondra.

  Within that spectral image, scenes from Eliondra’s greatest ages—ancient Greece, ancient Rome, the Renaissance—flashed in a relentless, rolling sequence.

  And then came the voices.

  Countless men and women, the old and the young, their fury overlapping in a deafening chorus:

  “Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you! Kill you!…”

  This was no mere cry—it was hatred amplified ten-thousandfold, a tidal wave of fury like a thousand people pointing in accusation, ten-thousand cursing in unison.

  For any ordinary soul, to face this was instant death. The spirit would be obliterated, leaving behind nothing but an empty husk steeped in despair.

  And yet, this was only the prelude.

  The dagger itself now carried the concentrated wrath of the entire Eliondra—an enormity of power so vast it held nearly one-tenth the force of Earth’s own collective Alaya.

  Whether flesh or spirit, tangible or ethereal, nothing could survive that strike.

  Watching, Mycenae understood in an instant.

  The Sun God seated in the distance—this was his enemy’s true form.

  And for the first time, a whisper of regret slipped into his mind.

  To reveal such terrifying power, only to gamble it all on one reckless blow…

  “No… she won’t. No matter how cold-blooded or hardened, no matter how strong their mind, if they are still human, killing so many at once will leave a trace of hesitation—a flicker of doubt. That’s the flaw! However small… as long as it exists, then—”

  He clung to this thought, forcing comfort into his mind. Somewhere deep inside, a thrill began to rise—an almost delirious hope that he might succeed in slaying a god.

  But in that same breath, Seraphine slowly opened her eyes.

  Whoosh ——

  In an instant, the Moon’s surface seemed to give birth to two suns, their blazing, divine radiance flooding ten thousand miles with light.

  The cold void cloaking the Moon was torn apart—ripped into nothingness—by an endless, searing brilliance.

  The world was illuminated.

  And the dagger—plummeting from the heavens with boundless, annihilating might—suddenly froze mid-strike.

  Upon its blade, the billions of roaring, wailing Eliondran souls that had manifested now stared wide-eyed in terror… before breaking into one united, bloodcurdling scream.

  “Aaaaaaaaaah!!!”

  The dagger splintered, cracking apart piece by piece until it dissolved into absolute nothingness.

  The two billion vengeful souls—the miniature Alaya that had been hidden within the weapon—vanished as if they had never existed at all.

  The dense, burning hatred and despair born from the deaths of billions… could not withstand even the casual glance of Seraphine.

  Far in the distance, Mycenae went still—utterly frozen—every human face covering his form losing its luster, eyes turning empty and dim.

  “Will… the light of will…”

  He stammered through clenched teeth. “No other force—just pure reality-warping through the mind! Crushing two billion resentful souls with personal will alone… so cold… so absolute… not a trace of regret! How… how is this possible…?”

  Crack!

  A fissure ripped across Mycenae’s surface—then, from that line, hundreds of thousands of cracks erupted all at once.

  Crack crack crack!!

  In the blink of an eye, he shattered into countless fragments of flesh, each finer than a hair. And then—ignition. His remains erupted into dark flame, burning away into wisps of black smoke and drifting ash.

  Mycenae… was dead.

  The vast, endless Ocean of Knowledge rolled in ceaseless waves. Streams of pure information surged through each swell, colliding, grinding, sparking threads of insight that drifted upward—fuel for the great, ethereal Moon Palace suspended high above the firmament.

  Then, without warning, a jet-black diamond plunged from the sky, striking the ocean’s surface with a heavy thud.

  Across its inky facets, countless runes shifted without rest. The number of faces changed endlessly—octahedron one moment, fifteen-sided polyhedron the next—with no discernible pattern.

  The swirling currents could not erode it.

  This crystalline construct was Mycenae’s life memories, extracted by Seraphine in the moment of death.

  Its data was encoded in a mathematical system beyond anything known to Earth’s sciences—layered with alien witchcraft encryption.

  The complexity of its cipher surpassed even Earth’s most secure 256-bit AES encryption. Worse, the encoding carried non-reversible properties akin to the MD5 algorithm, making it impossible for Seraphine to crack it quickly—even with her Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation.

  Her deduction: breaching Mycenae’s memory defenses could take a great deal of time.

  “Alright.”

  On the Moon’s surface—

  Seraphine closed her eyes, shifting her focus toward her attribute panel.

  【Host: Seraphine】

  【Physical Strength: 1.2 sextillion】

  【Soul: 1.2 sextillion】

  Seraphine stood in silence, feeling the vast, pure, and utterly untainted physical power coursing through her body.

  She murmured softly to herself,

  “My current physical strength… about one-fifth the mass of Earth. Not bad.”

  Buzz—

  Her immense mental power—so dense it was almost tangible—swept outward, instantly enveloping the Moon from its core to its surface… down to the subatomic level.

  And it didn’t stop there. Her mental force field surged further, spreading across space at nearly the speed of light.

  In that moment, if she willed it, the Moon could be annihilated.

  A single thought—and the entire lunar body would collapse into a swarm of elementary particles, scattering into the void within a heartbeat.

  Indeed… cultivation brought growth far faster than simply waiting for the system to passively boost her.

  After this recent period of focused training, Seraphine had opened the Heavenly Gate to the sixth layer.

  Through this journey, she realized her original projections for the Skyroot Codex had been… imprecise.

  Her initial theory and design assumed that the attribute multiplier for each Heavenly Gate layer would remain roughly the same.

  But after opening the fourth, fifth, and sixth layers in succession, reality proved otherwise.

  If the Nine-Layered Heavenly Gate were divided into three major stages—three layers each—then the attribute multipliers of the second stage were clearly far greater than those of the first.

  And logically, the multipliers of the third stage would likely surpass even the second.

  If so… the power she would wield after fully cultivating the Skyroot Codex might far exceed her original calculations.

  Suddenly, Seraphine turned her gaze deep into the starry void, a smile of curiosity playing on her lips.

  “Well now… what a coincidence. We have visitors.”

  Her mental force field—blanketing nearly half the Solar System—had just returned new data.

  Two million kilometers from the Moon, a thousand-meter-long, shuttle-shaped spacecraft drifted silently in space.

  An alien “guest” had arrived.

  And this “guest” was stealthily emitting a complex field wave, scanning the entire Earth before focusing intently on a certain location…

  The base at the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean.

  Almost nothing in the base reacted to the scan—except one thing.

  The Abraham Machine.

  The Seraphine clone stationed nearby responded instantly, pulling the agitated Abraham Machine—now returning bursts of data in response to the scan—into her Dimensional Pocket.

  As for why the alien vessel had evaded her mental force field until now… the reason was simple:

  Even with her soul attribute now towering at unimaginable levels, the universal law remained absolute—

  【Light Speed Cannot Be Exceeded】.

  No matter whether her mental field was spread in a full-domain sweep or condensed into a razor-thin linear scan, its “travel” speed remained bound to the realm of light.

  Even after spending precious seconds crossing hundreds of millions of miles, the moment of contact—interaction with matter, data retrieval, sensory feedback—still crawled forward at light speed.

  There was simply no surpassing it.

  The sole exception was the Real Number Channel—a phenomenon that ignored the light-speed limit entirely.

  But that shortcut came with a condition.

  To open the Real Number Channel to a specific destination, Seraphine needed its exact parameters: precise coordinates, time-flow values, localized constants…

  And therein lay the paradox.

  To exceed light speed, she had to use the Real Number Channel.

  To use the Real Number Channel, she first had to know the destination’s exact spatial data.

  And to get that data… her mental field would need to reach it.

  In the end, light speed still ruled as an absolute wall.

  “There’s always a way to break this limit. If not here in the Solar System…”

  “…then I’ll find it somewhere else.”

  Her eyes turned toward a point more than two million kilometers away, far beyond the Moon.

  Earlier…

  At a position 1.6 million kilometers from Earth, near the Sun–Earth Lagrange Point, a jet-black vessel tore into existence.

  This was the same alien craft that had emerged in the Symbolic Layer of the Solar System.

  “Why are these damned energy leeches everywhere? No matter how many we kill, they just keep coming! Infuriating!”

  The pilot hissed, opening a translucent light-screen. Trembling tentacles danced over the controls, activating the ship’s automated defense system.

  [Laser defense system activating. Target — parasitic energy-feeders attached to hull. Quantity: 47.]

  The hull’s dense, barbed spikes lit up with crimson fire—

  Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

  Hundreds of thousands of high-energy beams lanced outward, vaporizing dozens of semi-transparent, thin-membrane creatures clinging to the ship’s skin. One by one, they were burned to drifting ash.

  Inside the control chamber—

  “Hoo~ Finally, some breathing room,” the pilot sighed.

  Not far away, the fat captain watched Earth through a remote imaging array millions of kilometers distant. His gaze lingered before he murmured:

  “What a beautiful world. Once we clean up the pests gnawing at the order of civilization… it’ll be even more beautiful.”

  He activated the ship’s crystal detection array, locking its aim on Earth.

  Buzz—

  A concentrated wave of exotic energy pulsed from the ship’s bow, racing toward the planet.

  Seconds later, it bridged the 1.6-million-kilometer gulf.

  Instantly, streams of planetary data began to cascade across the captain’s display: mass, volume, magnetic field strength, atmospheric composition ratios, rotational period, Hill sphere radius, gravitational acceleration, tectonic distribution, biosphere taxonomy, indigenous tech-level metrics, and more.

  The refresh rate was so blindingly fast it resembled the flicker of lightning.

  An unprotected human glancing at the display would have their sensory nerves shredded by the torrent of flashing data—collapsing into convulsions and vomiting. Even the light radiation from the panel was intense enough to induce skin cancer in mere moments.

  To the fat captain, whose race possessed bodies of incredible natural durability, the equipment was perfectly safe.

  To ordinary humans… it was essentially a weapon of mass death.

  In this vast universe, the gulf between species could be immeasurable.

  The “finish line” that a fragile race clawed its way toward… could be nothing more than the starting point for a stronger one.

  That—was the cold truth.

  And then—

  An urgent alarm blared.

  The co-pilot spun around, hastily bringing up the feed.

  Ding!

  [Warning! Detected — 【Order Vortex】, Segment 5!]