“Order Vortex?!”

  At the sound of those words, the portly captain—his stance wide and grounded like a draft horse—flashed to the side of the stunned pilot, smacking him aside. With his round, fleshy face and dozens of eyes bulging wide, he fixed a heated stare on the display.

  “It really is that thing! The legendary artifact that, once all its parts are gathered, can forge the【Key of Heaven】!”

  He whispered, almost trembling with glee: “That key... can grant its bearer entry into the Trial of the Gods—and fulfill any wish!”

  Once he’d confirmed the readout beyond doubt, the captain’s cheeks quivered with manic delight as he bellowed: “I’m going to strike it rich! To hell with those bloated nobles—this time, I might actually become Royal!”

  The pilot, scrambling to his feet, blinked in confusion. “Order Vortex? Wasn’t that thing lost with the Ninth Prince during the civil war back on the homeworld? And the Key of Heaven—sure, there’s a legend, but it’s supposed to grant wishes only after you finish some divine trial, right?”

  The captain, regaining some composure, nodded. “Not wrong. That divine proving ground is hidden in a far-flung corner of the Milky Way. Clear it, and you can wish for anything—anything at all.”

  His voice dropped into a measured tone. “Strictly speaking, the Ninth Prince—and his rumored flagship carrying Order Vortex Component No. 5—vanished 310 Glacurns ago.” (1 Glacurn = 3.5 Earth years)

  Turning his many eyes to the azure planet on the screen, he muttered, “If I’m right, the Ninth Prince crashed here, a long time ago.”

  His expression hardened. Pivoting toward the pilot, he barked:

  “Get to the central compartment and launch a message beacon—no, ten message beacons—to the homeworld! Log everything from our recent ship records, and write this: ‘7th Fleet, Survey Ship 8164, has discovered Order Vortex Component No. 5 in Sector 359,700,163. Request immediate deployment of the main interstellar fleet and high-tier Transcender assets to secure it.’”

  The pilot gave a curt nod. “Understood. Should I route the beacons through the Projected Layer?”

  The captain frowned in thought. “The Sentience Realm doesn’t have light-speed limits, true—but even at peak potential, a beacon there tops out at five times the speed of light. It’d still take six Glacurns to reach the nearest usable hyper-dimensional corridor segment. Too slow.”

  He stroked the writhing facial tendrils that framed his mouth, weighing his options. “Here’s what we’ll do—you send them back the way we came, through the wormhole on this star system’s fringe.”

  The pilot’s face—tentacles and all—tightened in horror. “That wormhole?! Captain, you can’t be serious! Have you forgotten how we barely made it out of there alive? Over a dozen starships were shredded—we’re the only one left.”

  His voice dropped to a whisper. “There’s a galaxy tyrant sleeping in there. If it wakes... this entire star system will lose more than a few planets. And us along with it!”

  The captain simply raised one hand to silence him, gazing out into the dim void beyond the viewport. “That colossal thing, just stretching its body, erased our entire fleet. Frankly... I suspect it’s the very reason the Ninth Prince went down.”

  Then he turned sharply, his tone like steel. “That’s why I want ten beacons sent. As long as one makes it, that’s enough. Tell me, would you rather rot out your days in mediocrity until you die in some backwater corner of the cosmos... or gamble it all, just once?”

  His eyes gleamed. “If we pull this off, you’ll live dozens of times longer. Own worlds—planets entirely yours! Found a dynasty that will outlast ten thousand Glacurns. Or would you rather stay here, a pilot on a miserable survey ship, bullied by your captain every damned day?”

  The pilot stayed silent, eyes flickering as the words struck home.

  After a long breath, he exhaled. “Alright, Captain... you’ve sold me. I’ll take the risk.”

  “Good! Excellent!” The captain slapped his thin shoulder with such force the pilot winced.

  Just then, the detector blared.

  [Warning! High-energy reaction detected on planetary surface]

  “Huh?!”

  Both men rushed to the display.

  The feed showed the heart of a massive continent—where a blinding sphere of light was rapidly expanding. Its shimmering edge devoured everything it touched, leaving nothing but vast, barren craters in its wake.

  Within moments, the entire continent was gone. The sphere slowly faded.

  And above the endless wasteland, a lone figure hovered—its aura radiating staggering energy.

  The ship’s AI chimed again:

  [Warning! Transcendent Stage Ten lifeform detected! Extreme caution advised!]

  The pilot’s voice shook. “Tran... Transcendent Stage Ten?! This sector was just upgraded—how could something that powerful already be here?!”

  The fat captain was just as stunned, but he forced himself to steady. “Seems my call was the right one. Go—send the message beacons!”

  The pilot nodded and spun on his heel, darting away.

  Moments later, a narrow slit opened along the outer hull of the black starship. From it shot ten jet-black shuttles, each no larger than half a pencil.

  The instant they cleared the hull, they shimmered and phased into the Sentience Realm, activating stealth mode. They skimmed along the outer edge of reality’s stellar space toward the system’s far boundary.

  Following preloaded instructions, they would slip into a wormhole buried deep within the Oort Cloud, ride the spacetime tunnel, and cross an ocean of light-years back to the homeworld.

  “Sigh ~”

  The fat captain exhaled as his gaze swept over the screen—at the “continent” now completely swallowed by the sea. His voice was calm, but edged with weight. “That lifeform that erased the landmass… might be far beyond Transcendent Stage Ten.”

  The pilot blinked. “Why do you say that?”

  A cold gleam flickered through the captain’s many eyes. “After your father left you in my care before he died, you’ve spent all these years working aboard this ship. You don’t have much exposure to the deeper starship intel.”

  He leaned forward slightly. “When I was young, I worked the construction yards—big space docks. I know this: standard ship detection systems almost never scan a lifeform’s true core power directly. They only read the peripheral radiation it leaks. That data isn’t exactly wrong… but it’s intentionally conservative. In practice, you boost that number two whole ranks to get close to reality.”

  “Two ranks higher?!” The pilot’s eyes went wide. “That would be enough to strip an entire planet’s crust! That’s… an overlord-class lifeform! Ah—I get it now. Lucky you pulled us back so far. If that thing had spotted us, we’d be dead for sure. Captain, you’re—”

  The fat captain grinned with self-satisfaction. “Ha ha ha… If I wasn’t vigilant, I’d have been a corpse in some forgotten corner of the galaxy long ago—”

  Om —

  Without warning, a colossal, ethereal force bled into every atom of the starship—locking hull, crew, and even thought itself in place at a subatomic scale.

  The captain’s and pilot’s consciousness froze mid-thought.

  Suspended in the infinite dark, the black starship’s outer spatial shell began to twist and warp, folding in on itself into a spinning vortex. From within that churning spiral, veins of searing light burst outward.

  Om —

  A figure stepped from the heart of the vortex.

  This was Seraphine’s true body.

  She regarded the starship only inches away, calm and almost curious. With the barest lift of her hand—

  Whoosh!

  The vessel—capable of skimming the sun’s surface without melting—came apart in utter silence. Hull plates, drives, control nodes, and every other component separated into perfect, intact segments.

  In the void, shimmering Real Number Channel gates flared open, and the ship’s disassembled remains streamed through, sent directly to the Sapphire Research Institute on distant Earth—now expanded a hundredfold in size.

  Dozens of alien lifeforms soon floated before Seraphine. They were massive, heavily built—towering over Earth’s humans—and yet each face was slack, eyes vacant.

  Compared to them, Seraphine was small. Physically.

  But her presence alone dwarfed them to nothing—mere dust motes adrift in her shadow.

  “So… the Mercury Race shows itself after all.”

  Her lips curved faintly. “You’ve decided to stand against me. Very well. Let’s see what your memories reveal.”

  Light bloomed in her eyes, unreal and hypnotic. She reached out—not physically, but through force of will—ripping their sluggish, anchored souls straight from their bodies.

  In an instant, those souls shattered. Seraphine’s vast mental power consumed them without mercy, spilling out to coil around the void itself.

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  The now-empty alien bodies, along with their biomechanical armor, dissolved into motes of light and vanished—teleported to the research institute as rare and valuable material.

  A torrent of knowledge poured into her mind.

  From the Mercury Race’s societal order and state of civilization, down to the smallest personal habits of these individuals—every detail unfolded within her.

  More than half of it was clutter: family histories, petty ambitions, trivial daily thoughts, or festering dark desires. Such waste data was instantly flagged by 《Twilight Dominion》, sifted once for scraps of value, then erased—utterly—so no corruption could infect Seraphine’s own thought system.

  The remainder—less than half—was worth keeping.

  For example, there was the navigational expertise of the interstellar survey vessel Theron; the fragmented technological knowledge of the Mercury Race retained by the captain, pilot, and crew; intelligence on civilizations hostile to the Mercury Race; scattered but revealing accounts of the so-called Order Vortex; a detailed breakdown of the functional architecture of the Sentience Realm’s hyper-dimensional corridor; facts about exotic Sentience Realm species such as the Void Whale; the precise location of a wormhole hidden within the Oort Nebula beyond the solar system; and the known strength tiers of lifeforms across the civilizations of the Milky Way…

  All of it—every last scrap—was instantly sifted, categorized, and filed away with crystal clarity in Seraphine’s mind.

  Some of the discoveries fascinated her, as they contained concepts and phenomena absent from the Dragonblood. But idle curiosity would have to wait—two far more pressing matters demanded her attention.

  First: to push her cultivation of the Skyroot Codex to its absolute limit.

  Second: to purge the countless sources of chaos still festering on Earth.

  Earth.

  Eliondra Sea, Sky above.

  A clone of Seraphine opened her cold, unblinking eyes, lowering herself until she drifted just above the gently rippling expanse of the deep-blue ocean.

  Standing on that endless mirror of water, she cast her vision far toward the horizon. Her mental power unfurled like an elegant ribbon, arcing across unimaginable distances until it brushed against the capital of Beaconreach.

  There, a giant—easily thirty meters tall—suddenly stiffened, as if some invisible current had passed over him. He frowned into the far distance, straining to sense the origin of the intrusion, but found nothing. With a faint scowl, he turned away.

  “The so-called King of Aurora,” Seraphine murmured, her voice tinged with a delicate smile. “Your physical strength is… respectable. It seems this surge of the great Ether Tide has treated you well. Very well—let me greet you personally.”

  Then her brow knit ever so slightly.

  “Thirty meters is too tall. I have no desire to look up at anyone. Let’s make you a bit shorter.”

  Her mind ran the calculations in an instant.

  “Thirteen thousand kilometers northwest. At Mach eight-thousand… not far at all.”

  She began to sink, calf muscles flexing, and the tranquil sea beneath her feet bucked in agitation.

  The colossal energy she commanded—boundless yet exquisitely controlled—spread outward in all directions without a trace of waste, turning a hundred-mile radius of open water into a solid, unshakable runway for her acceleration.

  The ocean’s surface trembled, sending violent ripples across thousands of meters. Beneath, currents twisted and churned, as though the seafloor itself had shuddered.

  And this—this was only the prelude.

  She intended to run—from here to Beaconreach’s capital.

  The devastation she would leave in her wake… was of no concern to her.

  All across the globe, countless eyes tracked her through satellite feeds. Analysts and generals alike froze at the sight, thinking the same thought:

  That stance… she’s going to run.

  The very next heartbeat—

  Seraphine moved.

  Mach 8,000. Five thousand miles per second.

  BOOM.

  The detonation was apocalyptic—like a hundred-million-ton nuclear warhead going off at sea. Temperatures soared past a million degrees Celsius, vaporizing hundreds of kilometers of ocean in a heartbeat. The air above was stripped into plasma, ionizing everything within a kilometer. Where the superheated surface clashed with dense thunderclouds above, the heavens exploded into a jagged lattice of lightning—bolts as thick as buildings, raking sky and sea alike.

  In seconds, half the Eliondra Sea vanished beneath an electrical storm so vast and violent it rendered the sun irrelevant. Fire and lightning alone lit the world.

  Beneath the surface, the temperature shock birthed monstrous tempests—churning water-dragons hundreds of meters wide that raged with mindless fury, destroying all they touched.

  And through it all, Seraphine—wrapped in a plasma sphere hotter than the Sun’s heart—tore across the Atlantic like a living comet, a streak of annihilation arrowing toward Beaconreach.

  Every human watching via satellite was struck dumb, unable to decide whether they were witnessing a goddess… or a calamity.

  Beaconreach, Capital Ruins.

  Om—

  A massive, translucent pyramid drifted slowly under the clear blue sky.

  At the far end of its path lay the capital’s inner city—reduced to rubble by nuclear fire, and now eerily silent.

  From above, the desolation was absolute: twisted steel skeletons of skyscrapers, once-serene parks turned to wasteland, shattered malls, the ghostly remnants of office towers.

  Nothing remained alive.

  Only dead land stretched in every direction.

  Whoosh—

  A dry wind swept through the skeletal remains of the city, kicking up ragged waves of dust and grit.

  From a distance, the view was nothing but ruin.

  Broken masonry, shattered tiles, and scorched rubble sprawled in every direction—withered, blackened, lifeless.

  The expansion of the crystal Pyramid below was relentless; as it grew, the city’s remains were pushed outward, the circle of devastation stretching wider and wider.

  Sorrow hung heavy over the place like a smothering fog.

  But the King of Aurora, seated within the floating pyramid, felt no such emotion.

  “I’ve already located those three wastes.”

  In the heart of the great structure, on a plaza polished to a crystalline gleam, Cuan—thirty meters tall, skin traced with radiant golden sigils, muscle-packed to the point of menace—opened eyes the color of molten metal. He cast a frigid glance at the dozens of Aurora clansmen gathered before him, each shorter, each visibly trembling.

  A sneer split his face.

  “Aurora Clan… you’ve fallen far.”

  “After all your so-called evolutions, to be injured by laughable human weapons? Hah. This king almost feels tempted to devour you where you stand.”

  No one dared meet his gaze, much less reply. The ones humiliated were Fengao and his two companions, and everyone knew it. But knowledge alone was dangerous here—Cuan’s mental power could peel thoughts straight from their skulls. Even silent resentment would be suicide.

  Against a true sovereign, the weak were as glass—transparent, fragile, unable to even hide their own fear.

  “Hmph. This latest evolution… I’m thousands of times stronger than before. And I’m hungry.”

  “They’ll make a fine snack.”

  In a blur, Cuan vanished, reappearing outside, suspended amid blue skies and drifting clouds.

  The wind tore at his ears as Earth’s gravity seized him, dragging him downward in a freefall. He made no move to resist.

  When the barren ground rushed up to meet him, he halted—not slowing, but stopping, the abrupt stillness jarring against the violence of his fall. Hands clasped behind his back, he hung there, radiating a pressure that was anything but human.

  The earth below split apart, layers of dirt and rock ripped open like paper. Three bellowing Aurora warriors erupted from the fissure.

  They froze when they saw him.

  “King?!”

  Fengao, Manzang, Cengmu—their guts turned to ice. Every instinct screamed run, but their bodies wouldn’t obey.

  Crunch… crunch… crunch!

  Cuan’s head swelled grotesquely, cheeks distorting as something thrashed inside. A storm of muffled violence filled the air—explosions, whistling impacts, tearing wind, bone-snapping cracks, and the muffled screams of the three warriors.

  Even blows that could level a city couldn’t pierce the flesh of his mouth.

  “Aaaah! Spare us!”

  “King! No!”

  Their desperate cries were swallowed by the wet, rhythmic grind of his jaws. Pitch-black blood laced with flickers of lightning seeped from the corners of his lips, each drop sizzling as it struck the ashen ground below.

  Gulp… gulp… gulp.

  Cuan tipped back his head. One final swallow.

  “Hoo~.”

  Cuan let out a slow breath, a chilling chuckle slipping past his lips.

  "Truly… exhilarating. And over so quickly."

  He lifted his gaze to the empty, endless blue above, his expression dripping with contempt.

  "Ha… ha… ha. Your terrified stares, your confused whispers—let them blaze as fireworks in tribute to your king."

  With a mere flick of his eyes, his gaze cut through the heavy atmosphere, clearly picking out dozens of machines with reconnaissance functions hovering afar.

  Relaxed and in no hurry, Cuan had been planning to head farther out, tear down a few more cities, and indulge in a small feast—when a profound, immense mental power suddenly swept lightly across the surface of his body.

  "Who?!"

  He snapped his head toward the source, his stare sharp with shock and suspicion.

  "So strong! This presence… it’s no weaker than mine! Impossible! I am the greatest lifeform on this planet!"

  Yet even as he barked the words, his mind returned to that enormous surge of energy yesterday—the one that had wrenched him from his deep slumber far too early.

  It had been… more than 10,000 kilometers away.

  Such a staggering distance, and still the aftershock had reached him, jarring him awake.

  "This planet… hides something unusual."

  "Should I… leave it for now?"

  For a heartbeat, Cuan hesitated.

  Then, without warning, a violent sense of danger slammed into him, flooding his entire being, sinking into every cell.

  It was so foreign—so utterly alien to his existence—that it froze him in place.

  In that frozen instant, the world around him began to shudder. The ground and air boiled and roared, erupting into an endless, all-consuming sea of fire.

  And from the sky, a familiar aura descended.

  Cuan knew it at once.

  "The human… the one who killed Vuron!!"

  Cuan’s eyes widened in shock.

  Above him blazed a mass of light so intense it seemed as though the sun itself had descended—searing, blinding, and packed with an unfathomable, crushing kinetic force—plummeting straight from the heavens.

  And in that razor-thin instant before impact, he caught a glimpse.

  It was… a foot.

  Heading straight for his face.

  BOOM!!!

  The detonation was like unleashing a hundred billion tons of TNT in a single heartbeat.

  The ruins of the capital were annihilated—vaporized into nothingness.

  The Pyramid, like a top lashed by a brutal strike, spun and tore through layer after layer of atmosphere, hurtling hundreds of thousands of miles until it crashed into a remote desert.

  Before the stunned Aurora Clan crew could even react, a colossal mental power swept through the ground itself, locking onto them with unyielding precision.

  In an instant, the entire Pyramid—structure and crew alike—was frozen at the sub-atomic level.

  The earth for hundreds of kilometers buckled inward. Air, stone, metal—everything—was reduced to an endless, incandescent ocean of light and heat.

  A wall of air, vast and terrifying, roared outward like a cosmic tidal wave.

  Even faster shockwaves tore through the land, engulfing all of Beaconreach.

  Mountains and monoliths alike were hurled skyward at speeds exceeding 10,000 meters per second, escaping Earth’s pull and vanishing into the infinite void—transformed into hundreds of thousands of meteors.

  From the moon’s surface, one would see the Beaconreach continent spitting out a storm of burning meteors, so many they shrouded half the sky in flame.

  Meanwhile, tens of thousands of molten pillars erupted from the ruptured depths below, each one laced with staggering heat and kinetic fury. They punched through the atmosphere, streaking into orbit.

  RUMBLE!!!

  Near-Earth satellites were swallowed whole, torn apart by the upward surge.

  A handful, saved only by desperate remote control, stayed in place—watching in horror.

  Through their lenses, they saw the center of devastation.

  Shrouded in haze yet still glowing crimson, a blinding white cavern of light yawned open—its brilliance painful to behold.

  And from that cavern’s base…

  CLATTER CLATTER CLATTER!!!

  The bedrock itself trembled as a colossal blue Pillar of Light, a hundred meters wide, drilled downward with terrifying speed, ripping the crust apart.

  At the bottom of that blazing shaft—

  “AHHHHHHHH!!!”

  Cuan’s screams tore through the molten air. His body, more than half obliterated, was being crushed beneath Seraphine’s foot, her heel grinding his skull into pulp as she drove him relentlessly downward, smashing him through layer after layer of stone.

  Every passing second saw him forced through tens of thousands of meters of rock, Seraphine’s expression utterly indifferent as she stomped him deeper and deeper.

  Friction from their descent heated the tunnel walls to such extremes that even lava couldn’t exist—matter was ripped into plasma, flooding the passage with roaring, lightning-laced energy.

  The tunnel—a searing blue wound hundreds of kilometers deep—crackled with arcs of blinding electricity.

  Cuan’s body was little more than a shattered skeleton now. Limbs gone, torso half-erased, he seethed with rage and despair.

  In millions of years of life, never—never—had he endured such humiliation.

  “DAMN IT! UNFORGIVABLE!!!”

  His mangled face twisted, and he roared:

  “Aurora Art — Earth’s Work!!!”

  In a desperate bid, thousands of unbreakable whips burst from his flesh, lancing outward in all directions for hundreds of kilometers. At their ends, even more tendrils erupted—penetrating thousands of meters in every direction, weaving an intricate, continent-spanning lattice.

  In seconds, the land itself—the bedrock, the plates, the deep tectonic layers—was bound into a single unified structure.

  He tried to shift the continent’s very foundations, to counter her unstoppable stomp.

  But it was useless.