Emberlight Empire, Ashara, Kael’s residence.

  “Today… is it already the seventh day of the first month of the Eon Calendar?”

  Seraphine frowned, fixing Kael with a sharp gaze. Her voice dropped low:

  “And what you just said— that I’ve only been gone from Earth for two hours?!”

  “Uh… yes.”

  Kael looked utterly bewildered.

  Scratching the back of his head, he gave a sheepish laugh.

  “Didn’t you just summon everyone for a meeting this morning? This… disciple thought you’d be away for quite some time. Never imagined you’d return merely two hours after leaving.”

  “Hm——”

  Seraphine slowly clasped her hands behind her back and turned to the window. The sky outside was a clear, endless blue.

  “You may continue your cultivation.”

  “Ah, ah, yes, Master.”

  Though still confused, Kael nodded earnestly.

  “Then… Master, take care.”

  Seraphine gave the faintest nod, her expression unreadable. In the next instant, her figure blurred and vanished before his eyes.

  Once Seraphine had gone, Kael sat cross-legged again, slowly rising into the air. From his storage bracelet he drew out an Ether-Crystalline long blade.

  Ten thousand miles away, several thousand meters above the vast Pacific Ocean—

  Swoosh!

  A massive pocket of air was suddenly displaced, and Seraphine’s figure emerged.

  Her eyes swept coldly downward as she released her Divine Will, instantly enveloping the entire Earth.

  Buzz——

  Her Divine Will, as vast and bottomless as an abyss, rolled out and instantly wrapped the entire globe.

  In an instant a flood of information poured into Seraphine’s mind.

  Life-expectancy shifts across continents, the subtle rhythmic vibrations of the planet’s core and crust, global ocean current circulation maps — data layered and pulsing, every thread of planetary telemetry arriving at once.

  She sifted and cross-checked that torrent of mixed signals, and confirmed Kael’s words exactly. Today was indeed the seventh day of the first month, and she had truly been away from Earth for only two hours.

  So what had actually happened during that span?

  “Previously, the Astralglow Tiger ‘stagnated’ me inside that warped region of the Wormhole for two months,” she murmured, “but now it’s as if that never occurred. This is very odd.”

  Two hours… counted from the moment she had last left Earth, it matched the instant before she was about to step into the Wormhole.

  She gathered the stream of time-data for this patch of space-time with painstaking care — separating threads, comparing timestamps, validating consistency — and confirmed this was indeed the Prime space-time.

  Her eyes flickered. A single, silent thought, then full comprehension:

  “So that’s it. I see.”

  “This anomaly must have originated back on that vast River of Time, caused by the ‘erasure’ executed by that black-gold Phoenix of unknown origin. It wiped the Astralglow Tiger from existence from its birth up to its millionth year, and that cascade produced these effects. If the 【Cause】 is removed, then downstream 【Effect】 vanishes too — meaning I, positioned later in the timeline, would no longer have experienced that two-month ‘stagnation’ calamity. The Prime timeline’s flow has effectively been pushed back by two months…”

  She paused, then froze. “Wait—no, no, no!”

  A tight frown cut across her face as she muttered to herself: “My memories haven’t shifted at all. The thousands of space-time traversals, the emergence of the black-gold Phoenix, its manipulation of future space-time — I recall every step clearly. My Physical Strength and Soul attributes, which rose multiple times, and the space-time skills evolved from all those traversals, have not been lost or reduced, including…”

  Seraphine’s thoughts shifted. She opened her Dimensional Pocket and looked inside.

  The Astralglow Tiger’s predecessor, the Pyramid spaceship, the massive remains of the Alefen Colossus, and the two colossal space-time saucers—all were still there.

  She hesitated, murmuring softly:

  “From the current situation… after the Prime space-time’s timeline shifted, every unfavorable effect that should have fallen upon me seems to have bypassed me entirely. Not a trace remains, and even…”

  Her gaze suddenly lifted, sweeping outward toward other continents—toward the countless islands scattered across the seas south of the Divine Continent.

  Vast mountain ranges, coastlines, plains, rolling hills—everywhere she looked had become desolate, eerily empty.

  No cities. No towns. No villages.

  Not even the faintest sign of artificial alteration remained.

  Places where bustling human settlements should have stood were now drowned beneath primeval forests and endless grasslands.

  And yet something was strange.

  The enormous molten crater she herself had blasted open in the heart of Beaconreach remained exactly where it was, but around it there was no trace of human presence.

  From sky to earth, lakes to seas, rivers to shores—every sign that humans had once lived there had been erased.

  Not the acquired disappearance of forced clearance or destruction.

  But as if humanity had never set foot there for thousands, even tens of thousands of years.

  As if no one had ever been born in those places.

  That kind of terrifying, absolute erasure.

  In those vast regions, only great herds of monstrous beasts roamed—creatures swollen with new strength from the resurgence of Ether—relentlessly staging the cruel and bloody theater of the animal kingdom.

  More disturbing still: a single sweep of her Divine Will across the planet revealed the truth.

  Earth’s human population in this Prime space-time had fallen by several billion.

  From its original seven to eight billion, several billion souls had vanished.

  Theoretically, the hundred-plus nations and billions of people who had once lived on Earth’s surface had all vanished into thin air.

  Across the entire planet, not a single non-Emberlight human remained.

  Confronted with this world-shattering anomaly, Seraphine had no patience to question each high-ranking imperial official. Instead, she directly scanned the memories of tens of thousands of ordinary people across every stratum of society.

  And in those memories, she discovered—

  Everyone retained fragments of information about other countries. They knew of ancient foreign histories, famous figures, and faraway lands. Yet none of them could recall when, or how, those nations outside Emberlight had disappeared.

  Most only realized something was wrong when emergency news broadcasts forced the truth before their eyes.

  Naturally, the discovery ignited furious debate online, where countless netizens clashed in heated discussions.

  The imperial government, cautious and swift, immediately dispatched survey teams to the farthest corners of the globe, seeking to uncover the truth behind this colossal event—an event where every nation and every population beyond Emberlight had simply ceased to exist.

  “Could it be… caused by that wave of space-time turbulence? No, that feels too much like a coincidence—too deliberately targeted.”

  Seraphine exhaled sharply.

  “All in all, I still profited. No damage to myself, a host of new space-time skills, and even four days of free attribute doubling… Huh?!”

  Her eyes widened. She whispered:

  “This is a flaw. A flaw in the system’s 【Time Flow】 and 【Moment】 judgment mechanism!”

  Hovering in the air, she began pacing back and forth, muttering as she moved.

  “If that really was my future self, her wisdom would not fall short of mine. In fact, after enduring enough time, it would almost certainly surpass mine. With such wisdom, she would definitely detect the flaw exposed by the system this time.

  The method itself is simple: first stir up a massive downstream tide in past time, then reach back from the future into that past to ‘freeze’ the tide while simultaneously erasing the one who created it.

  Or—create a space-time ‘explosion’ at the tide’s origin point, forcing turbulence to erupt. Then, use that turbulence to interfere with the system’s time-judgment mechanism, seizing the chance for multiple attribute doublings.

  The execution may be complex, but with the space-time manipulation abilities of a future self—and sufficient practice—one could essentially ‘farm’ attributes, like exploiting a bug in a video game.

  For instance: let time accumulate for ten days or half a month. Then, while minimizing all adverse side effects, reset that entire span back to its starting day, and begin the accumulation anew.

  Repeat the cycle as often as patience allows. Repeat it endlessly.

  One single day could be leveraged to make attributes skyrocket without limit.”

  Suppressing the storm of emotions in her mind, Seraphine forced herself to think of another angle.

  “Could there be another possibility? Could it be that my future self has already mastered some method to bypass the system’s time-judgment mechanism?”

  Her thoughts stretched further, unfurling like threads across time, until a sudden idea struck.

  “There’s also this possibility: the future me deliberately displayed this attribute-readable anomaly before my past self—precisely as a reminder. A signal that the system has loopholes, that it is not flawless, and that its rules can be exploited like bugs!

  And at this very moment, by receiving that reminder, I—the present me—have begun entertaining the idea of exploiting those bugs. That curiosity could drive me to research relentlessly, eventually cracking the system’s time-judgment mechanism. And that would explain the incredibly powerful self I will one day become.”

  Her eyes narrowed, gleaming with a sharper light.

  “Moreover, if the system’s time-judgment mechanism can be deceived through a series of methods, then… is the attribute doubling multiplier truly fixed? What if there’s a way to shatter the doubling rule altogether?”

  After a long silence, Seraphine slowly reined in her wandering speculation. The scattered storm of thoughts quieted, her expression smoothing into calm.

  “Overthinking leads nowhere. But researching the system itself… that must be placed on my agenda immediately.”

  A smile touched her lips.

  “If one can stack cheats upon cheats, create even bigger, more outrageous cheats—who could possibly refuse?”

  Even as she said this, another memory surfaced—an answer revealed during her battle with the Astralglow Tiger, when Chaos Calculation had tapped into the Ocean of Knowledge.

  That answer which reclaimed her two months of attribute growth lost to ‘Stagnation’——

  【Experience spacetime shifts. Reverse past and future.】

  “Reversing past and future—yes. But…”

  Seraphine raised her gaze to the heavens, confusion stirring in her mind, and whispered:

  “But why can Chaos Calculation, as though traversing the future, already grasp this answer?”

  She once again felt deeply astonished by the miraculous nature of Chaos Calculation.

  Thinking that, aside from herself in the Prime space-time, it was highly likely that no other “Seraphine” across parallel timelines possessed Chaos Calculation, she couldn’t help but feel a faint tremor of emotion—about destiny itself… about the so-called unfathomable hand of fate.

  Her gaze turned vacant yet shimmered with color as she murmured:

  “Could the abilities Chaos Calculation has revealed be nothing more than fragments of its true essence? Did I truly awaken it on my own… or was it born as the result of some future cause?”

  Buzz—

  As her emotions swelled, Seraphine suddenly set Chaos Calculation upon itself, forcing it to calculate its own essence.

  At the same time, the Eye of True Revelation joined the effort, working in unison with Chaos Calculation, exhausting their combined might to unravel the truth—the hidden core of Chaos Calculation itself.

  The computation stretched on endlessly.

  So long that the sun dipped and the moon rose, climbing to its zenith.

  So long that time itself slipped quietly forward—until the first year of the Eon Calendar, January 8th.

  The Infinite Attributes system stirred once more.

  【Host: Seraphine】

  【Physical Strength: 12312 Star】

  【Soul: 12312 Star】

  Another attribute doubling surged through her. In an instant, Seraphine possessed power equal to more than ten thousand suns.

  But she only cast a passing glance at the panel before turning her focus to the vague answer that had emerged from the joint calculation of Chaos Calculation and the Eye of True Revelation within her mind:

  【...Fusion...Wisdom...Omniscience...】

  “Hm...”

  Seraphine hesitated. “Does this mean the Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation must fuse, evolving once more?”

  Out in the endless cosmos, Seraphine sat cross-legged, her entire being ablaze with radiant divine light.

  The brilliance was so intense that all sentient beings across the surface of Earth could faintly see a piercing point of light—bright as the sun—burning through the veil of the atmosphere.

  “My foundations in every aspect are complete,” she said softly. “At last, I can make my move—to break through the Martial Saint, and advance into Divinitas.”

  According to the martial arts cultivation system Seraphine had devised for herself, she was still within the Martial Saint realm, not yet having broken through into the higher Divinitas Great Realm.

  If one were to speak strictly in terms of realm divisions, she was far behind—not only when compared to the “Seraphine” and Kael of another space-time, who had already stepped beyond Divinitas, but even when measured against Marie. Marie, blessed with unmatched martial arts talent, had by the age of thirty-three soared straight to the peak of the Divinitas realm, like bamboo shooting upward after the rain.

  Yet this was nothing more than a realm, a label, a man-made framework for dividing so-called levels. It could not truly capture the essence of life’s evolution.

  It was like comparing one U.S. dollar with one Zimbabwean dollar. Numerically, both were “one,” yet in value, the gulf was immeasurable.

  So too with cultivation. Even if two people were said to stand within the same Divinitas Great Realm, the martial systems of different space-times could diverge vastly in actual power and life level.

  In the Prime space-time, should an Earth human cultivate the Earthbless Codex—Seraphine’s carefully deduced martial system—to its absolute limit, and ascend into Divinitas, they would become an Ether-fed existence. Their bodies would hold more than a trillion tons of raw might, able to bind infinite streams of Ether with a single thought and unleash techniques powerful enough to annihilate planet-sized super lifeforms.

  Placed against that other space-time’s standard, such a Divinitas would be equivalent to Kael and the alternate “Seraphine,” who had reached levels beyond Divinitas.

  And Seraphine herself… was already something far greater, beyond comparison, beyond imagination.

  The evolutionary path of the Skyroot Codex was a road of unparalleled difficulty, not only to begin but to cultivate onward. Its very foundation rested upon the dimensional upgrading of the one hundred and eight Great Apertures within the human body.

  To raise dimensions meant drawing in pure energy from higher-dimensional space. But this energy came with a price: its demands on both Physical Strength and Soul Strength were merciless. Even the faintest trace absorbed by someone lacking sufficient strength would erase them utterly, body and soul alike.

  And to even perceive this high-dimensional energy, much less absorb it, required high-dimensional senses—yet another threshold.

  Beyond that stood the ordeal of opening the Nine Heavenly Gates. Each Gate pushed open caused every Aperture in the body to ascend by 0.1 of a dimension. But with each Gate opened, the pressure on body and soul grew exponentially.

  When all Nine Gates were forced open, all 108 Great Apertures within the body would rise to the level of 3.9-dimensional Apertures. At that stage, one would stand a single step away from reaching true four-dimensional Apertures.

  But that final step… was more difficult than the combined effort of opening all Nine Gates before it.

  Otherwise, Seraphine would never have lingered so long at the threshold of the Nine Heavenly Gates before daring to attempt dimensional ascension—for such a step demanded an unimaginably profound foundation.

  Yet despite its brutality, this path, once fully traversed, would lead to the Divinitas she herself had created.

  And now, at last, the moment had come.

  Seraphine resolved to fuse all one hundred and eight Great Apertures within her body into a single whole, using that union to refine both body and soul, sublimating them into a fully realized Four-Dimensional—thereby stepping beyond mortality into the existence of a true high-dimensional lifeform.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  A four-dimensional Divinitas.

  In the vast and silent universe, nearly five trillion kilometers from Earth, lay the Oort Cloud—the Solar System’s farthest frontier.

  Here drifted endless fragments: shattered asteroids and barren comets of every size, mingled with dust-clouds so vast in scale yet so faint in density they stretched across unfathomable space.

  Buzz ——

  Within the haze of cosmic dust, a massive spatial distortion suddenly blossomed.

  From its depths yawned a winding passage no wider than a hundred meters across, yet extending for an unknowable number of trillions of kilometers.

  The passage blazed with searing heat, containing nothing but boundless thermal energy. No particles, no debris—only the residual scar carved when Seraphine had ignited her warp bubble and burned a corridor straight from Earth across half the Solar System.

  The bubble flared once more, then vanished. Seraphine stepped calmly out from the distortion.

  She paused, gazing at the infinite void, then seated herself cross-legged in the emptiness, stilling her mind as she prepared to ascend.

  This breakthrough demanded an all-out assault across every front—body, soul, and divine aura.

  By her own deduction and design, the ascent from peak Martial Saint to Four-Dimensional Divinitas required shattering three barriers.

  The first step: the solidification of the 【Immortal Primordial Soul】.

  The so-called Immortal Primordial Soul was forged through zero-point energy extraction, controllable quantum fluctuation, matter–energy conversion, gravitational manipulation, and other esoteric methods. Seraphine relentlessly compressed her vast and boundless soul body until it solidified into a structural form that simulated the partial existence mechanism of a black hole.

  This new soul-structure could instantaneously devour and digest all external matter, energy, information—even the subtle influences of surrounding force fields—refining them into a pure four-dimensional energy state.

  Throughout this process, Seraphine merged the Body-Soul (the instinctual and information-transmission system of the flesh) with the Mind-Soul (the operating system of thought and consciousness). Both were united under the rule of Spirituality as King: the root of wisdom itself, the fundamental Spirituality, presiding over body and mind alike. This union produced a vast, indescribably complex information-state framework—something no three-dimensional structure could ever express—yet one that fully governed the Primordial Soul.

  Finally, with Divine Will as her inexhaustible fuel, she fused all these components together through long, obscure cycles of tempering and sublimation. The end result was a single entity whose very existence could collapse matter, boil energy, and unravel the fundamental forces of the external cosmos.

  It was called the Primordial Soul, yet in truth it resembled less a soul than a dangerous, living black hole.

  Hidden deep within Seraphine’s body, this Immortal Primordial Soul was not designed to protect itself. More often than not, it served to protect the fragile external world from being annihilated by its very presence.

  The term “Immortal” signified that no matter or phenomenon within three-dimensional reality could ever destroy, or even so much as scratch, the Primordial Soul’s true form.

  This was because any attack, before even reaching its surface, was instantly vaporized into pure light and thermal energy by a destructive force field—one that propagated, enveloped, and expanded at the speed of light—before being effortlessly consumed within its domain.

  Buzz ——

  Seraphine’s entire body blazed with endless radiant light, from afar resembling a humanoid Great Sun.

  Deep within her mind, that abyssal, boundless soul suddenly trembled—then erupted with a thunderous roar, unleashing hundreds of millions of divine rays into the outside world.

  Boom!!

  In a single instant, those blazing torrents pierced directly through the Sentience Realm, throwing the Projected Layer into utter chaos.

  Within the Projected Layer, countless warped color blocks—representations of dream clusters—shattered like fragile glass, vanishing and leaving behind vast hollow voids.

  The Symbolic Domain beneath it quaked violently. The divine rays, upon entry, accelerated to one hundred thousand times the speed of light, raging like a storm. In the span of one second, they traversed a thirty-billion-kilometer radius, tearing the void into a titanic honeycomb of light, vast enough to bury all things. Even a damaged Sentience Realm Hallway, drifting across that region by coincidence, was obliterated. Its structure collapsed, unable to repair or close again for a long while.

  Meanwhile, in the material void itself, countless meteors and comets within several hundred thousand kilometers of Seraphine’s seated form shattered and vaporized. The very atomic lattice of countless tons of matter disintegrated under the assault, reduced to pure, terrifying light and heat. Even the cosmic dust and frozen comets farther afield melted into glowing plasma.

  For a fleeting moment, that once-dim nebula—this forgotten corner of the Oort Cloud—flared with sudden brilliance, as though two suns had appeared in the Solar System. The vast radiance outshone even true stars, a flood of destructive light that bathed the universe itself.

  Buzz… buzz… buzz ——

  The Nebula, which had blazed like a second sun, gradually dimmed once more.

  At its center, Seraphine sat unmoving. The violent trembling of her soul stilled as she began refining her vast soul body, drawing body and mind into a single unity.

  The process manifested as the inward collapse of her soul body—like a radiant star imploding into a black hole, a furious core of annihilating gravity.

  Rumble!!!

  The collapse tore through the surrounding emptiness. Even the vast fabric of space-time, already hollow and silent, was dragged and warped, pulled from every direction into her abyssal center.

  The collapse lasted five… six minutes.

  By then, gravitational tides—propagating outward at the speed of light—had engulfed a radius of one trillion kilometers. Every fragment of matter within that boundless sphere had been stripped of form, reduced to light and heat, and devoured by the embryonic Primordial Soul.

  Meanwhile, quantum fluctuations—erupting everywhere in the trillion-kilometer void—were forcibly drawn inward. Each high-frequency oscillation between the virtual and the real detonated into a colossal outburst, like a true gamma-ray burst.

  From Seraphine’s seated form, an incandescent cluster of light exploded forth, flooding the dark void with storms of ultra-energetic photons.

  The scale defied reason: in a single second, the energy released surpassed the Sun’s total output across tens of millions—perhaps hundreds of millions—of years. Each photon born from her collapse carried one hundred thousand times the force of an ordinary solar photon.

  And it was within this rare, terrible, and magnificent spectacle that Seraphine completed the forging of her Immortal Primordial Soul.

  Boom!!!

  It was as if a true black hole had opened within the far reaches of the Oort Cloud—no, more terrifying still, a self-propagating singularity, capable of expanding its own annihilation field.

  In an instant, the destructive force surged outward at light speed. Any fragment of matter unlucky enough to drift into its domain shared the same fate: instant vaporization into pure light and heat, before vanishing into that dark, lightless, four-dimensional metaphysical sphere—the embodiment of Seraphine’s thoughts, will, and mental consciousness—devoured from afar.

  Yet in the next moment, Seraphine drew the Immortal Primordial Soul back into the depths of her body.

  She had no choice. Even for her, its unrestrained power could warp or wound her very being. Only by forcibly manipulating the fundamental forces could she suppress its radiance and keep herself intact.

  “Hoo——”

  A breath escaped her lips, blazing with light. With it, she began the second step—constructing the 【Divinitas Frame】.

  Buzz~~

  The one hundred and eight Great Apertures within her body flared at once, each like a miniature sun, flooding the void with boundless brilliance.

  The blazing radiance wove itself into patterns incomprehensible to mortal logic. In a single instant, all apertures connected, fused, and transcended—becoming a vast space-time lattice that seemed to contain the true myriad phenomena of the cosmos itself.

  Externally, Seraphine’s form dissolved into luminosity. Her skin, muscles, organs, bones, even her brain—all blurred, all grew ethereal.

  On the smallest scale, even the countless cells comprising her body began to dissolve, shedding their solidity. Within them, hidden structures—impossible to depict in three-dimensional space—emerged and evolved, intricate beyond mortal comprehension.

  Her being flickered, leapt, and sang in endless transformation.

  Transformed to the brink of departing three-dimensional space-time itself.

  Seraphine’s body was no longer merely human flesh. It was becoming something higher: a four-dimensional structure.

  During this transformation, she felt like a tiny frog trapped at the bottom of a shallow well, climbing upward step by step, struggling to catch a glimpse of the vast universe above.

  In her perception, all matter, energy, and force surrounding her gradually grew simpler, duller—reduced to the faint outlines of uncolored sketches.

  But this sensation was nothing new to Seraphine. She had experienced it countless times before when activating her high-dimensional vision.

  The difference now was that the scope and clarity of her so-called high-dimensional senses far surpassed the perception of her present four-dimensional body—stretching across multiple universes, extending into high-dimensional spaces beyond the third dimension, and even further still.

  Seraphine realized that what she had once called high-dimensional senses should, in truth, be named super-dimensional senses.

  Their reach was infinitely beyond the limits of four-dimensional perception.

  Thus she understood: high-dimensional life was not something that needed to be overly mythologized. After all, its body was still made of fundamental particles, each retaining its dimensional attributes.

  The difference lay only in degree: the vast escalation of total energy and information within the body, and the sheer intricacy of its structure—far beyond anything a three-dimensional lifeform could ever evolve. Such a body could wield functions utterly impossible for lesser beings.

  From her own calculations, Seraphine further confirmed that if native life truly existed within four-dimensional space, they would likely be born with the might of top-tier Milky Way Overlord-class beings—perhaps even beyond.

  “To the final step.”

  Without relying on any trans-spatial abilities, she crossed three-dimensional space with ease, traversing a hundred thousand miles in a single step—solely by virtue of the natural abilities of a four-dimensional lifeform—before sitting cross-legged once more.

  After her transformation, Seraphine found that her body seemed to have evolved countless new functions, still waiting to be explored and understood.

  But such discoveries could be left for later. The priority now was the third step in advancing to the Divinitas Great Realm.

  To cultivate the 【Celestial Arcana】.

  Buzz ——

  In an instant, Seraphine was engulfed by a radiant sphere of light, ten thousand miles wide, blazing like a Great Sun.

  Beneath her, a phantom world spanning several hundred thousand kilometers unfolded, centered upon her figure.

  Screech!!!

  From within that phantom world, a colossal Three-legged Golden Crow emerged, its body vast as a star. Majestic and resplendent, it unfurled its dazzling wings. With a single beat, it swept around the blazing Great Sun that encircled Seraphine, orbiting her without pause.

  After several revolutions, the Golden Crow merged with the Great Sun, becoming one.

  This was her divine aura, long dormant yet never lost.

  Divine aura was a power that could temporarily embody the mysteries of all natural things—born when innate Aether was sublimated under the true will of the Great Sun.

  It could seize objects like telekinesis, or manifest and simulate countless forms.

  It could even, by aligning with the true will of the Great Sun, evolve into a true Great Sun itself.

  But in the next instant, all of it shattered into nothingness.

  Seraphine had abruptly annihilated the true will of the Great Sun itself.

  No—this was not annihilation.

  It was continuous evolution. Continuous advancement.

  Until at last, a single wisp of radiance emerged—blindingly brilliant, magnificently pure.

  Within that strand of white light, the sun, the moon, the stars—the myriad phenomena of the mortal world—countless main-sequence stars and planets, one after another, revealed themselves.

  Bang!!!

  “The Great Sun Golden Crow is no longer enough to represent me.”

  Seraphine stood with her hands clasped, her gaze cast into the vast, obscure universe. Her voice was cold, resolute:

  “Only light! Only the cosmos itself—opening, expanding into boundless spacetime light—can represent me!”

  “This is—the Light of Infinity!”

  At once, the four fundamental forces descended, condensing piece by piece.

  In an instant, they merged into one: an unseen yet unifying field—the 【Grand Unified Field】, the all-encompassing cradle of every 【Force】 in the universe.

  At the same time, endless high-dimensional pure energy surged forth from the surrounding void.

  Under Seraphine’s will, the Light of Infinity, the Grand Unified Field, and that pure high-dimensional energy rapidly converged and fused together—refining a celestial arcana.

  Its outer form was pure white light. But within, it shimmered with countless illusory lights of power.

  This was the 【Celestial Arcana】—the eternal source, capable of evolving all phenomena of the universe.

  As the first Celestial Arcana took form, more began to manifest around Seraphine, each one orbiting her in silent brilliance.

  Then, with a single casual gesture, she pointed into the distant universe.

  Boom!

  At once, a gas giant, one hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, erupted into being. Its immense gravity dragged meteors and comets from every direction, pulling them into fiery descent.

  Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

  The colossal planet quaked violently beneath the bombardment.

  But with a flick of her sleeve, Seraphine dissolved it into countless photon streams, scattering them across the void.

  Next, she created three stars of equal mass, bound in a shared orbit.

  Moments before their destined collision, all three vanished instantly—as though they had never existed.

  Amidst the vast, shadowed cosmos, starlight flickered faintly.

  A solitary red dwarf—smaller in volume and mass than the Sun—yet like all stars, it had shone unceasingly for billions of years, as if each day were the same.

  Then suddenly—

  Within its searing dark-red atmosphere, space itself twisted. A warp bubble erupted into being.

  Bang ——

  The warp bubble shattered in an instant, and Seraphine’s figure emerged.

  She inclined her head slightly, her cold gaze fixed on the red dwarf below, saying nothing.

  This was Centaurus—lying just south of Hydra’s head and north of the Southern Cross.

  At the central junction of three constellations—Circinus, Lupus, and Vela—it hung in the southern sky, visible from Earth’s southern hemisphere during autumn.

  In the Ancient Age of Exploration, Centaurus had been one of the most vital celestial guides. It contained the Alpha Centauri system, one of the closest triple-star systems to the Sun.

  The distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri is about 4.24 light-years. In kilometers, roughly 4 × 10^13 km—an expanse almost beyond comprehension.

  Even with Seraphine’s warp ability—optimized and enhanced countless times—capable of reaching a million times the speed of light, the journey would still take about two and a half minutes.

  And this was merely the nearest star system to the Solar System. It was her doorstep.

  If she sought the observable edge of the universe, 46.5 billion light-years away…

  Even at full speed, without pause, at a million times the speed of light, the journey would still demand 46,500 years.

  At the thought, Seraphine sighed softly.

  “The universe is… truly vast.”

  Amid her lament, she extended her hand, spreading her five slender fingers wide.

  At once, a pinpoint of darkness—a minuscule, pitch-black mass—materialized upon her pale palm, rising slowly.

  She pressed two fingers together, pinching the black speck, then with a merciless flick, hurled it down toward the searing surface of the red dwarf.

  It was a black hole.

  A miniature singularity born from nothing—conjured through the 【Celestial Arcana】, which could evolve all phenomena of the universe.

  Yet though she could now create all things, that did not mean she fully understood them.

  For within the 【Celestial Arcana】 dwelled the Light of Infinity, a force steeped in idealistic and metaphysical properties.

  Therefore, in terms of practical application, data, and physics, Seraphine needed to carry out precise experiments to refine her control over magical power.

  Knowledge acquisition is endless—forever without boundary.

  For this reason, she chose to conduct a black hole experiment, gathering detailed data in the process.

  Her decision to come this far was also deliberate: to shield the Solar System from potential harm.

  As for what damage this remote sector might suffer, it was of little concern to her.

  Swoosh ——

  The black hole fell swiftly. In an instant, it pierced through the stellar atmosphere; devouring swaths of searing plasma, it sank into the boiling, roaring surface of the red dwarf—vanishing from ordinary sight.

  But through Seraphine’s four-dimensional vision, the tiny singularity she had casually “pinched” into existence did not vanish.

  She watched as it plunged deeper, tearing through layers, feeding voraciously. Around it, incandescent matter spiraled inward, consumed in torrents, and the singularity swelled, growing ever larger.

  Yet, because its initial mass had been so minuscule, its impact was muted.

  After a short span, the region where it had fallen showed only subtle distortions in shape and luminosity. The area appeared dimmer, heavier, slightly concave—as though a massive black hole itself lurked there.

  Minutes passed.

  The now-enlarged singularity, having consumed vast reserves of stellar matter, finally forced its way into the one critical zone of the red dwarf: the core.

  Here, nuclear fusion raged with unbroken fury. Countless chain reactions ignited every second.

  In each reaction, four hydrogen nuclei fused into a single helium nucleus.

  Roughly 0.7% of the mass was released as energy—light and heat, the very forces that powered the red dwarf and held back the crushing weight of its own gravity.

  Half the star’s total mass was concentrated here. Its density, temperature, and compressive force peaked at extremes unmatched anywhere else in the Centauri system.

  But all of this was meaningless to a black hole that could devour everything.

  Everything was merely food.

  2 minutes... 5 minutes... 10 minutes...

  As time passed, Proxima Centauri had clearly shrunk by one full circle compared to when it first started. Its volume was now only slightly larger than Jupiter.

  However, apart from that, this red dwarf still appeared very quiet, as if all the chaos born from the black hole was tightly locked within its center.

  But this kind of quietness would not last long.

  Indeed, at this very moment, in Seraphine's cold eyes.

  Boom!!

  The visibly rapidly shrinking red dwarf suddenly began a comprehensive structural collapse from the inside out.

  The external manifestation was... an explosion.

  Boom!!!

  After exploding with a colossal burst of light and heat, Proxima Centauri agonizingly split into two extremely hot stellar remnants, one large and one small.

  These two dazzling, brilliant stellar remnants, as soon as they were born, angrily spewed out intense radiation and countless streams of super-hot plasma towards the outside world.

  Only a few minutes passed.

  The smaller of the two brilliant stellar remnants visibly began to indent inwards. During this indentation process, it rapidly 'slid' into the center in a swirling motion, being quickly devoured by the high-speed rotating black hole.

  Throughout the entire process of devouring, it was accompanied by surging streams of high-energy matter and emitted pulsed radiation.

  Not long after, this smaller remnant of Proxima Centauri was completely consumed by the black hole, as if it were eating it alive. Then, the black hole's gravitational clutches reached out to the not-so-distant, colossal remnant of the star, which was less than a million kilometers away.

  And that remnant of Proxima Centauri, due to the approaching distance, suffered immense tidal gravitational differential forces on its outer and inner layers, making it completely unable to maintain its shape. It was rapidly stretched and deformed by the black hole's terrifying gravity.

  Like noodles being expertly demonstrated by an old master in a street stall, the stellar remnant gradually stretched into a long, 'interstellar' hot light stream, millions of kilometers long, swirling around the rapidly rotating black hole in circles, sweeping through the surrounding starfield. It even coincidentally devoured a passing cold comet in an instant.

  Thereafter, as the swirling became faster and more intense.

  At last, in one final, magnificent detonation, the remaining body of Proxima Centauri was consumed, devoured whole by the black hole.

  Throughout the entire devouring, the black hole blazed with radiation—pouring out ultraviolet light, torrents of X-rays, and bursts so bright they seared the void itself.

  Soon, countless stellar fragments and rivers of plasma swirled around the swelling singularity, coalescing into a colossal, radiant accretion disk.

  Because its inner edge raced at near-light speed while its outer layers dragged more slowly, friction between these molten currents unleashed terrifying storms of energy.

  Some of this energy spiraled inward, vanishing into the black hole’s abyss. The rest, seized by its immense magnetic field, surged along the magnetic poles and erupted outward in twin jets of light—two colossal beams stabbing through the vast, shadowed universe.

  Thus, in less than half an hour, Proxima Centauri was erased from history.

  And with it, the entire Centauri star system had begun its march toward doom.

  Yet on the scale of the Milky Way—let alone the universe—such a tragedy was nothing. A single star’s demise, even several, was scarcely a ripple in a sea of hundreds of billions.

  Unless, of course, life existed here. Intelligent life.

  And indeed, tragically, it did.

  Roughly 200 million kilometers from where Proxima once burned, a dry, reddish-brown world of bare stone circled the star. Arid, stripped of oceans, its crust had baked for eons beneath the dwarf’s light.

  Shaped by this harsh environment—and stirred by the faint Low-Ether conditions of the Centauri Sector—this barren world, much like the desolate planets of the Solar System, had nurtured simple, primitive forms of life: a breed of silicon-based Lithic Insects.

  The difference was that, though the Ether here was far weaker than in the Solar System, the timescale was far older—stretching back to a truly ancient age.

  So ancient was their evolution that these rock-born insects, through endless ages of hardship, transformed into Silicon-based Lithic Lizards—creatures of immense strength and formidable intelligence, forged beneath the crushing power of time itself.

  And now, their civilization—after tens of thousands of years of struggle, clawing its way through scarcity to barely reach the dawn of spacefaring—looked on in despair as their “Sun” was swallowed whole by a black hole.

  In this apocalyptic calamity, the brightest minds of the Lizardmen, after frantically scratching their scaled brows, still failed to devise any path toward salvation.

  They broadcast their helpless cry into the void.

  But soon after, the pillars of their society collapsed. Order shattered. The entire civilization plunged into riots and chaos unlike anything in its history.

  And just as the Lizardmen were consumed by despair…

  The black hole above—wreathed in its brilliant accretion disk—was suddenly devoured in turn, torn away by a vast spatial vortex, like a cosmic storm unfurling in the heavens.

  In an instant, it vanished.

  The Lizardmen froze, stupefied. Then came ecstasy, wild celebration, unrestrained hope.

  But that hope did not last. For even without the black hole, their “Sun” was gone. The triple-star Centauri system itself had collapsed.

  In the end, they were still condemned to die.

  No one knew that the vortex was Seraphine’s work.

  For even with her power, she could not truly destroy a black hole. To shield the Solar System, she had simply forged a new space-time coordinate and hurled the singularity into the unknown through the Real Number Channel.

  Where did it arrive?

  Would it one day bring annihilation to another civilization?

  Seraphine did not care.

  Turning her gaze from the lizard world, sinking once more into despair, she unfolded a Lorenz warp bubble and vanished from the disintegrating Centauri system.

  Moments later—

  In the frigid outskirts of the Solar System, amid the Kuiper Belt—

  On the frozen surface of a drifting comet, Seraphine sat cross-legged, cultivating.

  The barren celestial body beneath her, under the influence of her meditation, warped like pliant rubber—its mass, volume, and density shifting in violent flux.

  Buzz ——

  After one final transformation, the comet quietly dissolved into a flood of pure light and heat, blooming into a blinding brilliance that scattered into the boundless void.

  Only then had she fully completed the integration and refinement of her Immortal Primordial Soul, Divinitas Frame, and Celestial Arcana.

  If, when they first awoke, these three were little budding seeds, now—having reached their apex—they had truly blossomed and borne fruit.

  Thus, the 《Skyroot Codex》 was perfected under Seraphine’s hand. The evolutionary path ahead slipped again into unknown mist; it was time to invent new techniques.

  【Host: Seraphine】

  【Physical Strength: 3.3 million Star】

  【Soul: 3.3 million Star】

  With a mass-equivalent power exceeding 3.3 million Suns, Seraphine had never felt so vast.

  “3.3 million suns of power…”

  Seraphine closed her eyes slowly, trying to dull the blinding radiance that lingered in her gaze.

  Those rays—energy on the scale of a true gamma-ray burst—could, if carelessly aimed at a star a trillion kilometers away, utterly erase it from existence.

  “I am too powerful.”

  For the first time, she sensed the volume of force within her as slightly excessive—an uneasy edge of control slipping from her grasp.

  Then a familiar thread registered in her senses.

  “Space-time force?!”

  In an instant Seraphine turned her perception toward the Sentience Realm. Deep within, the Hallway was knitting itself back together, emitting a slow, persistent brilliance. Even across the layers of space-time, the Hallway shards gathering and recombining—and the scattered strands of space-time power that flared during their reunion—appeared vivid in her mind.

  “A space-time diamond, perhaps?”

  She drew from her Dimensional Pocket a glittering, transparent object—a Regret Potion, black-diamond in hue—and let it hover before her.

  “Wrong.”

  A frown tightened. The space-time force embedded in the Sentience Realm’s Hallway was, in quality, far inferior to even the Regret Potion.

  “The Regret Potion’s core is superfine space-time diamond powder. Then… the Hallway is likely composed of—”

  At that moment, Chaos Calculation screamed a frantic warning.

  【Danger! Danger! Danger! Danger! Danger!】

  “Hmm?!”

  Seraphine’s eyes opened. Two phantom beams of divine light burst forth, racing at light speed, piercing every barrier in the universe ahead, streaking toward the Kuiper Belt’s depths.

  Her mind pulsed; Chaos Calculation’s data poured into her awareness:

  【Root Spirituality support is insufficient. When Physical Strength and Soul attributes simultaneously exceed 100 million Star, self-collapse will occur. At that point, there is a 50% probability of becoming an impartial, emotionless cultivation machine; a 50% probability of becoming a ruthless evil god, eternally and indiscriminately annihilating all things.】

  “A built-in death clause?”

  Seraphine sat unmoving in the void, considering.

  “It seems desire—longing for immortality—is no longer strong enough to uphold this swelling force. Desire is weak, satiable. Root Spirituality requires a different anchor.”

  She inhaled the void’s cold silence. “I need a support in my mind that is not desire. Not want. I need a belief—immovable, absolute—to bear this weight.”