“Uh… Uh…”

  Yimier, tossed about like a rag doll by Cadelon, lay crumpled in the corner of the hall, groaning weakly. His bloated body gushed streams of mercury fluid laced with crackling lightning. His life aura was fading fast—he looked as if he wouldn’t last much longer.

  Beep! Beep! Beep!

  [Warning! Overlord Stage Ten lifeform detected. Extreme caution advised.]

  [Warning! Overlord Stage Ten lifeform detected. Extreme caution advised.]

  [Warning! Overlord Stage Ten lifeform detected. Extreme caution advised.]

  The old captain of the Mercury Race, standing not far away, was paralyzed—utterly unwilling to step forward and rescue his prince.

  The combat power detector strapped to his Etheric Battleform’s wrist had transmitted the warning, and the message shattered his courage. He stood rooted like a statue, frozen in place.

  Behind his stiff, fearful mask, turmoil churned in waves through his heart:

  Impossible! Here, in this remote sector at the edge of the Orion Arm… how could a Milky Way Overlord appear?!

  And not just any Overlord—Stage Ten! The very pinnacle, a living legend!

  The high-grade Battleform’s detection accuracy is dozens of times sharper than any standard starship system. It can’t be wrong. It can’t… What should I do?!

  An existence like this… Even my Mercury Empire has only three of them! How could I stumble into such a nightmare? My luck is cursed!

  Of course, the old captain did not recognize Cadelon.

  Nor did Cadelon care. After all, her dominion was the galactic core.

  As for this distant fringe of the Orion Arm—a place she regarded as little more than the Milky Way’s backwaters—she had not set foot here in ages.

  Any legends of her name in this spiral arm had long since withered and been buried by time.

  Still, the other party’s frozen silence displeased her.

  Her voice cut colder as she pressed again:

  “What—shall I repeat myself?”

  Buzz ——

  As her question fell, the old captain felt as if he had plunged straight into hell; the world around him seemed to melt away.

  Terror flooded his mind in an instant, his nervous system seared as though scorched alive by the glare of plasma fire, pain stabbing into the very marrow of his being.

  Ugh… this aura… I’m going to die!

  Perhaps Cadelon’s energy field had flared too violently, for the combat power detector shrilled even louder:

  [Warning! Overlord Stage Ten lifeform detected. Error. Error. Warning!]

  [Overlord Stage Ten lifeform detected. Error. Error… Warning… Unable to identify. Unable to identify. Extreme danger. Extreme dan…]

  Bang!

  The combat power detector abruptly exploded, jolting the stupefied captain—and drawing Cadelon’s notice.

  Her gaze slid toward the smoldering device strapped to his wrist. Curling her lips, she sneered:

  “Pathetic low-grade creature. Did you really think you could measure my combat power?”

  The captain shuddered from head to toe. He fought down the dread swelling in his chest from the shattered detector, along with the physical and mental torment wrought by her crushing aura. Meeting that single eye, alive with strands of dark-blue lightning, he stiffened his spine and barked loudly, face full of reverence:

  “Noble Lord, your command is my mission!”

  Cadelon laughed sharply, cold amusement in her tone.

  “Ahahaha… quick to adapt, sharp enough. You’re qualified to be my dog.”

  Her smile froze into steel. “Tell me, lowly mercury-based thing—how long until your fleet arrives at its destination?”

  The old captain, seized by both terror and awe, answered at once, voice solemn and precise:

  “Noble Lord, our fleet of 600 starships will depart Zciya City immediately. Once beyond Drugana’s gravity well, we will enter Sentience Realm stealth navigation.

  Throughout the voyage, the fleet will sustain a speed of six hundred and sixty-six times the speed of light. Estimated arrival: 0.167 Glacurns.”

  “Six hundred and sixty-six times the speed of light? Pathetically slow.”

  Cadelon shook her head, sneering coldly.

  “Starships of your caliber can only bully a few Broken Civilizations at the outer edge of the Milky Way’s spiral arm. And tell me—what is that Glacurn you mentioned? Some Mercury standard for time?”

  The old captain bobbed his head in a flurry. “Yes, yes, exactly so!”

  “Mercury… ah, I remember that planet.”

  Cadelon raised her seven-fingered hand, stroking her alloy chin as she recalled. “Many years ago—before your people even entered the space age—I happened to pass by.”

  The captain’s eyes lit with sudden joy, and he rushed to flatter her. “My Lord, the universe holds countless stars, yet you crossed paths with Mercury! Surely, your fate with our race runs deep.”

  “Fate?” Cadelon’s voice dropped into a slow murmur. “At that time, I was young—newly advanced to the Overlord level. If I hadn’t been chasing a Star-burning Vulture that day… given the ugliness of your planet, it would have been reduced to ash by one of my Star Collapse Annihilation Cannons.”

  “Uh…”

  The old captain froze. The polite words he had been about to offer—inviting her to Mercury as an honored guest—were instantly swallowed back down his throat.

  “Enough chatter. Where you’re going is irrelevant. What matters is that you get there swiftly—without delay.”

  Cadelon clapped her alloy fingers lightly together. “Go. Depart at once.”

  “Yes! Yes, at once!”

  The old captain bowed again and again, not daring to glance at Yimier’s dying form slumped in the corner. He turned and hurried out.

  Minutes later—

  From the topmost landing platform of Zciya City, high-frequency announcements blared across the starport, throughout the skies for tens of thousands of kilometers around the city-state, and out into the cosmic space encircling Planet Drugana:

  [Attention all units! Berths 473, 474, 475…901, 902, 903 commencing ascension operations.]

  [Attention all units! Berths 473, 474, 475…901, 902, 903 commencing ascension operations.]

  [Attention all units! Berths 473, 474, 475…901, 902, 903 commencing ascension operations.]

  At once, the 600 Mercury starships—black, spiked, shuttle-shaped vessels—ignited their anti-gravity engines. Fields shimmered, lifting them from the platform. Rising into the skies, they adjusted their hulls with precise angle-shifts, then surged upward. In moments they tore through the last two hundred kilometers of atmosphere and hurled themselves into the endless dark of space.

  Several hundred kilometers below, inside Zciya City’s Governor’s Mansion—

  Panei, watching through Drugana’s monitoring feeds as the Mercury fleet surged into deep space, was overcome with emotion. Guiding his external robotic arm, he lifted a massive wineglass and toasted the screen.

  “My friend… my long and ordinary life will one day end, but you…”

  Gulp, gulp, gulp ——

  He drained hundreds of kilograms of fine wine in a single swallow. Then he sighed, his tone almost a lament.

  “A genius warrior from the galactic core—crossing a hundred thousand light-years to clash in a destined battle, against an enemy hidden in the depths of the cosmos! When you return in triumph, the entire Milky Way will thunder your name—Cadelon!

  And I, your humble admirer, will bask in the glory as well!”

  —Meanwhile—

  The 600 Mercury starships had already left Zciya City far behind, pulling more than 100,000 kilometers away. Soon they would break free of Drugana’s gravity well, slip into Sentience Realm stealth navigation, and accelerate to superluminal speed, vanishing into the vast deep.

  Yet aboard the colossal flagship, Cadelon—seated cross-legged—felt an unfamiliar ripple in her mind.

  A whisper like a klaxon echoed endlessly in her ear: Danger! Run! Danger! Run! Danger! Run!

  She lifted her chin, eyes fixed on the dim, endless void beyond the porthole, trying to grasp that alien sensation—an emotion unknown in tens of thousands of years of life. Her voice rang cold.

  “What is this? Unease? Fear? Hmph. Pathetic! How could I—ever—be afraid?”

  Annoyed, she forced the emotion down, crushing it beneath will.

  But at that very instant, the world before her dissolved into endless black.

  Her thought, her consciousness, her memories, her soul, her very Root Spirituality—and the vast, terrifying power within Cadelon, strong enough to extinguish stars hundreds or thousands of times over—were snuffed out in an instant.

  Along with her, the colossal Mercury flagship and the entire surrounding fleet of 600 starships—near or far—were vaporized into nothingness in a single breath. Cadelon had no chance to react, no moment to even grasp what was happening, before the sudden, boundless force erased her utterly.

  Thus perished Cadelon, the ultimate Overlord who had reigned undefeated across the Milky Way for tens of thousands of years—silenced without a cry, body and soul alike obliterated.

  “What?! What’s happening?! What is that thing?!”

  Below, in the skies of Drugana, Panei—still drinking idly in the Governor’s Mansion of Zciya City—jerked in horror at the vision playing across the screens. The massive wineglass slipped from his robotic arm, shattering as his stunned gaze locked onto the cosmic display.

  The Mercury fleet was gone. Vanished.

  Only a circular wall of radiant light remained, spanning the void in all directions. Its vastness defied measurement—the monitoring system could not even trace its edge.

  That immense curved wall, girded by a halo of countless stellar lights, loomed across the dim universe. In Panei’s shaken eyes, it resembled the fabled barrier of space-time itself, said to lie at the universe’s edge—majestic, crushing in its weight, as though it held the power to annihilate the cosmos entire.

  And then, as suddenly as it appeared, the boundless wall of radiance scattered and dissolved into nothing.

  Behind it yawned a warped space bubble, its diameter stretching tens of millions of kilometers.

  Within that warped domain floated a cluster of bizarre celestial bodies, encircled tightly by hundreds of thousands of planets of every size—and at its heart, a steady-burning star, one million kilometers across.

  Panei, with all his elite upbringing and knowledge, finally grasped what he was seeing. His voice trembled with disbelief.

  “It’s… a warp bubble! This is technology only galactic core civilizations could possess. Yet it’s here—in the outer spiral of the Milky Way? And inside that bubble… so many planets, even a constant star? Could it be… a natural cosmic phenomenon?!”

  His six rod-shaped pupils quivered violently, spasming as though struck by seizure.

  The sight outside Drugana had utterly broken him.

  With his enhanced brain, Panei needed only a single second to reach an answer—one so absurd that even he could scarcely accept it:

  “I see it now. This is… an entire star system!”

  It was no accident. Not a natural phenomenon. Someone—no, some vast and monstrous being—was dragging an entire star system at superluminal speed!

  In the Governor’s Mansion, Panei felt as if he were gazing upon an ancient god. His worldview shattered to dust. His massive frame reeled drunkenly, staggering as tears and laughter mingled.

  “Hahahahaha! Has the universe gone mad—or have I?! What great deity would wield a warp bubble to swallow an entire star system? To travel with a star system, faster than light?! Impossible! Madness! Hahahahaha—pure madness!”

  In his delirium, a memory surfaced—Cadelon’s words:

  […The Oracle Machine told me the destination of their journey is where the most important moment of my life will appear…]

  “Destination? Most important moment?”

  Panei’s crazed laughter faltered. His lips quivered as he muttered, half in awe, half in despair:

  “Cadelon… so that Mercury vessel was your destination. And the greatest moment of your life… was death.”

  He laughed again, wild and bitter. “How pitiful, Cadelon. Not a single strike—not even a glimpse of your destined foe—before you were reduced to vapor. And they… they may not have even noticed you existed.”

  His six pupils spun violently, his voice breaking into a wail.

  “Ridiculous! Your death was more ridiculous than the humblest speck of carbon-based bacteria!”

  Then his laughter died into weeping. His voice cracked like glass.

  “So what good is genius? In the end, even genius cannot defy fate!”

  And as Panei teetered on the edge of collapse—

  Outside, in the void beyond Drugana—

  The decaying sea of negative energy and the fractured warp-shell around the bubble disintegrated at once. From its edge erupted torrents of warped spacetime, endless cascades of high-energy particles, and a hurricane of gravitational waves.

  Like a cosmic gamma-ray burst, the storm roared outward, engulfing everything.

  This torrent—greater than the total energy a constant star would release over tens of billions of years—was so boundless, so unfathomably vast, that Drugana, standing directly in its path, endured the full baptism of this cosmic flood.

  Its viscous atmosphere, two thousand kilometers thick and roiling with endless storms, was torn apart in an instant. Layer after layer disintegrated as razor-edged destructive energies ripped through, annihilating matter at the molecular and atomic scale. The air itself dissolved into storms of high-energy, charged particles, some plunging into the abyssal core, others hurled outward into the void, vanishing into the deep cosmos.

  In this apocalyptic calamity, Zciya City’s titanic interstellar support leg—tens of thousands of kilometers long—was the first to snap. Under chaotic mechanical stresses it fractured violently, dragging the colossal city above into freefall. The city plummeted at over a hundred kilometers per second, dropping more than a thousand kilometers in moments.

  Its descent was so sudden that even the collapsing layers of atmosphere below had no time to resist. Zciya tore through them with unstoppable momentum, each impact igniting vast sheets of crimson fire that blazed across the heavens as the city plunged downward.

  The shattered support leg, though impossibly intricate and forged to withstand near-eternal strain, had not broken within the mere two-thousand-kilometer atmospheric belt. Its true point of failure lay buried more than ten thousand kilometers beneath the surface of Drugana’s abyssal liquid hydrogen ocean.

  Thus the entire megastructure of Zciya City, fused seamlessly to its vast support column, was wrenched downwards as if seized by some colossal, primeval serpent rising from a silent demonic sea—its fangs closing upon the city and dragging it through four thousand miles of open sky.

  Accompanying Zciya City’s thunderous plunge—tearing through atmospheric layers and shaking the heavens with rolling echoes—the colossal structure was clamped as if by some invisible force, brutally dragged toward the abyss below.

  Rumble! Rumble! Rumble!!

  The sky split apart as Zciya crashed downward, each layer of atmosphere detonating in succession. In an instant, titanic cyclones erupted, raging like hundreds of thousands of savage, spectral dragons, howling as they devoured swathes of sky spanning thousands of miles.

  The momentum of this fall was so violent, so catastrophic, that the city-state’s massive anti-gravity generators roared into overload. Engines blazed, conduits smoked, sparks spat across colossal housings—before barely halting the plunge in time.

  Yet even within those fleeting moments of freefall, tens of millions—perhaps even hundreds of millions—of fragile-bodied inhabitants of Zciya City perished in horror.

  The devastation struck hardest in the northwestern gaseous quarter and the southwestern liquid quarter. The mechanical-structured gaseous lifeforms were shredded outright, torn into streams of mixed-color vapors that bled into the storming atmosphere. In the liquid quarter, the aquatic peoples—bones frail, flesh soft—were crushed en masse.

  That sealed aquatic district, once a deep cerulean lake-world, became a slaughterhouse. More than half its denizens dissolved into heaps of shattered skeletons and rancid, pulped flesh. Hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—of chunks of bloodied meat, broken organs, and liquefied tissue swirled together with collapsing architecture and surging torrents of dark blue water, coagulating into filthy, turbid mountains of gore sinking into the depths.

  And in the gaseous quarter to the northwest, the tragedy was even more merciless. No corpses remained. The tornadoes ground every last gaseous lifeform into unrecognizable vapors, their essences torn apart, shredded, and dispersed into the chaotic winds.

  Meanwhile, in the vast eastern district, with its two hundred stacked levels, calamities multiplied beyond counting…

  Streets of shops in countless styles, towering high-rises jammed together, sprawling villas, endless rows of connected housing, winding rivers threading through small mountains, suspended railways crisscrossing in the air, vast smelting complexes, repair yards, assembly plants—

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  All of it collapsed, crushed into ruins, mingled with the blood and torn tissues of the countless alien denizens buried within. The city became nothing more than a landscape of desperate mass graves, great and small.

  But this was still not the end.

  Even as Zciya City frantically tried to stabilize its failing structure, Drugana’s atmosphere itself was annihilated in only minutes by the overwhelming flood of destructive cosmic energy.

  The planet’s girth contracted by four thousand kilometers in a single moment, the veil of atmosphere ripped away, exposing the vast hydrogen ocean that had once been shielded.

  Now naked before the storm, that endless liquid hydrogen sea ignited under the assault of high-energy waves pouring in from deep space. Fusion fires bloomed tens of thousands of miles beneath its surface. Cavities of searing plasma—temperatures soaring beyond a hundred million degrees—erupted and collapsed in rapid succession. Each void released torrents of blinding heat and cataclysmic shockwaves, until the entire ocean was driven into frenzy, churning, boiling, writhing like a cosmic cauldron.

  And beneath even this ocean, the Ether-Crystalline metallic hydrogen layer—Drugana’s buried heart—could not endure. Cosmic energies, their interactions brutally invasive, speared downward, forcing the crystalline strata into violent resonances. Vast chains of underground nuclear detonations thundered through the abyss.

  The atmosphere disintegrated.

  The oceans burned.

  The underworld itself exploded.

  Not long after, Drugana’s surface began to convulse, and across its face erupted blazing infernos thousands of miles wide.

  At the core of these incandescent seas, tens of millions of searing material jets burst upward from the unknown depths of the metallic hydrogen underlayer. They tore through the vast liquid hydrogen ocean, carrying colossal kinetic and thermal energy as they speared into the sky—now a barren darkness stripped of atmosphere.

  One of these catastrophic plumes struck Zciya City-State, which was already barely holding itself together amid the apocalypse.

  Boom!!!

  It was as though a hydrogen bomb of a hundred million tons TNT-equivalent had gone off in silence. A crimson tide of annihilating heat expanded in a thousand-mile vacuum radius, painting space itself with blood-red fire.

  At the blast’s epicenter, the colossal shamrock-shaped city was ripped apart, its tri-leaf structure torn into three broken districts, flung outward in different directions, carrying with them an endless chorus of screams.

  As the shattered city spun and tumbled at hundreds or even thousands of kilometers per second, the two sealed regions—the Northwestern gaseous zone and the Southwestern aquatic zone—were the first to unravel.

  Tens of millions of gaseous beings and aquatic species, who had miraculously clung to survival until this point, finally met their end. In the burning dark sky, they dissolved in despair into shredded vapors, charred fragments, and festering dust.

  The eastern district, hurled uncontrollably for more than ten thousand kilometers across the horizon, followed soon after. It detonated in an immense blast, fragmenting into countless shards. Some plunged like meteorites into the boiling hydrogen ocean, leaving trails of crimson flame, while others were hurled outward into space, blasted into chaotic orbits where they slowly circled the dying Drugana.

  When the explosion ended, the entire eastern district was gone, and with it, hundreds of millions of lives. Only a handful survived—those with bodies forged by immense life force and the rarest of Transcendent self-preservation powers.

  Zciya City Governor Panei was one of the few survivors.

  But unlike the others, his fate was cruel. Just as he burst free of the massive explosion, a surging jet of high-energy matter shot up from the abyss below and slammed directly into him.

  Boom!!!

  A tide of searing thermal energy, spanning thousands of miles, erupted outward. Panei’s external machinery and bio-devices disintegrated in an instant, leaving only his true, bulky body—split apart like a colossal lobster torn limb from limb.

  The difference was, Panei lacked any protective chitin. His triangular head, elongated bulk, two slender tentacle-limbs extending from his shoulders and neck, and dozens of tiny crab-legs along his abdomen were all laid bare—nothing but soft, white flesh hundreds of meters wide, riddled with wounds and ruptures.

  A Stage Ten Transcendent, yet stripped of his augmentations, Panei had no telekinesis, no barrier, no defense at all. Reduced to a helpless, broken mass, he plummeted in pieces into the endless liquid hydrogen ocean below like a rain of meteors.

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Each fragment of his body struck the turbulent sea with cataclysmic force, unleashing tidal waves that drowned countless other alien beings struggling on the surface.

  The portion containing his consciousness—his mutilated head—thrashed and boiled in the roiling ocean. Summoning the last of his will, it propelled itself through the waves, dragging heavy surges of water as it swam desperately toward the scattered wreckage of his body.

  Whoosh whoosh whoosh—

  At last, as Panei’s head seized the first broken segment of his form, a shadow blotted out the sky. From the darkness above, a colossal metal pillar came crashing down—dozens of kilometers thick, descending with apocalyptic weight.

  No… not a pillar.

  It was one of Zciya City’s broken support legs, shattered into countless segments during the blast, scattered into deep space, and now raining back to the planet.

  Rumble rumble rumble!

  The alloy pillar, several kilometers thick, trailed blazing firelight as it fell.

  Its sheer mass, combined with extreme velocity, meant the kinetic energy carried by that shattered city-state support leg was beyond terrifying.

  Within Panei’s rapidly trembling rod-shaped pupils, that colossal alloy pillar slammed down, striking him directly.

  The instant it hit the sea’s surface, it annihilated Panei’s head and the section of body clutched by his outstretched tentacles, reducing them to ash.

  Rumble rumble rumble rumble!!

  All matter dissolved into blinding heat and light, turning this region of the sea into a blazing ocean of fire.

  The pillar—kilometers across—did not stop. After erasing Panei’s head and shoulders, it roared downward, shattering thousands of miles of ocean, pressing his broken body into the seabed. The long pillar body, like a sky-covering hand, kept plunging.

  Only seven or eight seconds later did the colossal mass vanish beneath the waves, swallowed by the turbulent sea.

  At last, the liquid hydrogen ocean fell “calm.”

  Seraphine stood in the boundless void, hands clasped, gazing at the distant gas giant ravaged by the backlash of the warp bubble’s collapse. She shook her head lightly and clucked.

  “Unexpected. I didn’t think the bubble’s dissolution at a ten-million-kilometer scale would have such an impact. So the quantitative shift became a qualitative one.”

  Then, raising her hand toward Drugana from tens of thousands of kilometers away, she pointed.

  “Astralglow Reversal.”

  Buzz ——

  A mysterious, extraordinary power surged out from the void, accompanied by countless pale motes of light—flashing, leaping, and in an instant enfolding a vast cosmic sphere with a radius of 300,000 kilometers.

  Within that range lay Drugana, over 100,000 kilometers distant, now in the throes of collapse.

  Having ascended into a four-dimensional Divinitas, Seraphine’s mastery over space-time had abruptly advanced once more.

  Among her powers, Astralglow Reversal—the skill that wielded the authority to turn back time—had expanded its reach from a mere 100,000 kilometers in diameter to a full 300,000.

  Its temporal scale had likewise grown, from only three hours to a full three days.

  That meant: when she invoked Astralglow Reversal, every shred of matter, energy, and information within a three-dimensional sphere of 300,000 kilometers centered on her would, under her will, be driven backward to any moment she chose within the past three days.

  “Time…”

  Seraphine casually traced a counter-clockwise half-circle with her index finger. “Return to thirty minutes ago.”

  At her words, the upheaval and turbulence raging across distant Planet Drugana abruptly stilled. Then, as if a recording reel had been thrown into reverse, all phenomena—matter, energy, information—suddenly flowed back along the stream of time.

  Each explosion that had shattered the planet, each eruption of fragments and waves of invisible heat, all drew back together, recombining and reforming into their former, stable state.

  The hundreds of thousands of incandescent streams of matter that had jetted upward from Drugana’s vast liquid-hydrogen ocean into space halted their surge. Their direction reversed, plunging back with even greater speed into the deep, cooling as the nuclear fusion unraveled, restoring once more to liquid hydrogen.

  The atmosphere, which had collapsed and dispersed, now condensed anew—particle by particle—gradually reassembling itself.

  And the colossal alloy pillar of a fractured support leg, which had pierced deep into Drugana’s Ether-Crystalline metallic hydrogen underlayer, seemed to lift upward as if drawn by an immense force—bearing with it Panei’s broken, yet ceaselessly regenerating body—rushing once more toward the sea’s surface.

  Next, Zciya City—once blasted into three fragments and scattered by plasma torrents—drew back together, reformed, and then soared skyward.

  Countless alien beings who had perished tragically within its three inner districts also unraveled their deaths, each step reversed, until life returned to them once more.

  The collapsed, disintegrated buildings too were restored, repaired one by one to their former state.

  Amidst these countless scenes of time’s reversal, an unseen, peculiar force continuously gathered, traversed, twisted, and reshaped itself within the endless stream of space-time. Under Seraphine’s will, everything within a radius of 300,000 kilometers was dragged swiftly back to the point thirty minutes prior.

  Thus, Drugana regained its former shape, while Zciya City floated in stable suspension within the 【Habitable Layer】, just 280 kilometers from the void of space.

  Even the six hundred starships of the Mercury Fleet, scattered large and small, which had retreated 100,000 kilometers from the planet, reappeared once again in the boundless cosmos.

  Yet at that moment Seraphine frowned—for she had uncovered a problem, a flaw within Astralglow Reversal.

  “All resurrected intelligent beings… none of them carry Root Spirituality.”

  Her Divine Will instantly swept across Drugana, more than 100,000 kilometers away.

  From the gaseous beasts roaming its skies, to the primitive yet faintly intelligent hydrogen-merfolk tribes dwelling deep in the liquid hydrogen oceans, to the multitude of aquatic and gaseous species in Zciya City’s Northwest and Southwest districts, and the vast populations across its Eastern district—every form of life was laid bare before her gaze.

  And yet, all the resurrected intelligent beings—hundreds of millions in number—had become hollowed shells.

  Their minds still processed. Their bodies still moved. Their souls still vibrated.

  They talked, ate, worked, paid attention… every behavior was intact.

  But the most essential core, their Root Spirituality as intelligent life, was gone.

  Confronted with this eerie sight, realization struck Seraphine:

  “Just now, they died. Even if I turn back time, the Spirituality that dissipates with death cannot be called back.”

  “Alas—”

  With a quiet sigh, Seraphine shook her head lightly.

  “Root Spirituality is too enigmatic. Even after unifying the four fundamental forces, I still cannot analyze it, cannot replicate it, and cannot touch it with precision when confronted with Spirituality itself.”

  Across the endless void, six hundred Mercury starships drifted in silence, motionless.

  From a distance, their vast hulls seemed utterly insignificant against the measureless darkness that swallowed them—so small, so fragile, no more than dust motes suspended in the abyss.

  Suddenly, a streak of dazzling light—far smaller than even the tiniest vessel among the hundreds—flashed across the void at impossible speed.

  In the next instant, it stopped.

  Only a hundred meters from the largest warship.

  Whoosh——

  The brilliant radiance dissipated, and from its glow emerged Seraphine, hands clasped calmly behind her back.

  Though her height was no more than 1.8 meters, when set against the towering, spiked warship before her—tens of thousands of meters in height and breadth, a mountain of steel bristling with weapons—her figure seemed ethereal, insignificant, reduced to dust.

  And yet, it was not a matter of sight alone.

  It was presence—an abyssal gap on the metaphysical level of existence itself.

  Buzz——

  From the warship’s central core, a distorted spatial vortex surged into being. Seraphine smiled faintly and stepped forward into it.

  Inside, her gaze swept across the alien carvings etched into the vast cabin walls, strange motifs illuminated by the glint of cold metal.

  Her eyes soon fell upon the massive, metallic giant seated cross-legged at the hall’s center. Its body was wreathed in dark-blue lightning currents, arcs leaping endlessly across its form, while it sat enthroned upon a colossal circular seat dozens of meters tall.

  Sensing the terrible flow of force ceaselessly circulating within its Physical Strength, Seraphine’s swordlike brows furrowed slightly. Surprise flickered in her voice as she spoke:

  “Such vast, immense power… if translated into attribute values, it would reach nine hundred and twelve Stars. Not simple.”

  If not for the Phoenix, which could soar freely through the River of Time, this unfamiliar alien giant before her might have been the strongest lifeform Seraphine had encountered since her transmigration.

  After all, even a peak Stage Ten Milky Way Overlord possessed attribute values of barely a single Star—yet this one’s power had already surpassed 900 Stars.

  If all of this strength had been cultivated by its own hand, then it was truly remarkable.

  Of course, it cannot compare to me.

  So Seraphine thought.

  For in diligence and effort upon the path of cultivation, if she claimed second, none across the cosmos would dare claim first.

  At that moment, the colossal humanoid turned its lone eye toward her, sluggishly, as though in a daze. Then it drifted back into blank emptiness, expressionless, unfazed, utterly unconcerned.

  Where vigilance should have burned, there was nothing—like a living statue stripped of sensation.

  Witnessing such a reaction, Seraphine shook her head with faint regret.

  “Though brought back from death, it has lost the most vital Root Spirituality. This life will never again possess will, or the sparks of wisdom. Even emotions—joy, sorrow, fear, hatred—have all vanished. Its path of evolution is cut short, leaving it crippled. A pity… what a pity.”

  She clicked her tongue twice, then raised her hand, pointing toward the massive, one-eyed giant across the chamber.

  “Very well. As a token of appreciation, I shall claim your memories.”

  Buzz!

  Boundless Divine Will descended, lancing straight into the brain and soul of the single-eyed giant seated motionless upon the vast spherical throne.

  The giant’s massive frame shuddered faintly, and in the next instant its colossal reservoir of memories was seized in full, drawn out and carried back to Seraphine.

  Yet as those memories surged into her, a flash of sharp, mixed displeasure crossed her face.

  “So she’s actually the same as Mycenae—sealing away her memories. Why such precautions… against me?!”

  Her irritation faded, replaced by a pensive murmur.

  “The mechanics of this thought-memory lock… they bear faint traces of the Witch Continent. And yet, there’s also the subtle imprint of the Houiste Federation’s information-materialization technology.”

  Seraphine’s clear voice drifted into self-question:

  “Just where did this being come from? To be entangled with two such distant, obscure powers… it truly stirs my curiosity.”

  Deep within her boundless Ocean of Knowledge, in one silent corner, stood a pitch-black mountain peak marked Mycenae.

  Suddenly, from the far horizon, a far greater, darker blue mountain plummeted down.

  Boom!

  Whoosh—whoosh—whoosh——

  As it fell, it churned the ocean into titanic waves, then settled beside the black Mycenae peak.

  This new blue mountain was nothing less than the sum of the single-eyed giant’s memories.

  No sooner had it grounded itself than the sea erupted—layer after layer of mountainous waves collapsing into hundreds of thousands of torrents, their edges honed like serrated blades. Conscious currents of thought rushed upon the peak, carving, slicing, and unraveling it.

  Hiss—hiss—hiss—hiss——!!!

  Accompanied by the scorching roar that reverberated through the boundless ocean, every inch of the mountain’s rock was cut and pulverized by countless torrents and waves. As vast amounts of information disintegrated, a smaller portion of effective data overflowed and sank into the Ocean of Knowledge.

  Thus, fragmented, chaotic, and unsystematic fragments of memory surfaced in Seraphine’s mind.

  “Cadelon… the Milky Way’s first Overlord… Yonruk Civilization… Nebula life… Panei… Ponret Immortals… Six galactic core races… Above Overlord…

  Hmph, this is all too fragmented, far too little of real value. Just scattered terms and concepts—no coherent substance.”

  Her lips tightened slightly, a flicker of disappointment crossing her face. “It seems I can’t forcefully crack this open—it’s too wasteful. Like deciphering Mycenae’s memories, it can only be unraveled bit by bit, slowly.”

  At that moment, Seraphine’s thoughts shifted once more toward the Witch Continent.

  As for the possible location of that mysterious realm, Chaos Calculation offered only this:

  【Not within this universe, nor in a parallel universe】

  “Then where is it? It seems to exist nowhere at all.”

  Shaking her head, Seraphine raised her eyes toward the silently seated single-eyed giant and spoke with faint amusement:

  “Cadelon—Nebula lifeform, of the Yonruk Civilization in the galactic core, a so-called ‘great’ figure at the very peak of the Milky Way’s Overlord class. How curious… I leave the Solar System, and the first thing I encounter is you, a big fish.”

  She lifted her hand lightly, fingers curling into the air.

  Boom!!

  A titanic gravitational field erupted, engulfing Cadelon’s immense body.

  In an instant it became a cosmic abyss, shredding everything within several kilometers into endless elementary particles.

  Even the Mercury Race’s massive warship, struck by the annihilating tide, shuddered violently and began collapsing into ruin.

  Yet under Seraphine’s terrifyingly precise control, the field—just a step away from black hole intensity—focused entirely on Cadelon, ripping his alloy armor to tatters.

  Bang!!

  Ten thousand rays of searing light flared forth as a body of pure plasma, burning at hundreds of millions of degrees, materialized before her eyes.

  “Interesting… in some respects, your Physical Strength resembles Vuron’s peak state. But in magnitude and intricacy, you outstrip him by trillions.”

  Seraphine stepped forward casually, jogging a few steps to the blazing dark-blue giant’s side. Unfazed by the cataclysmic heat, she reached out, seized Cadelon’s arm, and crushed it in her grip—holding the trembling plasma mass to examine it up close.

  As she examined the blazing giant more closely, the Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation activated in tandem, beginning their deduction of the Yonruk race’s core essence—its genetic blueprint, its biological nature, even its possible evolutionary history.

  If she could fully decipher it, replicating such a high-combat-power specimen would be effortless.

  And yet, meeting such a civilization in the depths of the Milky Way—humanoids formed entirely of searing, high-energy plasma—did not surprise Seraphine in the least.

  She understood well: in common theory, low-temperature carbon-based organisms are the most natural outcome of planetary evolution. They emerge readily from vast natural environments, complexify through intricate molecular architectures, and in turn, ascend step by step toward intelligence.

  But through phenomena she had witnessed firsthand, and the principles she had distilled from them, Seraphine had reached a different conclusion:

  Life could not, in essence, be confined to any single form of chemical matter.

  In such an immeasurable cosmic expanse, the idea that life might arise only on rocky, temperate worlds like Earth struck her as profoundly unreasonable.

  The same applied to temperature. The universe spans from the abyss of absolute zero, ?273.12℃, to ranges of heat so extreme they defy comprehension. To claim that life’s emergence and activity are bound solely between 0℃ and 100℃ was nothing short of absurd.

  From a thermodynamic standpoint, life is best understood as a highly ordered open system—one that sustains its own low entropy state while ceaselessly exchanging matter and energy with its surroundings.

  What substance composes that system, therefore, has no rigid limitation.

  Cadelon, radiating before her, was living proof—a plasma lifeform.

  Plasma, the so-called fourth state of matter, arises in conditions of extreme temperature. When electrons gain enough energy to break free of atomic nuclei, they become free particles, leaving neutral atoms impossible. The result is matter that behaves with certain traits of gas, yet belongs neither to solid, liquid, nor gas, but to an ionized, luminous state.

  Which is also known as the fourth state of matter—the plasma state.

  Rumble!

  The amorphous plasma in Seraphine’s palm suddenly drifted upward, splitting into three blazing spheres of identical size and intensity.

  To ordinary eyes, these dark blue and pale-white masses would appear indistinguishable.

  But under Seraphine’s microscopic vision, each was wholly different.

  The first, on the left, was built from countless micro-plasma phases. When her Divine Will probed a single one, she discovered they were in fact self-sealing systems.

  Each plasma phase carried two distinct boundaries—an outer layer of negatively charged electrons and an inner layer of positively charged ions.

  “Like cells,” Seraphine mused, her eyes flickering. “Coincidence… or are these truly cells?”

  She immediately conjured over two hundred monoatomic elements from the periodic table, suspending them in the void.

  Under her will, each atom sought out a plasma phase as though alive, testing contact. At the same time, she created a range of experimental environments across the field: zones of high and low gravity, strong and weak magnetic fields, even laser bombardments of varying wavelengths and frequencies.

  Very soon, she observed that in the proper electromagnetic environment, the plasma phases could absorb neutral subatomic particles and decompose them into electrons and ions—causing themselves to expand.

  And when one phase grew large enough, it split cleanly in two. Replication, achieved.

  “This is equivalent to cells.”

  Amused, Seraphine turned her gaze toward the central plasma mass. Her microscopic vision sharpened, revealing countless threadlike structures shimmering within the blaze.

  Given sufficient energy, these particles spontaneously aligned into filaments, intertwining to form complex strands.

  As she studied the double-helix-like formations weaving within the plasma, her expression grew thoughtful.

  “This structure is clearly deeper, more intricate than the previous one… and it carries strong information-encoding capacity. Without question, this is genetic material.”

  Having said that, her eyes shifted toward the final plasma mass.

  Within the final plasma mass, Seraphine “saw” hundreds of thousands of minuscule plasma rings.

  They moved with no clear pattern, sometimes weaving around each other, sometimes stacking into intricate lattices.

  Inside those formations existed not only plasma phases and threadlike plasma strands, but also larger, more elaborate architectures.

  And deeper still, at scales far smaller than the plasma structures, Seraphine uncovered something rare—stable 【Nuclear molecules】.

  Just as, in ordinary matter, atoms combine under electromagnetic force by exchanging electrons to form molecules—so too could nuclei combine. Nuclear molecules were born when several atomic nuclei, bound by powerful attractive forces, exchanged neutrons instead, creating another kind of “molecule.”

  In theory, if enough energy were released through neutron binding during this process, complex organic Nuclear molecules might form. And with them, the possibility of life itself.

  Long ago, Seraphine had tried to synthesize such molecules in her own experiments—attempting to birth Nuclear molecule life. But her results had been disappointing. The molecules were short-lived, unstable, and collapsed before ever assembling into larger organic chains, much less life.

  “Yet here… these Nuclear molecules in Cadelon’s body are altogether different.”

  She sent her Divine Will probing through their lattices, scanning them from within and without. What she found was astonishing: these Nuclear molecules endured because their bonds incorporated Ether-Crystalline frameworks.

  Perhaps the neutrons themselves, forming the links within Cadelon’s Nuclear molecular body, were intrinsically Ether-Crystalline. That alone would explain their remarkable structural stability.

  “I seem to glimpse… the very evolution, the genesis of your Yonruk race.”

  Her gaze deepened, thoughtful. “But this scale of Ether-Crystalline integration is formidable. Even a High-Ether environment could scarcely achieve it. To forge the Ether-Crystalline core of a Pyramid-class vessel… one would need to…”

  Seraphine stepped back two paces, her gaze fixed upon Cadelon’s blazing form. Vast swathes of data surged across her vision, flickering like constellations, before solidifying into a tangible, non-illusory Nebula within her mind.

  That Nebula unfurled from its primordial state.

  Over eons, it swelled larger and denser, its mass and temperature rising to staggering scales. At its heart, within the high-energy plasma storm where the passage of time could only be measured in tens of millennia, something unexpected occurred: gaps of relative low temperature spontaneously formed, and, by degrees, order emerged.

  Given enough time, what can exist will exist in abundance. These ordered gaps were no exception.

  Amid them, catalyzed by the relentless activity of Ether, vast functional molecular frameworks came into being—stable 【Nuclear molecules】, bonded by Ether-Crystalline neutrons.

  Upon this foundation, charged plasma dust, guided by magnetic fields, gathered into plasma rings. The rings circled, intertwined, and stacked, shaping ever more intricate forms—

  Until at last, helixes appeared. Double-helixes, capable of attracting new plasma particles to “grow,” and even capable of self-replication into identical genetic spirals.

  These spirals—woven of Nuclear molecules, plasma rings, and dust—varied in radius across their length, encoding information with a density that rivaled the most refined material crystals.

  Evolution does not obey rational design, nor does it guarantee beneficial function. It simply persists.

  So within the furnace of that colossal Nebula, microorganisms of plasma arose: diverse in form, primitive in structure, locked in endless cycles of predation and competition.

  And then, after aeons, chance aligned. A primitive plasma bacterium drifted into an electromagnetic pocket of just the right intensity, where neutral subatomic particles abounded.

  There, it crossed the threshold.

  It multiplied. It assembled. It transcended.

  From that accident of environment and abundance was born the first multicellular plasma organism.

  It swept aside all weaker rivals, grew colossal, grew dominant. From that one improbable genesis arose the Yonruk race—a civilization of Nebula-born titans, who would one day stride across the Milky Way as overlords.

  “…Nebula double helix…”

  The phrase surfaced in Seraphine’s mind.

  For she recalled: long ago, back on Earth, she had peered into the depths of the galactic core through the most advanced deep-space quantum telescope. And there, at the Milky Way’s inner boundary, she had seen it.

  A Nebula with a double-helix spine.

  Its terrifying length stretched eighty-five light-years across the void.