In that era—more than ten thousand years ago—the strongest figure in all of Zciya City, was a Transcendent Stage Four Sea-Eyed warrior.

  It is important to understand that the base combat power multiplier from Transcendent Stage One to Transcendent Stage Ten is a staggering 1 million times.

  When broken down, the multiplier difference between each stage within the Transcendent Great Level is the ninth root of one million: 4.641588833613.

  In other words, about 4.64 times per stage.

  The same principle applies both to the Ordinary level below the Transcendent, and to the Overlord level above it—the combat power gap between each stage averages about 4.64 times as well.

  However, since the destructive output of the Ordinary level is negligible—barely able to withstand even the crude weapons of a low-grade Broken Civilization—the lower tiers of the Ordinary level are rarely distinguished so precisely.

  Whether one can destroy a single cubic meter, or two or three, all still fall under the category of low-tier Ordinary.

  Of course, these are merely the most basic baseline figures.

  In real combat, the outcome between individuals with different combat power values inevitably varies—sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot.

  After all, the gap between a fool and a genius often exceeds the gap between a dog and a man.

  Numbers are just numbers; victory or defeat is decided only in battle.

  Take for example a martial arts prodigy like Kael, who possesses BUG-level combat instincts and an almost heaven-defying gift for learning and mastering martial techniques. He routinely performs cross-stage combat.

  Even at Stage One, he can crush Stage Two, overwhelm Stage Three, and even challenge Stage Four. For him, such feats are everyday occurrences.

  That said, while talent and ability can sometimes bridge the gap between stages within the same Great Level, the difference between one Great Level and the next—say, from Ordinary Stage Ten to Transcendent Stage One, or from Transcendent Stage Ten to Overlord Stage One—is an astronomical 1000 times.

  Such a gulf is like the divide between heaven and earth. Unless armed with extraordinary abilities, no one can hope to leap across it.

  In other words, those who reach Stage Ten within any Great Level stand at the very peak of disparity—possessing power that cannot easily be matched.

  Take Cadelon, for example.

  By combat power classification, she was still a Milky Way Overlord Stage Ten.

  But in truth, she was over 900 times stronger than a baseline Stage Ten. To pit her against the remaining top-tier Overlords, it would take ten—perhaps even a hundred of them—and even then, she could swat them aside with a single hand.

  As for the so-called strongest individual of Zciya City in those days—he was hardly a heaven-defying prodigy. His cultivation was simply a slightly unusual variant of vital energy manipulation, an evolutionary system with nothing truly unique.

  Even at his peak, unleashing his full strength, that Sea-Eyed warrior could do no more than obliterate a comet a hundred kilometers wide in mere moments.

  Such a level of combat power, while far from top-tier within the Orion Arm of the Milky Way, was still respectable.

  Had he been without grand ambition, he might have abandoned the bustling High-Ether Sector, boarded a small starship, and flown off to some distant, forgotten Low-Ether Broken Sector.

  There, upon worlds where technology and evolution lagged far behind, he would have stood unrivaled. With a single punch that could pierce the skies, and a stomp that could shatter the planet’s crust, he could have proclaimed himself a god, founded a dynasty, and ruled as a petty tyrant amidst the primitives.

  But to pit such paltry strength against Panei, who by then had already reached Transcendent Stage Nine, was utterly laughable.

  And not just Panei—renowned for his terrifying brain control—but even when compared to the King of Aurora, long dominant over Earth’s food chain, that Sea-Eyed warrior fell not by one, but by many orders of magnitude.

  Seraphine had also come across his ultimate fate in the archives. The records state that the very moment he laid eyes on Panei—this colossal Stage Nine Milky Way Overlord lobster—his will was instantly seized.

  Under that first glance, he lost all control, becoming nothing more than a living cannon hurled into the void, where he promptly self-destructed.

  And thus, on that same day, the Sea-Eyed race—who had reigned unchallenged in Zciya City for ten thousand years—saw their long-entrenched rule collapse in an instant with Panei’s descent.

  The records further note that with one sweeping act of mental domination, the giant lobster reduced the entire Sea-Eyed people into a legion of pitiful slaves, to be commanded at his whim.

  For the next several millennia, all the backbreaking labor and menial toil in Zciya City once again fell upon the Sea-Eyed race.

  This included the later large-scale transformation of Zciya City into its current three-leaf clover design. Every detail of that colossal project was forced from the Sea-Eyed slaves—purchased with their sweat, blood, and lives—until nearly one-third of their population lay buried beneath the city they had built.

  At the same time, the Sea-Eyed royalty, including the Governor himself, were cruelly cast by Panei into the liquid-hydrogen oceans beneath the city-state, left to be devoured alive by the ravenous hydro tribes. With the sole exception of Swetha’s lineage, the entire royal bloodline was virtually erased.

  As for what followed, history records only that the remnants of the Sea-Eyed people, consumed by bitterness, repeatedly stirred up rebellion—only to be crushed, again and again, with ruthless finality.

  Those restless Sea-Eyed never grasped the truth: before overwhelming power, the weak have neither privacy nor secrets.

  The faint brainwave signals born from their thoughts, even the subtle ripples of their souls, were to the senses of the mighty as glaring and undeniable as LED beacons in the dark.

  A being like Panei, who indulged a twisted appetite for prying, might take delight in observing their every secret from beginning to end. But in front of a cold-blooded overlord like Cadelon, such brazen intrusion was no different from courting death.

  In the face of absolute military disparity, every elaborate scheme, every clever ruse the Sea-Eyed attempted was nothing but a clown’s performance in Panei’s eyes.

  Though Panei was not as ruthless as his ally Cadelon, he showed no hesitation in answering defiance. Against the Sea-Eyed, his cruelty was unflinching.

  Each time they rose in rebellion, Panei unleashed a purge.

  No grand strategy was required. A single sweep of brain control was enough to shatter their resistance, after which he slaughtered them without mercy—man, woman, or child.

  Once, twice, thrice… the cycle repeated itself over more than ten thousand years.

  And each purge marked another massacre visited upon the Sea-Eyed race at Panei’s hands.

  After more than ten thousand years of repeated purges, the Sea-Eyed people had dwindled to a minority race in Zciya City.

  All who once carried restless or rebellious thoughts had long since been cleansed, wiped out to the last.

  Even the most recent massacre was already a thousand years in the past.

  Seraphine felt little interest in this dreary history and set the records aside without a second glance.

  What truly caught her attention, instead, was the information surrounding the mysterious cult behind the so-called Sea-Eyed Prince, Swetha.

  After sifting through a mass of irrelevant fragments, Seraphine finally unearthed traces of the cult deep within the man’s memories.

  “Order is merely temporary; chaos is eternal.”

  Cult of the Evil Eye, Great Eyes.

  Drifting among the void between the ‘real’ planets of the Solar System, Seraphine’s gaze shimmered with torrents of information. She laughed softly:

  “I never would have imagined that the Primordial Demon Mattu · Erice, who once existed in the ancient Greek era of Earth, was also part of this cult.

  Or perhaps, even he himself had no idea that across the vast Milky Way, so many others of his kind still endured.”

  Indeed, through Swetha’s memory, Seraphine glimpsed the truth: vast numbers of beings like the Primordial Demon—tens of thousands of anarchic fanatics, each at least at the high Transcendent level or beyond.

  Madmen capable of leveling cities or even rending continental plates, all belonging to a single entity:

  The Cult of the Evil Eye, one of the six great scourges of the Milky Way.

  Swetha had been a prospective initiate of this cult.

  His path eerily mirrored that of Erice.

  He too had struck rock bottom in life.

  He too had stumbled upon a mysterious ancient tome in some desolate, lightless place.

  He too had found himself able to comprehend its contents without explanation upon opening it.

  He too, urged on by twisted impulses, gathered the bizarre materials listed in its pages.

  He too, after arranging them into a crude ritual circle, was pierced by the gaze of the Great Eyes from an infinite distance—his body and soul distorting as his former self died and something new, alien, was born in its place.

  The difference was this: pursued by Panei’s hounds, Swetha had fled in desperation to the forty-ninth dusty harbor of the eastern city. There, after inexplicably shaking off his pursuers, he discovered the ancient tome tucked within a filthy alley behind a gangster’s bar.

  That ancient text differed from Erice’s. Swetha’s copy was literally bound from Sea-Eyed skin, soaked with blue nerve fluid and filled with crude drawings.

  What's more, the ritual ingredients listed in those pages were scattered across multiple worlds.

  So Swetha risked everything: stowing away on a merchant freighter, hiding in a smoke-choked cargo hold, abandoning Drugana entirely—to set out on the path to become a demon.

  Following Swetha’s memories, Seraphine—almost as if she were walking in his shoes—witnessed the exotic vistas and strange customs of a string of planets.

  But the part she cared about most—the precise mechanics of the human-to-demon ritual—remained, like Erice’s account, frustratingly blank.

  Still, by comparing the recollections of both cultists, Seraphine gleaned a few insights into the so-called demon-transformation rite.

  “Perhaps the ritual begins the moment one touches the grimoire,” she mused. “Obtaining the book, opening it, reading it—those acts are part of the rite. The subsequent, grueling hunts for sacrificial ingredients are also ritualized. The thing you gather may matter less than the act of seeking it.”

  After a heartbeat she reached a conclusion: “The final sacrifice is probably only the inevitable culmination of all the prior steps.”

  She paused only briefly, then read on.

  As noted, Swetha started as a mere prospective initiate. And where there are prospects, there are always full members.

  Buried in Swetha’s memory, years after his crude transformation, he met a cabal of true cultists—demon-eyed, suffused with chaotic darkness and unmistakably far stronger—on a desolate, frozen world at the outermost edge of the Orion Arm.

  “I’m only a prospect?!”

  Under a black sky, on blue-cratered permafrost, Swetha faced a scarlet, giant ape hunched in the distance, scratching its back with vicious claws. Dozens of eyes on its face flashed outrage. In a low, bitter voice he demanded, “Then how do I become a full member?”

  “Chirp chirp chirp—screech!”

  The great ape blinked a golden-red third eye set in its forehead. It chattered and cackled as it scratched. “It’s simple! Return and offer every scrap of your race—flesh, blood, souls—unreservedly to the god through the ritual. The god, delighted, will grant you a glorious metamorphosis. After the change, you’ll be promoted! But remember: the rite must use the final page of the secret grimoire, 【Digro Sabbath】—and don’t you dare botch it.”

  “What? Digro Sabbath!”

  Swetha froze. “That kind of rite… needs that? What if I use another species…”

  “Other species are useless.”

  A hundred meters to his left, a plant-like creature—part carnivorous bloom—opened its maw and spat out lightning-bright pollen. “It must come from the race that bore you, the race that raised you, the one that holds your happiest and cruelest memories. Only those materials will take.

  Like me—two thousand years ago I summoned ten kin into the cult through the Sabbath. We all… ‘partook’ together to finish the rite. My birthworld had a billion souls; it took three full days of slaughter to complete.”

  Whoosh —

  A small, four-legged grey eagle with a snake-like neck, no bigger than a washbasin, hopped onto Swetha’s shoulder. Its head spun a full 180°, its black, dimly glowing eyes locking onto the many eyes on his face. It spoke in a flat, gloomy tone:

  “What’s the matter, little friend? Can’t stomach it? If you’re worried and can’t act, I can offer a solution.”

  Swetha hesitated. “What solution?”

  “Very simple.”

  The grey eagle gave a savage chuckle. “Tell me where your homeland lies. I’ll help you wipe out more than half of them in advance. With far fewer left, you’ll feel only rage and hatred—no sorrow, no hesitation. Sound good?”

  “No,” Swetha spat, roughly pushing the eagle from his shoulder. It burst into cruel, teasing laughter and glided upward.

  “Little friend—how many kin remain in your homeland?”

  At that moment, a decrepit giant rat, dozens of meters to his right and leaning on a crooked staff, rasped, “If the number’s too large, you’ll need to invite more… ‘guests’ to the Sabbath. Otherwise, the slaughter will be truly tiresome.”

  “Hoo—”

  Swetha exhaled with a complicated look.

  “The clan I belong to is small—barely over a million people. I can handle it on my own.”

  “I suspect, little friend, you may be mistaken.”

  Not far away, a colossal worm emerged from the ground, its body slick with a sticky sheen, radiating waves of mental fluctuations. In a deep, ponderous voice it spoke:

  “Digro Sabbath demands souls steeped in agony, broken bodies spilling blood—not merely hooking Ether in bulk and tossing it aside to create scattered, charred husks.

  What we seek has always been the process of slaughter, not the mere result of death.”

  “Chirp chirp chirp!”

  The giant ape that had appeared earlier cackled again.

  “Yes, yes, exactly! Kill kin, and you harvest souls of hatred. Kill loved ones, and you harvest souls of grief. Kill the young, and you harvest souls of bewildered innocence. These three are indispensable ingredients for opening communion with the ‘Dark Ocean’ during the Sabbath ritual.”

  Swetha fell into silence, saying nothing.

  His lack of response sent the Demons into raucous laughter, their mirth dripping with mockery and arrogance, laced with cruelty and greed.

  “This style…”

  At this, Seraphine scoffed coldly.

  “As expected—rhetoric of the Evil God.”

  “The Deep Space Evil God never appeared in the main arc of the original work, only in scattered rumors and peripheral mentions by minor characters.”

  Seraphine slowly lifted her head, gazing at the blazing galaxies stretching into infinity, her voice calm and steady:

  “The words Deep Space—they simply mean distance. But how great a distance? To the edge of the Milky Way? Beyond the Milky Way? Or… even further still?”

  Her eyes deepened, as if trying to pierce through countless light-years to glimpse what lay beyond the universe itself.

  “The Dark Ocean… could that be the dwelling place of the Evil God?”

  Boom—rumble, rumble!

  As Seraphine pondered the unknown realm of the ‘Dark Ocean,’ Drugana barreled across a million kilometers in mere seconds, like a cosmic bowling ball, plunging into the celestial cluster surrounding Earth—becoming yet another ‘entity’ of the Solar System.

  Seraphine adored this beautiful planet. She couldn’t bear to leave it spinning alone.

  So she decided to take it with her.

  “Come with me,” she whispered, “and soar into the cosmos.”

  She slowly turned her head, her gaze falling on Earth—hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, cradled among countless stars.

  Earth.

  Long before reaching this Sector, Seraphine had already ‘unfrozen’ it.

  Countless beings had returned to their daily work and lives.

  Only the endlessly surging, majestic vision of hundreds of planets coexisting and orbiting just beyond the thin ‘light membrane’ capping the sky above them remained, proclaiming Seraphine’s existence in a way that seared itself into their minds and eyes.

  Confronted with such an overwhelming, otherworldly spectacle, fear had gradually ebbed from their hearts. In its place, quietly taking root, grew a conviction—【The Empress is omnipotent. The Empress surpasses even the gods.】

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

  And in time, this belief became a matter of course.

  Meanwhile, outside—at this very moment.

  As Seraphine’s thoughts shifted, the Three Realms Domain instantly unfurled, enveloping an expanse of countless square kilometers.

  At once, the ‘entity’ of the Solar System behind her—stretching across millions of square kilometers of cosmic space—shattered beneath her will. It exploded into fragments, scattering into planets that flew in all directions like a storm of radiant, untamed birds, soaring through the starry deep.

  The melody of freedom is always stirring—yet fleeting.

  No sooner had those planets and asteroids settled into the surrounding void than, compelled by boundless force, they rumbled back toward Seraphine from every direction.

  In mere seconds, hundreds upon thousands of celestial bodies aligned in a vast column stretching tens of thousands of miles behind her. With the million-kilometer-diameter Sun at its head, Mercury linked to Venus, Venus to Earth, Earth to Mars—planet to planet, moon to moon—until the entire Solar System stood in a single straight line.

  Together they formed a cosmic serpent: a colossal chain of planets, moons, comets, and asteroids. With its blazing, million-kilometer head leading the way, it undulated with majestic grace, gliding into the unfathomable depths of the boundless universe.

  Whoosh—

  The trillion-mile void in every direction blurred, and a vast, dark, and bottomless Void Realm emerged—no less immense than the fabric of space-time itself.

  This was the Symbolic Domain.

  With a single thought, the Sector’s Projected Layer fractured into nothingness. From beneath it, the Symbolic Domain surfaced, revealed before Seraphine’s eyes.

  “Time to go,” she murmured, “to the Mercury Empire.”

  Rumble, rumble, rumble—

  A massive tide of energy erupted from the head of the Solar System serpent, surging outward at light speed. It swept across vast stretches of the surrounding void, crushing hundreds of thousands of meteors and snuffing out countless high-energy rays.

  Colossal fluctuations roared skyward, shaking realms themselves. With her hands clasped, Seraphine led the star-serpent—tens of thousands of kilometers long—straight through the barrier between reality and the Sentience Realm, surging into the boundless, cosmic-like Symbolic Domain.

  At that very moment, from the hazy depths of space-time within the Symbolic Domain, a colossal fleet emerged: more than a hundred starships, each thousands of meters long, advancing at high speed toward her position.

  “Ah?”

  Seraphine’s divine eyes swept across them, instantly grasping every detail within and without the approaching fleet.

  It was a Milky Way slave fleet, composed of interstellar cargo ships. They had just discovered and annihilated a primitive Iron Age civilization in a newly charted Low-Ether Broken Sector, and were now returning in triumph, holds packed with tens of millions of sentient captives.

  Their plan was simple: refuel at Zciya City, pass through this Sector’s Sentience Realm Hallway, and from there reach the bustling High-Ether prosperous Sectors where interstellar civilizations gathered—where their slaves would be sold for a fortune.

  Seraphine’s lips curved into a smile.

  “What a coincidence. Come along.”

  By now, the fleet had also caught sight of the blazing star ahead—growing impossibly larger with every passing instant.

  Shocked and bewildered that such a star could exist within the Sentience Realm, they scrambled to decelerate.

  But it was already far too late.

  Buzz—

  As Seraphine’s gaze swept across, the interstellar slave fleet—still tens of thousands of miles away—suddenly froze in place, then broke apart piece by piece.

  Tens of thousands of alien crew members of every form, along with tens of millions of goat-horned, three-eyed, chitin-based beings clad in archaic robes, were all seized by spatial vortices and cast onto the many planets behind Seraphine—worlds she had reshaped in an instant into suitable environments.

  The very moment these countless beings set foot upon those planets, strange forces pierced through their souls, striking directly at their Root Spirituality. Each was branded with white light, becoming a fresh source of wisdom’s flame, feeding Seraphine’s ever-expanding evolutionary path.

  When this was done, she lowered her gaze toward the trillion-mile abyss below.

  There, a Sentience Realm Hallway—hundreds of thousands of times thicker and vaster than the Solar System’s meager low-grade hallways—spiraled like a colossal band of light. It radiated a brilliance rivaling a star, encasing a cylindrical passage tens of millions of miles across. From the infinite black void it extended outward, stretching beyond Seraphine’s vision, plunging into the fathomless depths of the Symbolic Domain.

  This was the legendary advanced Sentience Realm Hallway, granting interstellar travelers the ability to soar at speeds of tens of millions of times the speed of light.

  Seraphine tilted her head, her eyes reflecting the blazing pathway below, and murmured in awe:

  “Even having seen it in others’ memories, beholding it with one’s own eyes brings a grandeur beyond compare.

  Such magnificence.

  I am ever more convinced: this network of Sentience Realm Hallways spanning the entire Milky Way was never a natural formation. It must have been wrought by some unfathomable super-civilization.

  The only question is… does that civilization still exist?”

  After a moment’s thought, Seraphine’s figure blurred, and she descended at speed—dragging behind her the vast Solar System serpent, tens of thousands of kilometers long.

  Before long she crossed a stark boundary, where light and dark were cleanly divided, and entered a radiant field—tens of thousands of miles thick and seemingly solid—that encircled the colossal hallway.

  The instant she entered, Seraphine felt the structure of space itself grow more intricate.

  It was still the same void, yet her senses told her it had become layered—distinct strata of reality stacked one atop another.

  As she puzzled over it, a stream of information suddenly imprinted itself into her mind:

  【Choose to accelerate either forward or backward to three hundred times the speed of light to gain a speed boost effect.】

  “There’s even a user manual,” she remarked, amused. “Truly considerate design. Not bad.”

  With that, Seraphine surged forward, dragging the star-serpent array behind her to three hundred times the speed of light in a heartbeat.

  Boom!!!

  In a single second, the star-dragon, tens of millions of miles long, lanced through a trillion miles of distance.

  As she traveled, Seraphine realized that both she and the celestial serpent trailing her had slipped into a strange, indescribable state. She could not define it, yet she suspected it was bound to the multi-layered structure of this luminous array.

  At that moment, under the strain of her acceleration, the void itself bulged and warped.

  The entire Sentience Realm Hallway shuddered violently. Countless fine fissures split open along its surface with echoing creaks, and then the dazzling light field erupted in an endless blaze—driving the Solar System entity of hundreds of stars to an even greater surge of speed.

  Rumble, rumble, rumble!!!

  In an instant, the terrifying star array—tens of millions of miles long—surged like a flood of smoke, accelerating ever deeper into the Sentience Realm.

  As it sped forward, the seemingly ‘tiny’ hallway body at the very center of the blazing light field trembled violently with Seraphine’s advance. Spiderweb-like cracks split open across its surface, only to heal slowly once Seraphine had dragged countless worlds far behind her.

  It was obvious: accelerating an entire stellar system was far beyond what this passage had been built to endure.

  Ordinarily, its ‘users’ were nothing more than starships of manageable size and mass.

  Tens of thousands of tons at the lightest, hundreds of thousands at the heavier end, and at most a few million tons.

  On rare occasions, it might accommodate a true ‘big catch’—a grand interstellar fleet numbering in the thousands or tens of thousands of ships, each a few hundred million tons, together weighing in at only a few trillion tons.

  For such ‘light users,’ the hallway could accelerate them again and again without strain.

  But today, it faced Seraphine, who was dragging the weight of the Solar System itself.

  Clatter clatter clatter!!!

  With each shuddering fracture within the advanced corridor, Seraphine and the constellation of stars trailing her were hurled to speeds of tens of millions of times the speed of light in mere moments—three trillion kilometers per second.

  At such a terrifying velocity, after just over three minutes of flight, Seraphine—dragging the entire Solar System—had already abandoned this star system and was surging toward the depths of the Orion Arm.

  The Orion Arm: a region woven from uncountable blazing stars, the most intricate and diverse spiral arm of the Milky Way.

  It lies on the galaxy’s periphery, stretching outward in the direction of the core, with a total span of twenty-five thousand light-years.

  A scale so vast it borders on despair.

  Yet, at tens of millions of times the speed of light within a high-level corridor, one could traverse the entire Orion Arm end to end in a mere twenty-two hours.

  But that is only the ideal. In reality, such high-level hallways are never so continuous.

  Within the present Milky Way, the Sentience Realm Hallway network is fractured and broken, scattered like shards across the stellar expanse.

  Many times, one can travel tens or even hundreds of light-years before the passage abruptly ends, forcing a detour into the Symbolic Domain for superluminal flight across a certain distance, just to reach the next usable stretch of the hallway for high-speed travel. And every new section—long or short—inevitably comes to an end. At that point, one must once again enter the Symbolic Domain, navigating according to the mapped distributions, to connect to the next usable Sentience Realm Hallway.

  Yet in truth, most of the Sentience Realm Hallways scattered across the vast cosmos are abandoned, useless remnants.

  Their greatest value lies in what they signify: that this seemingly barren, uninhabited Sector might once have been a thriving hub of life and culture ages ago.

  Moreover, hallways differ by level, and their speeds vary drastically, sometimes separated by immense disparities.

  Take, for instance, the hallway Seraphine now traverses. It is one of only three high-level hallways within the Orion Arm—and the sole one in this spiral arm that remains unbroken from beginning to end.

  Thus, some fifty thousand years ago, an interstellar cluster resembling the shape of a palm leaf gradually took form along this high-level hallway, together with the countless branching secondary hallways that connect to it.

  Naturally, like a palm leaf, it possesses both a petiole and leaflets.

  But unlike the broader, thicker structure of other leaves, the palm leaf tapers into dozens of narrow blades. From the base of the petiole to its farthest tip, it splits sequentially into thirty to fifty sword-shaped leaflets, each about three to four centimeters wide and sixty to seventy centimeters long, branching from both sides of the cylindrical petiole.

  Between each slim leaflet runs a clear dividing gap, giving them a sharp, independent appearance to the eye.

  So it is with this vast Civilization Zone.

  The petiole is the six-thousand-light-year-long high-level Sentience Realm Hallway Seraphine is currently crossing.

  The leaflets are dozens or even hundreds of elongated Sectors, each roughly ten to fifty light-years wide and stretching several hundred to several thousand light-years in length, interconnected by a dense network of secondary and lower-level hallways.

  Between each of these Sectors lie similarly narrow and elongated Broken Sectors, scattered in irregular sizes.

  Of course, in nature, palm leaves are flat, their sharp sword-like leaflets sprouting neatly along both sides of the petiole.

  The so-called “palm-leaf-shaped Civilization Zone,” however, possesses a fully three-dimensional structure.

  Its leaflets are not bound to a flat plane, nor are their numbers fixed, nor their distribution perfectly symmetrical.

  Many of these sword-shaped Sectors even form intricate connecting bridges between one another.

  This leaves the Broken Sectors—wider in size—appearing fragmented, scattered like shards across various corners of the “palm-leaf-shaped” expanse.

  The name itself is merely a temporary label given by Seraphine.

  Among the interstellar powers, its formal designation is the 【Fidd Popenif Interstellar Civilization Zone】.

  But since the name was clumsy and awkward to speak, Seraphine casually coined her own.

  Gazing upon the sword-shaped Sectors, each harboring hundreds of thousands of stars burning in golden brilliance, she mused briefly—then christened it the 【Golden Bough Interstellar Civilization Zone】.

  By now Seraphine, after surging more than a hundred light-years, had crossed into the thriving heart of the Golden Bough.

  From time to time, starships of every shape and size—and even entire armadas—flashed suddenly into her path.

  When these vessels finally perceived, at close range, the Solar System she was dragging at high velocity, the crews were struck speechless with shock.

  But it was already too late. One by one, they collided head-on with the Sun’s million-kilometer span.

  And yet—something strange occurred.

  The starships passed through as though phantoms, unharmed, while the Sun itself remained unscathed.

  It was as if both existed in parallel space-times—or as if both had slipped into states akin to dark matter, overlapping like illusory bubbles.

  Neither imposed the slightest mechanical influence upon the other.

  At the forefront, Seraphine at last understood:

  “So this intricate spatial weave in the acceleration field of the hallway… this is its purpose.”

  “And this accelerated travel state within the hallway… should be named the 【Dark】 state.”

  “A condition akin to dark matter.”

  Deep within the endless Projected Layer—

  Seraphine, accelerating at tens of millions of times the speed of light, let her mental reflection divide off a wisp of Divine Will, which in an instant plunged into the depths of her soul.

  Swish—

  Her Divine Will’s sight shifted instantly.

  Before her eyes opened a titanic sphere of space, nearly a billion kilometers across.

  At its center blazed a magnificent Sun, a million kilometers in diameter, still in its prime, slowly revolving as it shed torrents of brilliant, searing light across the void.

  Encircling the outer atmosphere of this colossal star—barely a million kilometers away—stood a ring-like mechanical megastructure, vast and intricate, a cosmic Great Wall coiling around it.

  Yet unlike a conventional Dyson Sphere, which merely harvests stellar energy passively—

  Within this titanic mechanical construct—cylindrical in form, spanning more than a thousand kilometers in diameter—every ten thousand miles there stood an impossibly “delicate” yet astonishingly vast needle, each over a million kilometers in length, piercing straight into the raging, seething ocean of light on the Sun’s surface below.

  In total, more than 1,200 of these colossal needles were embedded within the great machine.

  Each one thrust deep into unfathomable layers beneath the Sun’s surface, its heatproof alloys and pipelines endlessly, greedily siphoning the blazing torrents of stellar energy at every moment.

  Meanwhile, floating in the void one hundred thousand kilometers outward from this first mechanical Great Wall, there existed yet another colossal structure—ring-shaped, also cylindrical in cross-section, over a thousand kilometers thick, though with an even greater circumference and span.

  Though no visible bridges or shafts connected the two rings, they rotated independently, and in the ten-thousand-mile gulf between them, a storm of power surged back and forth. Energy was drawn and transmitted by means resembling wireless transfer, binding the two immense constructs into a single, seamless energetic entity.

  Beyond this second ring, another one hundred thousand kilometers farther out, hung a third structure of still greater magnitude.

  The second passed its titanic energies to the third, just as the third would to the fourth, another hundred thousand kilometers farther still.

  And so it went—layer upon layer.

  Suspended in the endless void above the Sun, Seraphine lifted her gaze. Near and far, her eyes beheld the impossible sight: more than a thousand vast, concentric rings—cosmic Great Walls—encircling and interlacing around the blazing star beneath her feet, each one in ceaseless revolution, rippling and heaving like the gears of a divine machine.

  Amid the ceaseless revolutions, a vast ocean of energy seemed to surge within the trillion-mile void. Stirred by the concentric cosmic mega-structures, it appeared boundless, immeasurable, and ever-expanding.

  Within those layered, perpetually turning fortresses of steel, hundreds of trillions of mechanical squids of every size drifted and darted.

  Like creatures swimming through a true ocean, they glided freely, each bearing its own distinct form and specialized function.

  Their primary purpose was singular: to ensure the flawless operation of the entire mega-structure system.

  These colossal, intricate constructs were the crowning achievement of Seraphine’s super-engineering—born from her mastery in deciphering the countless technologies hidden within the “dead” Alefen Colossus from another space-time.

  At present, she had gathered all personnel, archives, instruments, machinery, collections, and resources within the layered bastions of this mechanical citadel.

  This vast, limitless expanse itself existed because Seraphine had evolved her Four-Dimensional body, pushing deeper into the mysteries of space-time, ultimately severing the last constraints of Witchcraft. In doing so, she transformed her former Dimensional Pocket—once barely larger than Jupiter—into something immeasurably greater.

  Now, its capacity had expanded by tens of thousands of trillions of times, large enough to contain one thousand entire Solar Systems.

  “A place to store things—finally, no longer suffocating.”

  After leisurely admiring this meticulous creation of hers, Seraphine’s seemingly solid Divine Will body blurred, then vanished, reappearing tens of millions of kilometers away—at the 374th layer of the mega-structure.

  Passing through walls of alloy and barriers of defense without pause, she emerged at its heart: a colossal laboratory, two hundred kilometers long, wide, and high.

  Suspended within the weightless, pure-white chamber was a titanic whale, twenty kilometers in length and nearly nine kilometers wide, drifting in silence.

  Though massive beyond imagination, this form was in truth but a fraction of its original body.

  Its form had inexplicably diminished countless times since leaving the Sentience Realm, and its combat power had plummeted. Now it was no more than a Transcendent Stage Four Void Whale.

  The causes of this contraction and loss of strength had been deduced after extensive research by many scientists.

  In truth, the material body of the Void Whale—a species native to the Sentience Realm—may only ever have been as small as what Seraphine now beheld.

  The gargantuan form once glimpsed in the fractured corridor of the Projected Layer aligned with the Solar System was likely nothing more than a manifestation—its true body magnified by the boundless, chaotic currents that surged from the depths of the Sentience Realm.

  This phenomenon was corroborated by similar traits seen in weaker Sentience Realm creatures drawn into the whale’s blowhole.

  “A truly miraculous creature.”

  Seraphine extended a hand, brushing the Void Whale’s hide—rough and abrasive as sandpaper—while her mind flickered through dense records of other perilous beings born of the Sentience Realm.

  The so-called Sentience Realm species.

  As the name implies, they are lifeforms both strange and elusive, existing somewhere between matter and information, dwelling within the Symbolic Domain of the Sentience Realm.

  Their true origin and line of evolution are forever beyond tracing.

  Their biological framework cannot be fully unraveled.

  What is known is this: since the dawn of civilization, these ancient, dangerous beings have endured in the farthest reaches of the Sentience Realm, their lifespans stretching across scales of time that defy imagination.

  They typically wield strange abilities far beyond the comprehension of sentient beings—paired with violent, unpredictable temperaments.

  More fatally still, when many low-level civilizations first stepped into the stars, their greatest peril was not always contact with hostile alien empires.

  If their fortune failed them, they might instead encounter these entities: creatures born of another dimension, harboring an innate and inexplicable hatred for life in the material world.

  A single chance encounter with a Sentience Realm being could turn what began as a confused, almost accidental entry into the Symbolic Domain aboard crude chemical-powered starships into something indistinguishable from a cosmic horror film—or worse, an interstellar apocalypse.

  Space pirates roamed the Milky Way like rabid dogs. Yet no matter how ferocious, their violence was at least rational—always driven by plunder.

  Sentience Realm creatures, by contrast, killed without cause. Their slaughter had nothing to do with sustenance or survival. It had no reason at all.

  Upon glimpsing life from beyond the Sentience Realm, these entities would inevitably erupt into madness, attacking with relentless savagery—as though their very existence were defined in opposition to the material universe.

  Fortunately, these beings never leave the Sentience Realm. They recoil from the real cosmos itself, loathing the physical world. Unless forcibly drawn across the boundary, they will never step into reality.

  Even so, civilizations have long recognized the need to contain their threat. Thus, Sentience Realm species are classified into three principal danger levels, measured against the combat power standards of the physical universe:

  Normal tier. Transcendent tier. Overlord tier.

  Unlike the myriad lifeforms of the material plane, who must claw their way upward through painstaking cultivation, intelligent individuals among the Sentience Realm species are exceedingly rare.

  They are more often akin to wild beasts—savage, cruel, incapable of treading any cultivated path.

  And like wild beasts, their strength depends solely on innate talent.

  The greater the talent, the more terrifying their eventual power will inevitably become.

  Thus, Sentience Realm species require no cultivation; given time, they inevitably grow until they reach the ceiling of their innate talent.

  Take the Overlord tier for example.

  Among the civilizations of the Orion Arm, three such beings are clearly documented:

  Rotten Dragon. Void Whale. Abyss Lizard.

  To face these living Yama Kings—ordinary starships stand no chance. Even entire interstellar fleets, unless led by an Overlord of their own, would find only death if they crossed paths with one deep within the Sentience Realm.

  Fortunately, such encounters are vanishingly rare. An interstellar civilization may pass from birth to ruin without ever once beholding such an Overlord.

  In truth, what travelers dread most—and what they encounter most often—are the far more numerous Normal tier Sentience Realm species.

  Civilizations of the Orion Arm have officially cataloged fifteen distinct types of Normal tier beings.

  Their manifested forms—in shape, in abilities, even in temperament—mirror with eerie precision the demons, phantoms, and monsters found in the ancient myths of countless civilizations.

  To encounter one in the void is like having your starship haunted.

  These entities instill overwhelming terror and mental pressure, while unleashing attack methods that transcend all material logic.

  Some inexplicably gnaw the organs of crew members from afar, through intact hull plating.

  Others slip like ghosts through sealed metal, infiltrating the ship unseen, devouring captain and crew alike, then wearing their faces as masks.

  Some drag victims into nightmares, devouring them alive or possessing them in their sleep.

  Still others—field-type Sentience Realm species—can rend the veil between realms itself, dragging whole sections of the Projected Layer into the vessel. Within such warped zones, dream and reality blur into one, matter itself mutates into grotesque forms, and the starship becomes nothing less than a floating Hell. (Think of it as akin to the film 《Event Horizon》.)

  For small merchant ships and passenger vessels lacking firepower—or without enough powerful individuals aboard—these encounters are catastrophic. A single brush with such entities can end in annihilation: ship destroyed, crew lost, their journey swallowed by the vastness of space.

  But for colossal interstellar fleets, the danger is lesser. Damage can be inflicted, yes, yet it remains within limits that fleets can usually endure.

  What fleets truly dread are Transcendent-tier Sentience Realm species—creatures capable of obliterating a starship with nothing more than a casual motion.

  In the records of Orion Arm civilizations, eight such species have been documented.

  Each record is written in blood.

  Each entry exists only because desperate survivors returned—few, half-mad, barely alive—bringing scraps of knowledge at the cost of countless lives.

  And yet even this catalog is but a fragment.

  These are only the beings that have been recorded.

  There are still those undetected, still those from whom no survivor ever returned. They linger unseen in the abyssal shadows of the universe, their names and forms unknown.

  How many species dwell beyond the Orion Arm, in other spiral arms of the Milky Way?

  No one knows.

  How many stalk the entirety of the Milky Way?

  No one knows.

  And if the scope is pushed wider still—out to the very edge of the observable universe—how many dangerous Sentience Realm creatures might there be?

  No one knows either.

  And perhaps, hidden in the dark corners of infinity, there exist Sentience Realm beings beyond the Overlord tier—creatures of levels unknown, their terror surpassing imagination itself.

  Of them, even less is known.

  This myriad of unknown quantities and species—terrifying, bizarre, ferocious Sentience Realm creatures—fills the vast, boundless Symbolic Domain.

  They wait.

  Wait for the unlucky to stumble upon them.

  Wait to toy with them until death.

  Wait to swallow them whole in despair.

  Sentience Realm creatures are walking calamities.

  Yet here, in this immense laboratory, the Void Whale—an existence feared and dreaded by every civilization—was, upon awakening, docile as a lamb before Seraphine.

  Seraphine, however, felt only disappointment. Her voice softened:

  "What a pity. Your soul and mind are gravely damaged. All memory of what came before… utterly erased."

  "Master! Master! Master! Master!"

  The emotion radiating from the massive creature beneath her palm was reverent, submissive. Seraphine smiled, though her gaze turned inward.

  At the moment of the Void Whale’s awakening, the dormant ‘Mycenae’ memory packet in her Ocean of Knowledge stirred, quivering, releasing fragments of information.

  From within the shattered data, Seraphine beheld a vision:

  A humanoid figure—forced into form from countless fractured black crystals, always on the brink of collapse—commanding a colossal whale vast as a continent, surging through a dense, radiant Colorful River of Light.

  From that river pulsed an energy that transcended time and space.

  "Mycenae’s past life? What is this river? Why does it feel as though it wields dominion over space-time itself, deeper even than that black-gold Phoenix?

  Is it some natural phenomenon of the cosmos—or an ancient existence equal in stature to the Phoenix?"

  She reined in the unproductive thoughts.

  Her intuition whispered: “Set aside the Colorful River of Light for now. This Void Whale must have been the mount he rode to escape the so-called Witch Continent. But where is that Witch Continent…”

  Buzz—

  A flicker in her mind, then clarity dawned. She laughed softly.

  "Without even realizing it, I’ve crossed into the borderlands of the Mercury Empire."