City of Divine Blood is the largest interstellar metropolis within the vastness of Server 375.
It is situated at the absolute center of the universe.
This isn't a center defined by cultural significance, but a literal, objective geographical midpoint.
Unlike physical reality, the world of Brilliant Games Server 375 is not a 4D hypersphere.
In essence, it is a static, cubic universe with sharp edges and clear boundaries.
Like a square fish tank. In its geographical center, where the four diagonals intersect, lies a supermassive black hole.
Enveloping this black hole is a colossal accretion disk, radiating blinding light into the dark void, spanning 6.5 trillion kilometers in diameter.
City of Divine Blood is an ultra-gigantic megastructure cluster built beneath this disk. It consists of fifty-six interlocking mechanical rings, a nested system of orbital plates forming a massive city-state.
Each ring-shaped structure has a cross-section diameter of 15,000 kilometers. The smallest inner ring has a circumference of 200 billion kilometers, while the outermost ring reaches a staggering 1.9 trillion kilometers.
Separated by billions of kilometers, these rings are interconnected by hundreds of millions of pipelines, each 100 kilometers wide.
These massive cosmic conduits unify the scattered ring structures into a single, singular metropolis.
Though the city's birth is ancient, dating back over 100 million years, its history remains largely a mystery.
Over the eons, due to its prime location and unimaginable scale, factions from countless Earths have established bases here, stationing infinite personnel.
They use this hub to radiate control across billions of stars, studying the game to harvest massive profits.
The most difficult among the three Supreme Instances, [Cataclysmic Firmament], resides within a space-time vortex 9.9 billion kilometers above the prime sector of City of Divine Blood, situated right against the accretion disk.
To reach it, one must ascend the Sky-Piercing Tower at the district's edge, a narrow conduit leading straight into the mouth of the vortex.
Though called a tower, it is actually a bluish-white cylinder roughly nine hundred meters in diameter. Its surface is flawlessly smooth, hovering half a meter above the ground, constructed entirely from neutron-degenerate matter.
In essence, it is a neutron pillar, fundamentally no different from a neutron star.
Unlike typical neutron stars, this Sky-Piercing Tower has its terrifying physics, gravity billions of times stronger than old Earth, a billion-Gauss magnetic field, and million-degree temperatures, hermetically sealed within a 100-meter radius by some mysterious, ancient technology.
The gravity vector itself has been miraculously rerouted, aimed straight down a vacuum conduit toward the event horizon of a black hole located over a hundred billion kilometers outside the first district.
Cross that 100-meter boundary, and you're finished. The downward torrent of gravitational force, hyper-magnetic flux, and searing heat will instantly vaporize anything in its path, reducing it to nothingness.
Even if an object were durable enough to withstand the shock, the gravitational surge would still violently flush it out of the district and into the deep void, hurtling directly toward the black hole's maw.
Scaling this impossible Sky-Piercing Tower requires specific Player Classes, intangibility skills, or a Ghost Suit, Legendary-tier equipment forged from dark matter and dark energy using ancient tech.
For any other player, regardless of their power, entering is a death sentence.
...
City of Divine Blood, edge of the first district.
"A Ghost Suit, huh..."
Standing just beyond the 100-meter dead zone, Seraphine ignored the thousands of players watching from a safe distance. She gazed up at the bluish-white cylinder as it tapered into a needle-thin line against the sky. She smiled. "Neutron stars, black holes, wormholes... in the end, they're all just game rules stacked and stitched together."
Clearly, she didn't fear the lethal forces within the neutron pillar.
"...Excuse me, coming through..."
A young man clad in ornate, radiant mechanical power armor pushed through the crowd. He marched toward Seraphine, wearing a sycophantic smile.
"Hello, miss. I am the President of the Aquarius Guild, 『Aquarius ☆ Proud Peerless』."
Seraphine glanced at him. "Something you need?"
The smile on the President's face deepened. "It's like this, word is you've acquired the Mecha-God Core and the Divine Spark of All Evil. I was wondering... would you be willing to part with them? Price is no object!"
"Price?"
Seraphine chuckled, genuinely amused. "We aren't even from the same planet. Does price even have meaning here?"
"Heh! You don't need to worry about that at all!"
Seeing her interest, he became invigorated and spoke excitedly. "Aquarius isn't like those other guilds obsessed with hack-and-slash. We are a three-thousand-year-old commercial entity specializing in rare item appraisal, marketing, lore customization, player branding, and cross-server auctions. We have established business ties with 1,587,356,028 human-populated planets. If you partner with us to market the Divine Spark of All Evil and..."
"Hold on," Seraphine interrupted, surprised. "Game items can be sold across servers?"
"Exactly, exactly," 『Aquarius ☆ Proud Peerless』 nodded submissively. "While players can't physically hop between servers, items and data certainly can..."
"I see."
Seraphine nodded, turned, and began walking leisurely toward the Sky-Piercing Tower, leaving the guild leader standing there in awkward silence.
After a few moments, the man realized with a start that Seraphine was heading into the danger zone without any preparation. He shouted in a panic:
"Miss! Wait! You... you can't go in there without a Ghost Suit!"
Seraphine merely raised a hand and waved dismissively as she continued her approach.
Seeing her move, the thousands of players nearby erupted in a frenzy:
"Is she suicidal?"
"This... even a cheater can't be that fearless, right?"
"Does she have an intangibility skill? Can she convert her body into dark energy?"
Seconds later, under everyone's gaze, Seraphine crossed the shimmering boundary.
HUMMM!
A sudden, ear-piercing bass thrum echoed throughout the entire district.
The onlookers, including the Aquarius president, stood frozen in shock. Seraphine was floating steadily within the danger zone, completely unscathed.
The environment, as lethal as the surface of a neutron star, couldn't inflict a single point of damage on her.
Even more shocking, Seraphine's body remained in its physical state; she hadn't utilized even a shred of intangibility.
In Seraphine's perspective, crossing the boundary plunged her into a narrow, dense world of blinding light, searing heat, and violent electromagnetic flux.
To any normal being, entering this space meant instant annihilation.
But to Seraphine, the crushing gravity, hyper-magnetic fields, and extreme temperatures were merely simulated game mechanics, artificial approximations of true physical phenomena.
"All this brilliance is but a facade."
In this extreme environment, she could peer into the reality hidden beneath the game's core rules.
"Once I grasp that reality, the secrets of Brilliant Games... will be laid bare."
Smiling, Seraphine waded through the unimaginable gravitational torrent and blinding light. Ignoring the heat that could vaporize any macro-matter, she slammed a foot against the Sky-Piercing Tower.
CRACK!
The surface of the tower, composed of ultra-dense neutron-degenerate matter, actually yielded. Her foot sank deep into the pillar, and dozens of jagged fissures spiderwebbed across the impact zone.
The onlookers were paralyzed. To dent the surface of a neutron star and crack it wide open... this was beyond comprehension.
His face pale with shock, 『Aquarius ☆ Proud Peerless』 suddenly shouted toward her: "Miss! How... how do you plan to reach the Celestial Palace?"
"How else?"
The blinding radiance couldn't hinder Seraphine's senses. She turned to the guild leader and smiled, as if stating the obvious. "I'll run up, of course."
Using the foot embedded in the tower as a pivot, she lunged forward.
BOOM!!!
Amidst a series of heavy, vibrating thrums, Seraphine transformed into a blur of light, hurtling upward against the crushing torrent of gravity.
SWOOSH!
Turbulent currents roared as blinding light surged.
With her second step, she was already a thousand kilometers up.
Against the crushing gravity of a neutron star, Seraphine's first leap had propelled her five hundred kilometers into the sky.
BOOM!!
Another step, and she soared higher.
This time, defying the infinite gravitational weight, she vaulted three thousand kilometers, leaving the first district behind and plunging into the dark, boundless void of space.
BANG!
BANG!
BANG!
In just half a dozen strides, Seraphine had cleared a million kilometers. She was now running at a ninety-degree angle against the surface of the massive pillar.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
After accelerating through time and distance, even while enduring gravity a hundred billion times stronger than Earth's, her speed abruptly peaked at 99% of the light speed.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
As she ran at this horrifying velocity, her feet carved a continuous trail of deep footprints into the solid Sky-Piercing Tower.
Upon reaching near light speed, Seraphine sensed the invisible space ahead becoming strangely viscous.
"Viscous", as if it were deliberately trying to prevent her from accelerating further, from breaking the light speed barrier.
"The light speed shackle you've simulated... I've already spotted its flaw!"
With a cold laugh, Seraphine struck the pillar with such force that a ten-thousand-meter section of the Sky-Piercing Tower was instantly crushed into pure light and heat.
Simultaneously, the speed-limit barrier ahead of her shattered.
BOOM!!!
After covering millions of kilometers in a single second, a massive cluster of space-time turbulence, intermixed with twisted, pixelated mosaics, erupted and swirled around her.
Seraphine had forcibly defied the game's fundamental mechanics. Without warping space or folding dimensions, she broke the light speed limit through pure, raw velocity.
In this game, there was no design for objects to exceed light speed without utilizing space-time jumps or dimensional warping.
However, having observed the inner workings of "Brilliant Games" several times, Seraphine could now use her Transcendental Perception to hijack the low-level logic of the game's engine.
The intensity and depth of this interference grew by the second. The so-called game mechanics could no longer truly restrain her.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
In the FTL realm, every step Seraphine took annihilated millions of miles of the pillar's structure.
As her speed increased, so did the scale of the destruction. Amidst her sprint, Seraphine instinctively projected her Transcendental Perception outward, scanning every direction.
She sensed that "behind" the vast cosmic void, there existed additional, hidden space-time dimensions.
For a split second, she "saw" a mountain-sized, crimson, three-headed and six-winged beast, resembling a western dragon, streak through space, its form blurred and ethereal.
Without a second thought, she drew her blade. A massive, ten-thousand-mile crescent of brilliant white blade-qi swept outward.
BOOM!
The blade-qi vanished into the void after traveling only a thousand miles. Yet, Seraphine didn't hesitate; she continued her mad dash toward the space-time vortex at the pillar's peak.
...
Server 724, in the vastness of the void.
Inside the Level 200 Instance [Beast's Nest], over a thousand players in various mechas were systematically besieging the Instance Boss, the Bloody Dragon King.
BOOM!!
Suddenly, a ten-thousand-mile crescent of pure white light materialized out of nowhere. Like a colossal tsunami, it swept through space, instantly vaporizing the three-headed Bloody Dragon King as it entered its second phase.
The white sea of light didn't stop there.
It tore through another million miles, instantly cleaving a rotating rocky planet into dust before streaking into the deep void and vanishing.
The players, who had been in the heat of battle, were left paralyzed in shock.
"Uh..." Player A scratched his face, stammering. "Was that... a game bug?"
Player B rubbed his head in confusion. "So... does this count as a clear?"
Player C, the raid leader, checked the system notifications and looked up, stunned. "The system says we cleared it, but... we didn't kill the Boss."
The group looked at each other in stunned silence.
...
Server 375.
HUMMM!
A surge of experience points materialized and flowed into Seraphine's body.
This was clearly the reward for her cross-server strike that had slain an unknown Instance Boss.
To Seraphine, experience points and levels had become meaningless. If she wished, she could bypass her "Cheat" and use her Transcendental Perception to hijack the deepest layers of "Brilliant Games"' rules. She could rewrite her attributes at will or even warp the fundamental effects of her skills.
After a short while, running at hundreds of times the speed of light, Seraphine finally covered the vast distance and reached the end of the Sky-Piercing Tower.
There, a shimmering vortex, large enough to fill her entire field of vision, hung silently a thousand meters above her head.
"I've finally arrived."
With a soft whisper, Seraphine stepped into the space-time vortex.
HUMMM!
It felt as though she had traversed billions of light-years in a heartbeat, crossing through myriad dimensions.
Seraphine found herself floating above a boundless sea of white clouds, a shimmering, illusory mist that seemed far larger than any cosmic nebula.
This vast expanse of clouds radiated a brilliant, steady glow. Above this white sea, which spanned billions, perhaps trillions of kilometers, the sky was encrusted with countless stars that sparkled like radiant gemstones.
Seraphine looked down toward the distant horizon, a hundred billion kilometers away. She saw mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, and forests constructed from dense, glowing mist, each more majestic and massive than a blazing sun.
Amidst these colossal landscapes lay millions of celestial gardens, each far broader than the entire Eurasian continent of old Earth. Within them, giant versions of exotic flora bloomed in a riot of vibrant colors.
Winding streams and crystalline waterfalls meandered between the gardens. The gentle, rhythmic sound of flowing water was like a heavenly melody, soothing the soul.
The scene was a vision of prosperity and tranquility, a boundless beauty that seemed to have stepped out of an ancient painting.
Gazing even further toward the end of this cloud-shrouded world, Seraphine saw towering, jade-white structures adorned with gold, silver, pearls, and agate. These magnificent buildings floated with an effortless, regal grace.
Enveloping these massive white structures was a colossal, ethereal curtain of light. Its height was immeasurable, and its width stretched beyond the horizon.
A normal person arriving here would surely believe they had entered the Heavenly Palace of myth and that the curtain of light was the Great Southern Gate guarding the heavens.
But Seraphine peered through the illusory screen. She saw that beneath the jade-white shells of those majestic, mist-shrouded buildings lay vast networks of complex circuitry and mechanical devices.
This was clearly a mechanical, sci-fi version of the Heavenly Court.
SWOOSH!
Seraphine's form blurred as she crossed millions of miles in an instant. She arrived before the boundless curtain of light and reached out to touch it.
"Ding! Congratulations, you have discovered the Instance [Cataclysmic Firmament]. This area is suitable for groups of level 251 to 300 players. Please proceed with caution."
"Instance Summary: The Emperor has ruled over hundreds of trillions of stars for eons. But all things eventually reach an end, and the Emperor... has grown old.
The frail, aging Emperor refuses to let go and refuses to abdicate. He fears death; he fears his own non-existence. In his madness to prolong his life, he has ruthlessly cast septillions of living beings from hundreds of trillions of stars into a Quantum Alchemy Furnace, all to refine a single pill of eternal entropy-reversal and immortality.
He is the source of all chaos in the universe. He is the architect of extinction for sentient beings across a hundred million universes..."
After a quick glance at the summary, Seraphine stepped through the boundless curtain of light. She appeared before the gates of a colossal palace, a million kilometers high.
At first glance, the palace, glowing with a dim, ethereal light, appeared to be constructed from endless white jade. Its exterior was a masterpiece of intricate carvings and vibrant colors, depicting countless myths of gods and immortals, making one feel as though they had truly entered the realm of legend.
Mist swirled around lush, towering trees and mountain-sized, multicolored flowers, imbuing the structure with a transcendent aura.
However, compared to this gargantuan palace, Seraphine was a mere speck of dust. Every individual floor tile was hundreds of miles wide. It was as if she had entered a realm of ultimate giants.
This absurd scale instantly transformed the ethereal, spiritual atmosphere into something profoundly eerie.
Even stranger, Seraphine spotted something millions of kilometers away. In a corner of a courtyard even larger than the massive palace, a fleet of over a hundred interstellar warships was besieging half a dozen Heavenly Soldiers, thousand-mile-tall entities clad in ancient armor, half-flesh and half-machine.
An interstellar fleet fighting a squad of giant celestial guards... the sight was bizarre, to say the least.
As Seraphine projected her Transcendental Perception across the instance, she realized such battles were happening in every corner of the realm. Nearly a million warships, brought here by various player guilds through unknown means, were locked in combat with millions of Heavenly Soldiers and Generals across every district.
"Ding!"
"You are currently afflicted by nine negative statuses: Super-Radiation, Soul-Smoking Forcefield, Life Drain, Cellular Decay, Infestation Micro-Fungi, Quantum Virus, Mental Instability, Malicious Data, and Fel Energy Surge. Please leave the Instance area immediately to recover."
Seraphine calmly looked up at her health bar.
It hadn't moved.
It was as if the system notification had been a mere hallucination.
"Ah."
With a soft chuckle, Seraphine lowered her body into a half-crouch, crossing her clenched fists in front of her chest.
HUMMM!
A violent vibration erupted within her parallel fists, intensifying as she gathered her power.
Then, Seraphine suddenly threw her arms wide, slamming her fists into the air to either side.
[True Demon Revision · Earth-Shattering Great Mudra]
BANG!!!!
The world roared as the region within a range of tens of trillions to quadrillions of kilometers vibrated frantically.
CRACK!
The void of space suddenly fractured, erupting with a web of pitch-black fissures centered on Seraphine.
In the next heartbeat, this dense network of cracks expanded violently in every direction, hurtling toward every object and entity in existence.
CRACKLE! SNAP! SHATTER!
Like countless serpents from a black hell, the infinite, abyss-like black fissures surged outward. They expanded like lightning, blanketing every district of the instance, every building, every player, every Heavenly Soldier and Generals, everything in their path.
Seraphine slowly straightened her posture. Using her Transcendental Perception, she "looked" at the now-frozen world of people and objects. She calmly raised her slender arm and, with a smile, snapped her fingers.
SNAP!
CRACK!
The infinite fissures covering every inch of the instance gasped for a split second.
Then...
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Every atom, every millimeter of the instance... exploded.
Every player, every NPC, every palace building... shattered instantly into dust.
Following the cataclysm, the starry sky and the boundless sea of clouds were violently torn away, replaced by the vast, heavy, and silent darkness of the desolate void.
Infinite torrents of virtual matter surged from the void, washing over Seraphine.
This clearly indicated that Seraphine had annihilated the entire instance.
Feeling the raw, multi-layered game logic and circuitry exposed in this barren space, Seraphine spread her arms and laughed softly.
"This is the true face of "Brilliant Games"."
She gazed toward a colossal, majestic palace nearly a trillion kilometers away.
Despite having survived Seraphine's Void Shatter strike, the massive palace was currently teetering on the brink of collapse, though it had yet to disintegrate.
After "reading" the massive influx of game logic flowing through the void, Seraphine remarked:
"No wonder it didn't break. That structure is the Imperial Palace of the Heavenly Court, the seat of the Emperor of Decay. Since it houses the Boss, it occupies its own independent space."
Muttering to herself, she aimed her left hand at the distant palace floating in the misty void.
WHOOSH!
In a flash, hundreds of millions of layers of blazing divine blade-light, hot as heavenly fire, materialized from her fingertips.
HUMMM!
[True Demon Revision · Ruthless Blade Qi] + [True Demon Revision · Abstruse Truth of the Blade] + [True Demon Revision · Piercing Blade]
By re-engineering and merging the properties and values of these three skills, Seraphine forcibly created a "Logical Outlier" skill non-existent in the standard game: [The Blade of Pure Harm].
[The Blade of Pure Harm]: Reduces maximum HP and MP values by 9,999,999,999,999,999. Damage attribute +9,999,999,999,999,999. Attack range: 9,999,999,999,999,999m.
HZZZ!
This hyper-broken, over-stat new skill caused severe rule corruption, making the surrounding void violently warp and tremble.
The next heartbeat, a glowing blade just two meters long materialized in Seraphine's left hand.
Gripping the hilt, she swung it down toward the distant Emperor's palace.
SCHLICK!
Instantly, the blade's length expanded by countless hundreds of millions of times, stretching from a mere two meters to nearly ten trillion kilometers.
RUMBLE, RUMBLE!
Before the blade even connected, the ferocious gale of its edge stripped away the palace's skies layer by layer, fully exposing everything inside.
Within the palace sat a towering old man wearing an imperial crown and robes. His body was massive enough to rival a Red Supergiant star, exuding an aura that mingled supreme divinity with absolute, decaying death. Slumped on his throne, he stared in slack-jawed horror as the giant blade "slowly" descended upon him.
BOOM!!!
Like a sandcastle washed away by a tidal wave, the palace dissolved into dust in a fraction of a second.
The ancient Emperor was pulverized at that exact moment, leaving behind only his unblinking head and its imperial crown, which rapidly collapsed down to the size of a palm and drifted in the misty void.
SWOOSH!
Seraphine's figure flickered in the distance, crossing billions of kilometers in an instant to casually pick up the final Divine Artifact: the Emperor's Head.
...
City of Divine Blood, edge of the first district. At the base of the Sky-Piercing Tower, a massive crowd of players, several million strong, had gathered.
The noise from the massive crowd was deafening, enough to shake the very foundations of the skyscrapers nearby.
By now, every player on Server 375 knew that the Great Demon King Seraphine was about to collect the three Divine Artifacts and complete the ultimate quest.
Bug-abuser or hacker, it didn't matter. The fact that she could single-handedly crush the Royal Guild, slaughter her way through the three Supreme Instances, and seize the Divine Artifacts meant she was the undisputed peak of combat power in the server.
Perhaps... the highest in the entirety of "Brilliant Games".
Despite the countless times players had overestimated her, nobody expected her to actually achieve all this, especially in such a ridiculously short time.
In their quest for views, many player-content creators had dug up her profile, only to find something absurd:
She was just a "super-noob" who had started the game only a few days ago!
When this ridiculous information leaked, players across Server 375 and the other 998 servers were left reeling. The Game Forums were flooded with threads of jealousy and disbelief:
"This is completely insane!"
"I want whatever cheats she's using!"
"Seriously, V50 me the link to that hack to prove it works."
"This isn't cheating; it's the Great Emperor's ultimate ascension!"
"What are you even talking about?"
"So what if she's the number one player in Brilliant Games? Big deal. I dare her to hop servers and come get me!"
"Locked~ Incoming!"
"Bah! Keyboard warrior!"
"Only you would say that."
"Locked but delivered."
Aside from the chaotic forum threads and messy comments, countless players were flooding into the City of Divine Blood's first district. Their goal was simple: to witness the face of the Great Demon King Seraphine.
Streamers set up live feeds for players in reality and other servers to watch.
In the middle of the heated discussions, the deep space above the Sky-Piercing Tower suddenly ignited.
BANG!!
A dazzling sphere of light erupted from the misty void and hurtled toward the first district.