Through the vast deep space, Seraphine descended like a thunderbolt.
SWOOSH!!!
As she hurtled down at FTL speeds, the tiny, blurred speck of City of Divine Blood's first district grew clearer and more expansive.
Seconds later, she crossed the void, dove through the Sky-Piercing Tower's massive dome aperture, and plummeted into the heart of the first district. She landed on a high platform etched with shimmering blue-violet circuit patterns.
Below, the area was packed. Tens of thousands of players, maybe more, stood shoulder to shoulder. They craned their necks to look at Seraphine, yet not one dared to step onto the platform. They could only whisper fervently amongst themselves from the safety of the ground.
Standing leisurely on the stage, Seraphine retrieved three items from her inventory.
A silver brain encrusted with dense, complex circuitry, a pitch-black hexagonal crystal radiating divine light, and the severed head of an old man with silver hair and a fierce glare, wearing an imperial crown.
The crowd erupted at the sight of these objects:
"It's the Mecha-God Core, the Divine Spark of All Evil, and the Emperor's Head!"
"What is the Great Demon King Seraphine doing?"
"Is she turning them in to complete the ultimate quest?"
Watching Seraphine's calm expression and the floating artifacts, the players' eyes turned red with envy. These three items represented absolute power, unimaginable wealth, and unparalleled prestige.
Had it not been for Seraphine's terrifying reputation, countless players would have stormed the stage to seize them. But it was a fool's dream; no one dared to even make a provocative gesture after learning of her exploits.
Amidst the envy and shock of the masses, the three Divine Artifacts floating before Seraphine suddenly erupted with divine radiance.
BOOM!!!
In an instant, the thousands of skyscrapers, the sprawling streets, the entirety of the first district, and even the boundless void outside the city became hazy and blurred.
Only Seraphine and the millions of curious players remained clear, their forms standing distinct amidst the boundless, blurred chaos.
The witnessing players erupted in a wave of confusion:
"What's going on?"
"Is the map bugging out?"
"Where the hell are we?"
"Is the dev team finally showing up?"
"I have a bad feeling about this, something big is coming!"
"Everyone seeing this? I've just been teleported to a weird dimension!"
"I'm so hyped! This is insane!"
Ignoring the excited roar of the crowd, Seraphine noticed that the game's logic in this strange area was even more exposed and direct than it had been in the desolate void after the destruction of the [Cataclysmic Firmament] instance.
It was so blatant that it felt as if she could simply reach out and seize the core engine hidden beneath the layers of "Brilliant Games"' rules.
After everything she had experienced, Seraphine suspected that the mysterious Mr. Coo was no longer within the game. If he were, why hadn't anyone come to stop her after she had broken so many fundamental rules?
The entire game felt rigid and dead, operating solely on fixed scripts without any flexibility. It simply allowed her to tear everything apart.
"Did he return to a higher dimension, or is this not the only test site?"
As Seraphine pondered and the crowd murmured in confusion, a spectral face as massive as a star suddenly materialized at the edge of the chaotic realm.
The moment the giant face appeared, it crossed the vast distance to hover above them. It gazed down at Seraphine and spoke in a flat, cold tone:
"Player 『Great Demon King Seraphine』, do you wish to complete the quest [Throne of Apotheosis]?"
So, this truly was the manifestation of the official system.
However, Seraphine didn't answer immediately. She quietly activated her Transcendental Perception, peering intently at the indifferent giant face above her.
She wanted to look through this official visage to glimpse the location of the game's core engine.
After a few seconds of observation, she failed.
"Such a dense layering of rules for concealment... I can't see through it clearly. I was so close. If there were just one tiny crack, I could have seen everything."
Despite the failure, Seraphine wasn't disappointed. She still had the next step of her plan.
She looked up at the giant face, which stared back as if waiting for her reply. The millions of players around her and the countless viewers watching the streams held their breath.
"Yes," Seraphine said with a smile. "I choose 'Yes.' Take these three items and grant me the rewards I am owed."
"Very well. Your response has been received."
The chaotic giant face nodded slowly and solemnly announced: "Player 『Great Demon King Seraphine』 has successfully slain the three ultimate level 300 Bosses of the God-Slaying Mode Supreme Instances: [Mechanical Sanctuary], [Primal Abyss], and [Cataclysmic Firmament], the Mecha-God, the Primordial Demon-Ancestor, and the Emperor of Decay. She has acquired the Divine Artifacts exclusive to this difficulty: the Mecha-God Core (Unique), the Divine Spark of All Evil (Unique), and the Emperor's Head (Unique). Now, these three Divine Artifacts will..."
As the system droned on with the announcement, the three quest items ignited with violent light and drifted into the air, seemingly seconds away from vanishing from Seraphine's sight.
But in that exact moment, Seraphine summoned the shimmering Blade of Pure Harm, a weapon whose mere presence felt like being cast into the eighteenth level of Hell. With a violent swing, she slashed at the three Divine Artifacts and the giant face in the sky.
SCHLICK!!!
The two-meter blade instantly expanded into a light-year-long colossal edge, striking the three artifacts and the still-droning chaotic face simultaneously.
BANG!!!
The boundless chaos vibrated violently.
In a flash, it felt as though a primordial sun had descended. A light more blinding than the core of a star dominated the void with absolute dominance.
Under this magnificent radiance, the three Divine Artifacts and the system's giant face were frozen in place by the strike. Simultaneously, as if cast into an eternal hell of blades and shredded a hundred million times by a Demon God of the Sword, their surfaces were instantly covered in infinite, hair-thin cracks.
Seraphine leisurely "sheathed" her blade and snapped her fingers.
SNAP!!!
CRACKLE! SNAP! SHATTER! CRUNCH!!!
With that final snap, the three Divine Artifacts and the giant face erupted like ignited firecrackers. They shattered a hundred million times over, collapsing irreversibly into ash and nothingness.
The millions of players watched in a daze, their minds spiraling into absolute chaos.
"What... what just happened?"
"There was... a flash of light."
"It was blade-light... an endless, immeasurable edge..."
"The blade-light... it shattered the Divine Artifacts..."
"And the game system... it was shredded too..."
"Am I dreaming? What the hell am I seeing?!"
WHOOSH!!!
Mirroring the chaotic thoughts of the players, the operational logic of the entire Brilliant Games became a tangled mess because of Seraphine's strike.
The three Divine Artifacts, which were in the process of being "reclaimed" and no longer in the player's possession, had been destroyed before the reclamation was complete. The system sub-entity, which should have been indestructible while defining the quest's completion, had also vanished. Furthermore, the skill that caused this, [The Blade of Pure Harm], didn't exist in the system's database. All these logic-breaking factors stacked together, instantly creating a brief but deep rift that led straight to the game's core engine.
Peering through that rift, Seraphine activated her Transcendental Perception. She bypassed all barriers and rules, looking straight into the heart of the game's origin.
It was a tiny "Pocket Universe," barely 100,000 light-years in diameter.
A pocket universe, or an extra dimension. If the physical universe is a number line, a pocket universe is a segment extending into a different direction.
At the very center of this dimension, she saw a massive entity. It had three heads and ten arms, resembling an octopus, with a body the size of a star. From head to toe, it was plugged into billions of ethereal logic cables.
What shocked Seraphine even more was that, under her Transcendental Perception, this entity, which radiated a power capable of burning away the entire universe and everything within it, showed no signs of life. It was a near-dead... Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Son.
"A Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Son? And a perfected-rank one at that!" Seraphine said in surprise.
Indeed, her Transcendental Perception confirmed the identity of that massive silhouette.
It was an entity standing at the very end of all 3D life evolution, a perfected-rank Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Son!
Every celestial body, every surge of energy, and the simulation of all matter within Server 375, along with the operation of its myriad rules, was built upon the foundation of this tragic, Perfected Ungrateful Son. He was the source of it all.
Grasping the absolute truth, Seraphine was first stunned, then she laughed in realization. "I see. So that's how it is. Hahaha, I finally get it."
The source of those hundreds of quintillions of complex rules operating within Brilliant Games... is fundamentally a Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Son.
That 'Dimensional Artist' Mr. Coo is actually using a Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Son as a server host.
This... is the 'Reality' of Brilliant Games. This is the root of its existence.
To put it in perspective, the supreme ruler of the entire Houiste Federation, Holy Emperor Augustus, whose full-power strike could erase trillions of galaxies across the observable universe, was a Perfected Ungrateful Son.
Yet an entity of such a rank was being utilized by the unknown Coo as a "mainframe" for a video game.
Seraphine didn't believe for a second that a true perfected-rank Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Son would ever willingly submit to such an arrangement. It was a monumental humiliation.
This had to be the result of the Dimensional Artist Coo's raw, forced intervention.
"This Perfected Ungrateful Son was likely beaten within an inch of his life by Coo, then captured and turned into a 'living computer.'"
At that moment, a sudden thought struck Seraphine:
"Hmm... If the 'mainframe' maintaining and operating Server 375 is a perfected-rank Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Son, then does that mean... the hosts for the other 998 servers of Brilliant Games are also Perfected Ungrateful Sons?"
999... could the physical universe truly contain such a vast number of Perfected Ungrateful Sons?
Seraphine had her doubts.
"Perhaps..."
She pondered deeply. "Coo snatched them from other parallel space-times."
Suddenly, the massive chaotic realm vanished.
The thousands of skyscrapers, the crisscrossing streets, and the bustling first district reappeared, replacing the hazy chaos of before.
The sudden environmental shift snapped Seraphine back to reality.
Looking at the world around her, which appeared real yet was shot through with countless complex logic cables, she reached a sudden epiphany:
"I get it. To truly enter that pocket universe, I have to collapse this server, maybe even the entirety of Brilliant Games."
This was the insight granted by her Transcendental Perception. As for how to achieve it, Seraphine had already conceived a brilliant plan.
A plan to destroy the entire ten-billion-light-year expanse of Server 375, and eventually everything within Brilliant Games, without utilizing a single shred of her true body's power.
WHOOSH!!!
Having clarified this crucial point, she drifted upward, slowly flying toward the district's dome and into the vast cosmos beyond.
"Wait!"
Suddenly, a player burst out from the crowd.
It was the president of the Aquarius Game Guild, 『Aquarius ☆ Proud Peerless』.
Having witnessed the destruction of the three Divine Artifacts, this man, who spent his life dealing with rare items, could no longer contain his immense confusion and indignation. He leaped onto the high platform and shouted up at the ascending Seraphine:
"Why did you destroy the three Divine Artifacts?! Are you crazy or just stupid?! Do you have any idea how rare they are? Why would you waste them like that? What... what the hell were you thinking?!"
His questions echoed the sentiments of every player present.
Yeah, why?
Of all the things to destroy, why the three Divine Artifacts? It made no sense.
A thousand meters up, Seraphine stopped instantly.
She turned and looked down at 『Aquarius ☆ Proud Peerless』 and the sea of onlookers. She smiled.
"I simply sought the reality."
Having spoken, she accelerated, hurtling toward the higher reaches of the district.
"Reality?"
『Aquarius ☆ Proud Peerless』 stared blankly at the sky, muttering in confusion. "What reality?"
...
WHOOSH!!!
In a matter of breaths, Seraphine covered millions of kilometers. She rocketed through the metal dome of the first district and soared into the infinite cosmic void.
But she didn't stop. She continued her mad sprint toward the supermassive black hole in the distance.
Simultaneously, a series of strange words, driven by her will and ignoring the speed-of-light barrier, echoed through the universe, resounding in the ears of countless players:
"Feel the reality. Contemplate the reality. Accept the reality. Understand the reality. Those who do not know the reality can never truly see through Brilliant Games.
Everything is a necessary sacrifice. Therefore, your lives, your civilizations, and your races shall vanish in an instant, destroyed by this reality.
You may not understand. You may be filled with resentment. But you must submit.
For this is my will. And my will is your destiny."
Across the districts of the City of Divine Blood, millions of players heard her cold voice and inexplicably "saw" Seraphine as she flew toward the massive black hole.
They listened in a daze, their hearts filled with confusion. This included the guild leaders from far away and 『Aquarius ☆ Proud Peerless』.
Everyone was bewildered and lost. Their gazes were hollow as they "watched" Seraphine, hundreds of millions of kilometers away, come to a slow, floating halt. They all thought the same thing:
"What the hell is she doing?"
In the vast firmament, a hundred billion kilometers above the supermassive black hole, Seraphine stood calm.
Her Transcendental Perception, now capable of seeing through and deconstructing the majority of Brilliant Games' rules, expanded. She could now look down upon the entire ten-billion-light-year expanse of the game. She whispered:
"From this moment on, let the universe... feel the reality."
Having spoken, Seraphine retrieved the thin Speedrun Strategy Guide she had bought at the Azure Flame player's flea market.
In her vision, floating behind this light, 100-gram book, was a small number: "1."
This "1" represented the quantity of the item.
What Seraphine intended to do was change that "1", to alter the quantity of this book.
DING!!!
At her will, with a crisp sound, the crude, low-quality interface of the Cheat appeared in her vision.
‹«{ Cheat 1.0}»›
〈1〉[ Add 1,000,000 Skill Points ]
〈2〉[ Add 1,000,000 Free Attribute Points ]
〈3〉[ Quicksilver Mode ]
〈4〉[ One-time Grant: 10 Billion Currency ]
〈5〉[ Anywhere Portal ]
〈6〉[ Noclip Mode ]
〈7〉[ Modify Item Quantity ]
〈8〉[ Infinite Weight Capacity ]
〈9〉[ Global Random Color Swap ]
〈10〉[ Grant Random Interplanetary Spacecraft ]
Seraphine coldly selected option 7 and chose the Speedrun Strategy Guide.
Then, without hesitation, she changed the "1" behind it to... "ℵ₀".
The symbol ℵ₀ represents Aleph-null, the cardinality of all natural numbers, the smallest infinity.
She chose this over ω or ∞ because she had realized that the "Infinite Weight Capacity" granted by her Cheat was merely a facade. Under her Transcendental Perception, that "infinity" was actually a "pseudo-infinity", a value like a Googol (10^100) that merely appeared limitless.
Thus, Seraphine deliberately utilized a precise mathematical symbol: ℵ₀, Aleph-null.
The very instant she modified the quantity of the "Speedrun Strategy Guide" to Aleph-null...
HUMMM!!!
It was instantaneous.
There was no cosmic Big Bang, nor a Big Crunch.
There was no violent shattering of stars, nor any brilliant flashes of light. There wasn't even a ripple in space-time or a single visible change in the scenery.
In Seraphine's Transcendental Perception, which transcended Brilliant Games and covered the entire ten-billion-light-year server, the result was absolute.
The quantity of the "Speedrun Strategy Guide" books, which in an instant transformed into the set of all natural numbers, without any prerequisite process of event development, immediately exposed its absolute factual result of being Truly · Infinitely Large, Truly · Infinitely Numerous, and Truly · Infinitely Heavy after experiencing a True · Infinite surge, directly and brutally within the entire internal structure of Server 375; it took all those planets, all stars, all nebulae, all galaxies, all space-time, all matter, all players, all energy, all information, and all the game's rule-operating circuits... all in a single instant, they were 'pressed and shattered' and annihilated into nothingness.
Everything vanished in a heartbeat.
It was as if nothing had ever truly existed at all.
Immediately after...
Without even a split second to mourn the destruction of Server 375's simulated universe, the next to head to the "execution ground" were... Server 1, 2, 3, 4... and eventually every single "quasi-reality" universe within all Brilliant Games servers.
This terrifying process of destruction... possessed no actual process at all; there was no sound, no light effects, and not a single fluctuation.
Thus, Brilliant Games, which had existed for unknown years, consisting of 999 servers, encompassing a total of 999 nonillion cubic light-years of space, 19.98 trillion galaxies, and 99.9 decillion players... was destroyed in an instant.
The destruction was so rapid, the time consumed so fleeting, that perhaps even Seraphine's true body, were it present, would have been unable to perceive it in the slightest.
For this... was a speed entirely devoid of any chronological progression of events.
Perhaps the Dimensional Artist had once implemented some defensive protocols for Brilliant Games to activate upon encountering extreme danger, but whatever those protocols might be, they were utterly meaningless in this moment when faced with the onslaught of an Aleph-null quantity of books.
"Perhaps, this is exactly what happens when true infinite light-speed reveals itself within a universe..."
Maintaining only a faint sliver of spiritual light, Seraphine floated within an unknown space-time filled with countless high-energy illusory lights, calmly offering her lament.
Indeed, she had now lost every piece of equipment, every item, every attribute, every skill, and even that physical body from Brilliant Games during this cataclysm that thoroughly annihilated all 999 servers.
This was entirely expected.
Setting aside the terrifying destruction caused when a "stack" of Aleph-null books appeared within the Brilliant Games universe, which, while massive, still belonged to the "finite" realm.
Seraphine's (Clone) skills, attributes, and body only existed because of Brilliant Games in the first place. Since the game had now completely vanished, these "things" naturally disappeared along with it.
However, Seraphine wouldn't bother dwelling on these things, which were fundamentally little more than illusory playthings.
Seraphine (Clone) scanned this boundless and utterly alien space-time, which clearly possessed four mutually perpendicular directions and was filled with hundreds of billions of violent, star-sized torrents of matter-energy. She muttered in contemplation:
"Is this... a certain non-continuous 4D state of Hyperspace within the 'interior' of this universe's 3D sphere?"
In fact, long ago, through extensive astronomical observations and numerous scientific calculations, she had discovered and confirmed the fact that the overall space-time curvature parameter K of this universe was greater than 0.
This meant that this universe was a 3D sphere.
Or rather... a 3D surface of a 4D sphere.
Note that although the term "4D sphere" is mentioned, it does not mean that this universe possesses a systematic, large-scale 4D space with a complete space-time framework.
In this context, the "4D sphere" only had meaning on its surface; the "interior space of the sphere" was meaningless, as was the "space outside the sphere."
In other words, everything in this universe was defined on this "sheet" of the 3D spherical surface. The "spherical surface" concept was merely used to more vividly describe the overall existence and operational state of the universe's 3D space-time.
Of course, this "sheet" of the universe's 3D spherical surface was not purely two-dimensional; it also possessed a certain "thickness."
Similarly, the many pocket dimensions or pocket universes within this universe exist within the "thickness" of that 3D spherical surface, like small "bubbles" floating up and down, rather than existing in what many people assume to be the "space outside the sphere."
Likewise, the 4D Hyperspace, which is much smaller in volume and scale than the massive 3D spherical surface and far less stable in its space-time framework, is like countless tiny specks of dust or bacteria, "adhered" to the "interior" of the 3D spherical surface in a fragmented, intermittent state of spontaneous birth and death.
"I just didn't expect..."
Seraphine leisurely scanned this 4D Hyperspace, which was "boiling" and near collapse under the interference of countless chaotic pure-energy currents, yet maintained a relatively stable state due to the support of a massive, artificially designed space-time framework. She laughed softly. "That unknown Dimensional Artist, Coo, actually set the core of Brilliant Games in a place like this."
Amidst her laughter, she deployed her Transcendental Perception, rapidly expanding it to cover this vast 4D space where strong force, weak force, and electromagnetism were entirely absent, and only gravity continued to propagate and act.
HUMMM!!!
In just one second, Seraphine's perception swept past tens of quadrillions of 4D physical entities, floating in that strange 4D space, constantly being born and destroyed at temperatures of hundreds of quintillions of degrees Celsius.
It crossed tens of quadrillions of violent 4D pure-energy currents washing through up and down, front and back, left and right, and two other opposite directions that 3D life could never perceive or understand.
Deep within this 4D space, which spanned an unknown number of billions of light-years, she found the true core of Brilliant Games, a giant, grid-etched 4D tesseract formed by 999 spherical 3D pocket universes, each 100,000 light-years in diameter, arranged in a neat, regular pattern, constantly rotating, shifting, twisting, and overlapping across multiple dimensions.
Indeed, this was a 4D structure constructed from 3D structural components.
SWISH!!!
The moment she located this massive tesseract, Seraphine's illusory spiritual form vanished, crossing billions of light-years to reach that region of 4D space.
"Truly a masterpiece of divine craftsmanship," she said, her eyes filled with appreciation as she looked at the tesseract before her, larger than the Milky Way and far more complex. She laughed. "Coo, you truly are a Dimensional Artist, able to use a bunch of 3D pocket universes to construct a 4D spatial structure. Such a method of construction... is simply unimaginable."
If a single pocket universe were presented to a 3D being, they would see a perfectly translucent sphere as large as the Milky Way.
But faced with this tesseract built from 999 pocket universes, a 3D being would only see a massive collection of points, lines, and planes covering the vast space, manifesting at various strange angles and with eerie proportions. The moment they looked at it, that 3D being's brain would likely boil and their soul would shatter, resulting in death.
From this perspective, aside from the pseudo-four-dimensional beings of the Houiste Federation, there were likely no other intelligent lifeforms in the entire vast universe who could appreciate it, not even the individuals of the God of Hunger race, nor even the Gluttony King himself.
One can only say that the threshold for appreciating Dimensional Artist Coo's artwork is simply too high, so high that a normal 3D being would die from a single glance.
After her praise, Seraphine immediately utilized her Transcendental Perception to engulf this tesseract, which was in a state of high-frequency dynamic cyclic evolution.
HUMMM!!!
During a rapid and meticulous investigation, which could be called a "dissection," she gradually came to understand the various complex core structures of Brilliant Games, the logical interactions between these structures, the causal relationships between those interactions, the simulated operational principles of the hundred-million-level basic units, and even the cyclic processes generated after those basic units were connected to various complex structures.
In short, regarding everything within Brilliant Games, after a series of investigations and research, Seraphine had now roughly mastered more than half of it. If she were sent back to the moment she first entered Brilliant Games, she could likely become a semi-GM in just a second.
During this investigation, Seraphine also confirmed a critical piece of information: the core terminals for all 999 servers of Brilliant Games were indeed individual, sealed, and controlled Perfected Ungrateful Sons. Not a single one was of an ordinary rank.
"Where on earth did such a large number of Perfected Ungrateful Sons come from? Was it from various parallel space-times again? Let me take a closer look."
Driven by curiosity, Seraphine immediately activated her Transcendental Perception. She chose a massive pocket universe and entered it, enveloping and probing a Perfected Ungrateful Son sleeping in its deepest reaches. This entity was also the size of a star, shaped like a glass shuttle encrusted with diamond shards, with hundreds of strange, spindly legs sprouting from its body.
HUMMM!!!
After a careful probe, she discovered a startling fact: the mass of this Ungrateful Son reached a staggering 20 tredecillion tons. This mass data was almost equal to the combined mass of all matter in the trillions of galaxies within the observable universe.
"So an Ungrateful Son is essentially a living universe," Seraphine realized.
What was even more astonishing was that, despite such colossal mass, the entity's volume was only roughly that of a common star. This meant its density surpassed that of a neutron star by over a trillion times.