Seraphine harbored another deep question: Why did Holy Emperor Augustus fail his ascension?
While Augustus appeared domineering and arrogant, he was actually extremely cautious. He always sought absolute certainty, never entering a battle unprepared or making reckless, sudden moves.
This trait was evident from his willingness to spend a thousand years on ancient Earth, patiently upgrading humanity into an interstellar species before finally venturing into the cosmos.
For something as vital and potentially fatal as ascension, caution is an understatement, even a million times over. Augustus would have been meticulously careful, performing thousands or even millions of simulations, rehearsals, and deductions before officially beginning his ascension. Otherwise, it would have been completely out of character.
So the question returned to its starting point: if Augustus truly made such thorough preparations, how did he fail?
It was completely illogical.
Was it simply bad luck? Was he fated to die? Did the Great Eyes intervene? Or were there other unknown factors?
Seraphine desperately wanted to know.
Therefore...
"Saknussim... must know something."
Whispering to herself, she had a sudden thought. She summoned Godshell, who was resting within the dimensional unit cell in her body, and placed him in the vast void above her massive palm.
HUMMM...
The fabric of space-time vibrated.
Godshell manifested instantly in the vast firmament. Upon appearing, he immediately knelt in the void, bowing toward Seraphine's position. "Your Majesty."
Seraphine did not reply. She channeled the Authority of Change to envelop Godshell and thought:
"Restore... all his past memories."
HUMMM...
In an instant, Godshell's entire frame trembled violently.
Torrents of information, seemingly returning from the depths of past time, exploded within his mind, manifesting as vast segments of memory.
Standing millions of light-years away, Seraphine simultaneously read the memories as they spontaneously surfaced from the wreckage of Godshell's physical form, surging into his mental sea.
RUSTLE RUSTLE...
During the reading process, Seraphine discovered that the memories emerging through the Authority of Change were not particularly clear: the coherent parts accounted for less than 1%.
The remaining 99% were largely blurred, fragmented, or in a state of chaotic decay, making the reading process extremely taxing.
"Is this because Saknussim has been gone for too long?"
After a moment of contemplation, Seraphine continued to sift through the massive influx of Godshell's memories, searching intently for anything of value.
In the midst of her search, she suddenly uncovered a startling piece of information: the origin of the Strong Selection Technology.
Seraphine thought to herself: "As expected, this transcendental technology wasn't researched by Augustus; it was obtained from an unknown source."
Reading further...
According to this memory fragment, Augustus had felt deeply frustrated after being defeated several times by the Marsh Lord, Cassius.
Having never experienced failure in his entire life, this humiliating defeat brought him close to a mental breakdown.
Augustus wanted to strike back, but found himself completely powerless.
Because the Perfected Ungrateful Son stage was already the evolutionary dead end of this universe; there was simply no path forward.
As for the Marsh Lord's Single Soul, Triple Body ability, Augustus was entirely clueless, having no idea how to replicate or counter it.
That strange ability seemed to be a natural gift, not something that could be copied or learned.
Regarding this, Seraphine, who had already studied Cassius thoroughly, saw the reality clearly:
"This Single Soul, Triple Body ability is actually quite simple. It's just that Cassius's semi-materialized spirituality is of higher quality, giving him greater range and strength in reality-warping, allowing him to stably control more 4D bodies.
Theoretically, if the quality is high enough, one could achieve a Single Soul with a hundred, a thousand, or even ten thousand bodies, or directly fuse them into a single, supreme form."
Therefore, Seraphine was surprised to discover that the average range of these Ungrateful Sons' reality-warping power was pathetic, unable to even exceed a single astronomical unit.
This... was so weak it shocked her.
She recalled that after she condensed the Delusion of Love, she could use the Three Realms Domain to project her reality-warping power across a massive area spanning 30 billion kilometers in diameter, from the Sun to the nine major planets, and even part of the Kuiper Belt.
And that wasn't even her limit.
Yet, for these Ungrateful Sons, even touching a range of 100 million kilometers was a struggle. It was incredibly disappointing.
The gap between them was nearly a hundred-million-fold.
"Perhaps it's just the difference in spirituality quality."
After making this casual analysis, Seraphine continued to read further.
Rapidly skimming through the vast amounts of useless information in the memory fragment, she quickly found the key element: the origin of the Reality Strong Selection Technology.
Eons ago, when Augustus was spiraling into deep despair following his immense failures, a stranger... appeared.
Because Saknussim was not a high-ranking member of the Houiste Federation, he wasn't even middle management, but at most an experienced low-ranking officer, he had no right to know what that person discussed with Augustus. Nor did he know why Augustus chose to speak with them instead of swatting them into subatomic particles.
Saknussim only knew that after a relatively short period, Augustus decided to leave the River of Primordial. He boarded a Level 9.9 warp spaceship, the fastest in the Federation, and traveled to an unknown region.
Intriguingly, the mysterious stranger accompanied him.
A hundred million years later, Augustus returned to the River of Primordial and launched the Final Order project. The entire Federation roared into action under his command.
This sequence of events made it clear: the Reality Strong Selection Technology came from that stranger.
And within the fragmented memories of that era, Seraphine finally discovered the mysterious person's name: Aleister Crowley.
"The Dark Mage?!"
Long ago, when Seraphine's wrath and hatred clone descended upon a parallel universe, she had learned that the leader of the Hellfire organization was a mysterious person named "Crowley."
Furthermore, her dozens of other power projections across various space-times had also encountered organizations named Hellfire.
While the leaders of these organizations, mostly involved in criminal or grey-market activities, varied in race, gender, age, and appearance, they all shared one trait without exception: their name was Aleister Crowley.
This was a man who had been highly influential in Western occultism on Seraphine's previous Earth, and who had various links to significant historical figures and the Church of Scientology in the USA.
More importantly, the spiritualities of these individuals with the same name across various parallel space-times all possessed the exact same frequency.
Seraphine had sensed back then that spirituality existing in this form... was likely another cultivation method outside of the Cosmic Dawn path.
It was a method potentially related to splitting spirituality, or perhaps the so-called suppression of the "Other Self."
Of course, this was just a guess. Without being able to deduce a concrete answer, she could only set aside further investigation for now.
Pulling her focus back, Seraphine continued to "view" the memories of Godshell's past self.
She saw that in those ancient eons, millions or perhaps ten million years ago, after Holy Emperor Augustus launched the Final Order project, Aleister Crowley left the Houiste Federation without taking any credit.
When questioned or asked to stay by Augustus, Crowley claimed he had finished his task and was returning to his homeland.
The name of that homeland was... the State of Enlightenment.
"Tch, the mysteries just keep piling up. It's getting hard to keep track."
Despite her words, the feeling of peeling back layers of historical fog to find secrets deep within time was something Seraphine found addictive.
This was what she had always pursued, not for a purpose or profit, but for the sheer joy of researching and understanding how everything in the cosmos came to be.
Next, within Godshell's past memories, Seraphine watched the entire "setup" process of the Final Order and the grueling construction of the Primordial Integration Array, marked by countless failures.
She also witnessed Augustus's meticulous simulations and tests of the Probability Theory - Reality Strong Selection Technology, thousands, even tens of thousands of them.
These experiments demonstrated the terrifying and miraculous nature of the Reality Strong Selection Technology to its fullest.
For instance, by using this technology, the Houiste could turn a 2.5-kilogram block of ice into a red giant star over a hundred million kilometers in diameter out of thin air;
Or turn a half-meter-long dry branch into a thousand-kilometer-long planet-killing dreadnought loaded with mechs and fighters;
Or turn a rebellious group of high-level Overlords into a dozen brainless, carbon-based toads that would die the moment they left their muddy swamp;
Or even turn a supermassive black hole with the mass of a hundred million suns into a stable wormhole connecting two distant regions of space;
The most absurd feat was turning a mere mortal, who couldn't even survive a chemical-powered firearm, into a Sage King, perfect in both soul and body, out of thin air.
This meant that with this technology, anyone, even a brain-damaged, uneducated cripple, could be transformed from a weakling into an immortal Sage King without any side effects. They would gain mastery over the grand unified force field, integrate reality and illusion, and control spaces spanning over a million light-years with a single thought. A full-power strike from such a being could destroy a thousand Milky Way galaxies.
In an instant, their combat power would skyrocket millions of times, far faster than any "cheat" could allow.
This was the terrifying power of Reality Strong Selection probability manipulation:
Discarding every unfavorable possibility and forcibly choosing and locking onto the single reality one desires.
Once the choice is made and the reality is successfully locked, even an infinitesimally small possibility can be elevated to infinity.
But this technology had a very strange quirk: its energy consumption rate was incredibly bizarre.
It was both massive and miniscule.
This consumption rate would constantly fluctuate over time. The difference between its maximum and minimum values could reach a staggering hundred quintillion times.
Furthermore, the higher the consumption rate, the longer that period lasted. Conversely, the lower the rate, the shorter that period was.
For example, at the maximum consumption value, transforming a mortal into a basic, planet-busting Stage One Overlord would require the total matter and energy of tens of thousands of stars. It was an absolute consumption where not a single atom remained.
In other terms, it would take tens of billions of Earths to turn one mortal into a planet-buster.
Yet, at the minimum consumption rate, it would only take four or five mountains, each weighing roughly 1.4 trillion tons, to turn a mortal into a planet-buster without any logical explanation.
"Perhaps it's the ultimate tool for those who want to reach the top instantly."
After this thought, Seraphine continued to watch.
Time ticked away.
Soon, she saw the true reason why the Holy Emperor failed his ascension.
Eons ago, Augustus had successfully integrated the entire River of Primordial into the probability-manipulation energy network.
He had finished every preparation, chosen the start time, and officially activated the Primordial Integration Array to execute the Final Order. But at the most critical moment of the device's operation, the Otuben channel network, connected to countless galaxies, suddenly and inexplicably lost connection to 99.99% of its nodes.
Only about ten trillion galaxies remained functional.
Seraphine was stunned.
"Losing almost all your fuel out of nowhere? What the hell happened?"
"But ten trillion galaxies... heh, that seems to match my earlier estimations."
Indeed, she had initially calculated that the Houiste Federation's hallway network spanned about a hundred billion galaxies.
But as she learned more about this super-civilization, her calculations, fueled by the Eye of True Revelation and Chaos Calculation, produced increasingly larger figures.
Ultimately, her calculations had pointed exactly to ten trillion galaxies.
Seraphine hadn't thought much of it since. But now, it seemed her calculations were correct, or rather, they matched the result of the exact moment Augustus's ascension failed.
"Why did they vanish? Was it Great Eyes?"
Driven by curiosity, Seraphine continued to watch.
In an explosion that nearly surpassed the Big Bang, Augustus's ascension ended in total failure. The price was the complete conversion of his body and soul into raw energy; he was utterly annihilated.
The Sacred God Territory, the Primordial Integration Array, and countless Houiste were instantly vaporized into subatomic particles. Even Saknussim couldn't escape, losing consciousness and falling into the darkness of death the moment the cataclysm struck.
"Wait, what?!"
Seraphine looked up at the Sacred God Territory, which stood before her in its dismantled state, and at the super-colossal device within. She was utterly baffled.
"If Saknussim was blown to dust on the spot, how did he cross tens of trillions of light-years to return to the Milky Way? Where did his corpse on the Dark Void Battlefield come from? And what about the wounds on his body?"
"And the Sacred God Territory and the Primordial Integration Array... if they were destroyed, then what am I looking at right now? An illusion?"
Just as Seraphine was reeling from this incomprehensible realization, an incredibly massive and profound power suddenly descended.
This force completely ignored Seraphine's Hegemony Domain, which spanned five trillion light-years and possessed precision on the level of the Endless Scale Net.
It was like countless needles, refined down to the Planck scale, infiltrating directly into the space within a hundred million light-years of Seraphine's massive form.
This force, possessing a precision far beyond that of the Hegemony Domain, rushed toward the void surrounding Seraphine across billions of light-years.
But then, as if discovering something, the force "flinched" in surprise and retreated, instantly backing off hundreds of billions of light-years.
The force's retreat was so violent it caused the surrounding hundreds of billions of light-years of void to boil and surge, triggering massive space-time tides. In its wake, Godshell, perched above Seraphine's palm, was accidentally shredded and extinguished.
Poor Godshell could only return to the Eden World within Seraphine's dimensional unit cell, resurrecting once again in total bewilderment.
"My bad, I got a little too excited and accidentally killed your cute little semi-4D pet."
Accompanied by a voice filled with sincere apology, a radiant, shimmering figure materialized in the misty void hundreds of billions of light-years away. It was no larger than an average human, less than two meters tall.
SWOOSH!
The brilliant light faded, revealing a young Earth man wearing thick glasses, with a slightly messy, layered haircut, and dressed entirely in black.
It was Genarkrail's Sacred Descending Form.
"By the Immortal String!"
He stared with wide eyes at Seraphine's infinitely vast cosmic form, greedily scanning her as he spoke with intense excitement.
"Honestly, I always thought you were just a 4D spatial lifeform, but I never expected you... you're actually a 5D spatial lifeform, and with such a massive form to boot! Hahaha! This is... this is just amazing!"
While Genarkrail excitedly examined Seraphine, she was doing the same to him.
"His interference force density is far beyond the limits of my perception, much deeper than the Endless Scale Net level. Has he approached... or even entered the Planck scale? Interesting."
She slightly tilted her head toward Genarkrail and said curiously, "I remember... I've seen you before. You're that newborn God of Hunger named Genarkrail. I recall you being dead."
"No, no, no, you've got it wrong. The 'Genarkrail' back then was just a small beacon of mine, a cheap tool specifically used to mark this 3D space-time. It doesn't matter if it was crushed, so please, don't worry about it."
Unable to restrain his burning, greedy gaze, Genarkrail spoke with an incredibly gentle tone. "Alright, let's skip the small talk. First, let me introduce myself.
I am a traveler from the 6th Dimension. Driven by a benevolent heart, I wander through infinite space-times, solely to discover and realize the true value of all life and things, maximizing their potential so they can live out their lives with joy.
And this time, I've come specifically for you. You see, you are a peerless treasure, an absolute, supreme gem that is nearly impossible to find across the infinite space-times and immeasurable Matter Seas..."
"A 6D lifeform?"
Seraphine abruptly widened her Eye of Transcendence, her gaze burning with an equally intense and greedy light as she looked at Genarkrail. The corners of her mouth curled upward. "I was getting bored, and then I run into a 6D lifeform. This is perfect. Truly perfect."
In the dark void, Genarkrail was still rambling excitedly: "...Follow me. I won't hurt you, and you absolutely must not hurt yourself! You are far too valuable to suffer even a scratch... No, no, I mean you're too precious. Don't you see? The miracle of your birth and your grueling evolution were all leading to this moment, to me finding you! To me helping you realize your maximum value!"
"Hold on," Seraphine interrupted. "I'm curious. Why are your language and appearance so similar to someone from Earth?"
"Oh, that? You know about Earth? Haha, it seems you're quite familiar with Earth's culture."
Genarkrail explained with an eager smile. "As I said, I am an incredibly benevolent 6D being. My civilization is the highest-level and most kind-hearted in the infinite space-times. We care deeply about the pitiful, fragile, low-dimensional races in every universe. A cute and interesting species like Earth's is a primary focus of our attention and aid."
"Because of this deep love, I'm intimately familiar with every aspect of the Earth's culture... Come now, surrender to my power. Let it permeate your body and soul. Let me take you away. I will protect you and fulfill all your dreams!"
Having finished his speech, Genarkrail couldn't wait any longer. He unleashed his massive interference force, slowly enveloping Seraphine.
Facing his incredibly irritating tone, one that clearly treated her like a mere object, Seraphine didn't get angry at first. Instead, she asked with a curious smile, "Interesting. You seem to view me as something you can just seize at will. You're quite certain of yourself, assuming I have no power to resist. Is that it?"
"Hahaha, resist? Resist what? How can a 5D being talk about resisting a 6D being?"
Seeing his goal within reach, Genarkrail spread his arms and laughed uncontrollably. "Enough talk, my treasure. Your power and the precision of your interference field are so mediocre, riddled with so many flaws, they're like a tattered fishing net."
"If I wanted to hurt you, I'd only need a fraction of my power to completely tear apart and destroy your 5D unit cell structure from the most fundamental spatial level.
But of course, you have no need to resist. I harbor no ill will toward you, please believe me."
RUSTLE RUSTLE...
The fabric of space-time vibrated, and the firmament churned.
Watching the massive wave of malicious force sweeping toward her from the distance, Seraphine couldn't help but shake her head and laugh.
"Hahaha, the world is truly a strange place. To me, the power of a 3D Ungrateful Son is a tattered net full of holes... yet I never expected my own power to be a harmless net in the eyes of a 6D being.
But do you really think that's enough to finish me? Hahaha, how ridiculous."
The laughter vanished instantly. Seraphine activated... Instant Time Compression!
HUMMM...
In a flash, everything, from the ripples surging through the vast Dirac Sea to the high-energy photons racing through the void, and even the greedily smiling Genarkrail, became silent. They were frozen in place, fixed in a static instant.
In that moment, the entire universe stopped.
Seraphine, standing within this frozen second, instantly detached herself from her true "self" and the material world. Her phantom form appeared above the boundless, infinite River of Time.
She hovered there, suspended. Looking upstream, she saw the infinite stretches of past history. Looking downstream, she saw the endless flow of the future.
Finally, she looked up. Seraphine once again saw that massive bronze arrow, fixed firmly in the infinite void above the River of Time, eternal and unchanging.
She gazed at the boundless, scarred, and fragmented arrow and said quietly, "One day... one day I'll find out where you came from."
RUSTLE RUSTLE!
At the very moment Seraphine appeared, a blurred temporal tributary suddenly surged from the water below. With the sound of rushing water, it arched over her head and reached toward the end of the firmament. It flowed parallel to the main River of Time below, both roaring toward the distant future.
Immediately, a powerful suction pulled her from above, drawing her into that misty temporal tributary.
Thus, Seraphine descended once again into the virtual time domain, split from the true River of Time by the Instant Time Compression.
Compared to the true universe, everything within the virtual time domain, from the Sacred God Territory, dismantled into billions of shards, to Seraphine's twelve-million-light-year-tall body, and even Genarkrail's seemingly small but cosmically powerful form, now appeared as crude and simple as a child's line drawing.
Correspondingly, the "intensity" of these things had plummeted by thousands, if not millions, of times.
In other words, within this phantom time domain, Seraphine's power had effectively multiplied by thousands or millions.
Furthermore, due to the divine power of Instant Time Compression, whatever actions she took and whatever results she achieved here would be synchronized with the physical universe once the five-minute freeze ended.
HUMMM...
Within the blurred and simple phantom universe, Seraphine leisurely expanded her Hegemony Domain, blanketing everything within a five-trillion-light-year radius. This included Genarkrail, who was still frozen in the void with his arms spread and a "guaranteed victory" smile on his face.
Gazing at this mysterious 6D being, Seraphine focused her will, driving her Hegemony Domain into his body. She began to analyze his specific structure and the interactions between its various components.
RUSTLE RUSTLE...
Threads of the Hegemony Domain, each billions of times smaller than a hydrogen atom's radius, flowed like water through Genarkrail's Sacred Descending Form, meticulously probing and analyzing every bit of valuable information.
"Hmm... it's not a pure 6D structure, but a composite of multiple 'elements' from various dimensions. It's somewhat similar to the distorted Sacred God Territory, but infinitely more complex."
Filled with curiosity, Seraphine meticulously examined Genarkrail's body.
Under the influence of Instant Time Compression, the latter was oblivious to everything. He stood there with his arms wide and a joyful smile, allowing Seraphine to probe his secrets bit by bit.
Second by second, time passed.
Soon, four minutes and forty-nine seconds had elapsed within the virtual time domain.
With Seraphine's terrifying reaction time, a single second for an ordinary person was like a hundred million years for her. Effectively, she had been studying Genarkrail's body for hundreds of billions of years.
While she hadn't uncovered every single secret, she had understood about seventy or eighty percent of them. This included plundering the vast amount of information fragments stored within his form. However, since this data came from the 6th Dimension, she would need time to process and decode it to understand it fully.
Through her research, Seraphine discovered that Genarkrail's body used a sliver of 6D pure energy, containing massive amounts of data fragments, as its core. Layered upon this were vast amounts of 5D and 4D pure energy, numerous subatomic particles, and highly complex configurations of 3D space, 2D surfaces, and 1D lines, fusing into a multi-dimensional physical entity.
These elements from different spatial dimensions existed in a state that was simultaneously harmonious and repulsive, interacting yet remaining distinct.
The most miraculous part was that through this multi-dimensional correlation and non-correlation, unknown effects were produced. Seraphine suspected that on a scale even finer than the Planck scale, his body had achieved a perfect integration of the macro and micro multi-dimensional domains.
This resulted in a [Multi-dimensional Macro-Micro Resonance Interference Field], something entirely different from and far superior to the Light of Infinity, Holographic Domain, Phantasm Field, or quasi-reality fields in terms of range, strength, and precision.
This resonance interference field shared certain properties with her own [Boundless Domain].
"So once I've thoroughly researched and understood this, my external influence range should see an explosive increase."
Feeling pleased, Seraphine smiled and slowly raised a finger, pointing it directly at Genarkrail's laughing face. She whispered:
"Thank you for traveling so far, and for the gift. Since I have no other way to repay you... goodbye."
With that, she activated the Authority of Change:
"Manifest... 36 Singularity-like points."
SWOOSH!
In an instant, within the 3D space at her fingertip, 36 points appeared, indefinable in size, blurring the line between macro and micro. They were collapsed space-time points in a state of infinite steepness.
At that exact same microsecond, Seraphine again channeled the Authority of Change:
"Alter the expansion vector of these 36 Singularity-like points to a single, instant direction, locked onto Genarkrail's face."
HUMMM...
Within a span of time too short to describe or imagine, those 36 collapsed space-time points suddenly expanded... no, it wasn't a standard all-directional expansion. Miraculously, it was a purely linear, one-way surge.
These 36 currents of 'Blazing Wind', each only as thick as a fist but carrying enough primordial expansion power to completely rewrite the structure, framework, and layers of trillions of miles of space-time from the micro to the macro level within 10^-35 seconds, violently slammed into Genarkrail's laughing face and his entire body.
BOOM!!!!!
The firmament shuddered, and the universe wailed.
Here, the most glorious and radiant moment that births all matter, energy, information, and space-time, the [Big Bang], solemnly descended.
No mortal language or script could describe this miraculous "primordial expansion."
Even though the "attack" was focused entirely on Genarkrail, the extreme light from these 36 overlapping Big Bangs blinded the surrounding billions of light-years and even Seraphine's eyes.
Seraphine could only vaguely "see" Genarkrail, still frozen with his arms spread and a goofy smile, as his body was 99% vaporized by the terrifying expansion-wind. What little remained of his form was swept away, carried by the titanic primordial "wind gusts" millions of light-years into the distance.
BOOM! ROAR! BOOM!
This move was an upgraded variant of Seraphine's long-forgotten [Boundary Obliteration — All Perish]: the Wind of World-Piercing.
Essentially: multiple Big Bangs, delivered point-blank to the face.