The image of Star City's annihilation crashed into Moffat's mind like a hammer.
Had it truly come to this?
How absurd his earlier assessment of the main server now seemed—ridiculous beyond belief.
In this era, what was the cheapest commodity?
Human lives.
So what if a few quadrillion were lost? Clearly, this was the will of the higher-ups.
Just as the thought flickered through him, the light in his vision abruptly contracted—or rather, diminished.
Had the explosion of Star City already ended?
He couldn't be certain. All he sensed were waves of photons—perhaps some neutrons, maybe electrons—but nothing more.
An explosion of this magnitude should never have such a feeble impact.
And then he witnessed something impossible.
The ruins of Star City, which had moments ago been obliterated, began to contract.
This was no collapse.
Given Star City's sheer mass, a collapse into a red dwarf—or something of that nature—would have been within reason. Its sheer length was the only obstacle.
But what Moffat saw was not destruction—it was genuine contraction.
"Star City… it's recovering!" Lorc's voice broke through beside him.
Moffat found himself agreeing instinctively.
But such a thing was fundamentally impossible.
What kind of power could accomplish this?
Yet reality spoke for itself: Star City was being restored, drawn back together under the hand of some vast force. The entire explosion had been contained.
Moffat's doubts deepened—was this truly technology? Or something far beyond it?
"It's really coming back! Damn it, my optical sensors are fried," Kesiba cursed.
With his optics damaged, his vision blurred, like staring through the haze of severe myopia.
"Is this what they meant by the 'big characters' stepping in?" Lorc muttered, stunned.
Fortune had shifted—they were alive after all.
"But what kind of tech could possibly do this?"
"Hey! Main server—can you hear us?"
No response.
Perhaps it was locked down… classified.
But then, a voice resonated across every channel—not a reply, but a broadcast.
It was the main server.
[Esteemed citizens of the Eternal Cycle Star Nation, in light of Star City's invasion by an unknown civilization—and due to my own error as main server—Star City has been brought to the brink of annihilation.]
[As main server, I offer my deepest apologies. This failing is mine alone. My successor will mend this weakness.]
[By the time you hear these words, I will already have perished with Star City. Yet do not despair. Star City endures, and the Eternal Cycle Star Nation—as both a powerful stellar nation and a pillar of human civilization—is not so fragile.]
[However, understand this: Star City's recovery is not a reversal of time. You will soon see crude reconstructions. This is no longer the original Star City. We have merely prevented its total detonation, nothing more.]
[Within Star City, all advanced systems have been ruined. You will no longer enjoy the convenience of computational power. The boundary between the mortal realm and the underworld has fractured; as a result, nearly 10% of the population will not regain their memories from the underworld. For this, I extend my most profound regret. The Star Nation will issue compensation.]
[In time, under a new main server, your lives will return to normal. But this restoration may take long years. Already, Star City 1 has dispatched warships and a replacement main server to this location. You may also travel to the open star system's internal super-antimatter displacement device to receive emergency supplies from Star City 1.]
[And so—good luck to you all.]
The main server's voice was utterly cold.
Across the networks, the citizens who heard it showed no reaction at all.
Only Kesiba, Moffat, and Lorc felt a surge of emotion.
"So that's what it meant!"
Moffat's earlier confusion over why the main server had said "Good luck to you all" was finally resolved. It had already foreseen its own death—that line had been a farewell.
"I… feel a bit unsettled. What should I do?" Lorc muttered.
Kesiba shared the sentiment.
Their time with the main server had been brief, yet they had spoken with it, formed impressions of it.
And in the end, the main server was not some lifeless machine. Its emotions were suppressed, yes—but its computational power was vast enough to let it transcend certain boundaries.
The main server was a mechanical lifeform. And in the Eternal Cycle, all beings were mechanical lifeforms. There was no fundamental distinction.
In that moment, the three of them felt it—an odd sense that the main server had been a maternal presence.
Star City 1.
Luna checked the chronometer. By her estimates, the situation at Star City 5 was nearly resolved.
She herself had not gone there directly, but by leveraging the infrastructure of Star City 5, she was able to issue remote calibrations and overrides.
She was fully aware of the HHHI Corporation's plan. The instant she saw it, she knew something was wrong.
Civilization war was always a matter of life and death.
Kesiba and the others' approach was neither decisive nor safe. Unlike Luna's designs—clean, conclusive, absolute—their plan left too many cracks for infiltration.
And indeed, there was one glaring flaw.
Why would the spies even bother trying to survive?
They were essentially suicide operatives. Their deaths imposed no burden at all on the unknown civilization.
If there was even the faintest chance that their sacrifice could trigger Star City's destruction, the spies would have embraced it without hesitation.
And perhaps… that had been their true objective all along.
Why was that possible?
Because Luna had discovered something.
Given the depth of the infiltration, the spies had long since possessed the capability to wipe out Star City outright—unless, of course, their preparations had been insufficient.
But that was unthinkable. Their infiltration had lasted for millennia.
The only explanation was that the spies' goal was not destruction, but control.
Yet that alone did not account for the massacres.
If it was truly about control, then human lives should have been the most precious resource of all.
Even for the Eternal Cycle itself, population could always be manufactured—but for an invading civilization, people were invaluable.
Because people carried information. They carried memory. They embodied the culture of a civilization. Such things were beyond price.
In terms of civilizational value, lives and technology were equals.
And yet, the unknown civilization showed no sign of such intent.
Did they only want Star City itself?
Luna could not be sure.
"We'll know soon enough," she murmured. "Once we confirm the state of Star City 4."
"Star City 5 provided an excellent sample. The matter-normalization field is a priceless technology to refine… but this time, the cost was far too great."
And the cost wasn't the wreckage of Star City 5 itself, nor the destruction of vast stores of high-density matter.
The cost was Star City 5 itself.
Lorc stared into the cosmos and muttered to Kesiba beside him, "Hey… don't you feel like something's missing?"
Kesiba's mood sank into despair.
"Missing? Everything's missing!"
Dawn had just informed him that all of the main server's data was gone—his "lover" erased, untraceable.
"I'm not joking. I mean the star… it's gone."
Kesiba froze. Then fury erupted. He lunged at Lorc in rage.
"You call that not joking?! How could a star just—"
But when he lifted his gaze back to the cosmos, he faltered.
The star their Star City 5 had depended upon was… truly no longer there.
Every Star City of the Eternal Cycle Star Nation had long since abandoned the crude energy-harvesting methods of the old Olive Branch Civilization.
Instead, they drew power through the most advanced system known: the energy corridor.
Despite the mystical name, it was simply an immense chain of three colossal devices for projection and reception—points a, b, and c.
Point a served as the origin, divided into two subsystems: one for stellar collection, the other for emission.
Point b was a relay. It didn't receive energy itself, but performed secondary focusing and rectification. Energy loss over distance was inevitable—even after being concentrated at point a—so the beam required further correction along the way. Depending on the corridor's span, there could be multiple b-points.
Point c was the terminal receiver—perhaps the most critical element. It absorbed the energy, but the process superheated the machinery to hundreds of millions of degrees Celsius. Stabilizing hardware under such conditions was a monumental feat of engineering.
The receiver was immense, typically over 10,000 square kilometers. Not a solid plate of metal, but a churning sea of liquid alloy, constantly boiling, ringed by containment systems that ensured not a single joule of energy escaped.
Efficient and versatile, the corridor could even weaponize the star itself—transforming it into what was called an All-Star Cannon.
And that was exactly what Star City 5 had unleashed.
It had converted the corridor into a weapon, compressing its entire parent star and channeling it into the energy corridor, redirecting that force back to Star City 5.
The unimaginable energy was transmuted into gravitational force.
If all that gravity had been concentrated into a single point, Star City 5 would have collapsed instantly into a white dwarf. That had been the phenomenon Moffat glimpsed earlier—signs of white dwarf formation.
But the gravity wasn't concentrated.
It was dispersed—flung across every part of Star City at once.
Countless particles were pulled back and slammed together in violent collision.
The gravitational surge lasted only an instant. The power draw was astronomical.
But in that fleeting moment, Star City 5 did not collapse. Instead, its fractured frame was dragged back together—crudely reshaped into its original flute-like structure.
A shell of survival. But inside, chaos reigned.
Furthermore, due to elemental transformation, Star City 5 had become a single colossal mass of solid iron. Its surface materials were no longer modular, no longer separable.
To rebuild Star City 5, every fragment of matter would need to be reprocessed back into artificial particles, then reforged piece by piece with immense energy.
That kind of energy demand was staggering. It would mean moving the entire star-sized structure into another stellar system.
A task of astronomical scale.
Compared to this, repairing damaged equipment was trivial—a matter of raw resources. But on projects of this magnitude, the real limiting factors were time and cost.
Moving such an object even a few light-years would take thousands of years at minimum.
And over such spans, unforeseen complications were inevitable.
In space.
The Qili-class warship sliced through the void at over 200,000 kilometers per second.
Its breathtaking velocity came from refinements of the Angola funnel. Star City 1 could construct Angola funnels—and so too, naturally, could Star City 5. Their technological and industrial levels were not drastically different.
Now, within the Qili-class, the battle reached its final stage.
Hardly surprising. Damoro possessed both overwhelming strength and refined technology—and with the main server's support, victory was always only a matter of energy efficiency.
Just as on Star City 5, the spies' attack methods were narrow, almost simplistic. Their real danger lay in cunning infiltration, not direct combat.
At last, after cutting down the final spy on the warship, Damoro allowed himself to exhale.
He turned his gaze outward, into the cosmos.
Far off, he could see a portion of soldiers fleeing, retreating farther and farther. They had believed Damoro would fail, and so abandoned the battlefield once the spies' encirclement closed in.
That portion was not small.
But every soldier made their own judgment. And when judgment failed, consequences followed.
The main server would already have recorded their actions. They would be branded deserters, condemned by the Star Nation itself.
Meanwhile, more and more figures emerged from hiding, creeping back into the open.
Their eyes fixed on Damoro, still suspended among the floating cube devices, and awe welled up inside them.
In all their lives, aside from Hossie, none had ever witnessed such raw, incandescent heroism in a single person.
And when you stood before such a man, you felt it—how blindingly dazzling he truly was.
"Damoro," one soldier called out, voice steady with reverence, "thank you for saving the warship—for saving us."
"Your strength demands respect. Our ship has lost its Captain. I hope you will take command as our leader."
Damoro met the man's eyes, then shook his head without hesitation.
"Don't try to crown me."
"I didn't save you. I only struck back at these spies."
"The title of leader is not mine to bear. And as for the warship's Captain…"
Damoro released the seals that had bound the others.
They were shoved into a small room by his power. Now that they had recovered, the few cubic meters of space were crammed wall-to-wall.
"Don't push me!"
"You're the one shoving!"
"Where even is this place?"
"Main server! Main server!"
Hundreds called out at once. When the main server responded, nearly all of them demanded—almost in unison—that the space be expanded.
Only after the space stretched did they finally settle down.
Captain Bichen was the first to speak: "Main server, what's the situation right now?"
He knew very well what the disappearance of his officers meant for the warship. Checking the time, he realized over ten days had already passed. A fleet vessel without a captain for more than ten days, with spies loose on board—he could only pray the damage was still contained.
[Warship status: fully operational, Captain.]
[Through the extraordinary resistance of Soldier Damoro, all 30,287 spies aboard have been eliminated.]
Bichen and the others froze at the words.
What…?
What had happened in their absence?
Damoro—wasn't he just that soldier?
He handled everything? Was the main server joking?
"Report everything that happened over these last dozen days," the Captain demanded.
The main server immediately transmitted the full visual log.
Bichen watched in silence. Especially the combat footage—Damoro's battles struck him to the core.
That man… wasn't he far too strong?
Some moments blazed with a brilliance that left Bichen breathless.
"Main server, your records show both Damoros were the same person. Are you saying he staged all of it alone from start to finish? Even the one who trapped us—that was also him?"
[Yes, Lieutenant Colonel.]
A few officers burst out angrily: "Then why didn't you tell us?!"
[According to military authority treaties, when a high-authority individual makes a decision, lower-authority personnel cannot access its details without the higher individual's approval.]
The room went silent.
Damoro's authority was higher than theirs.
Was he dispatched directly from Central Command?
It was the only explanation that made sense—otherwise, how could his power be so overwhelming?
But in truth, it didn't matter. Even if they had remained free aboard the ship, they wouldn't have devised any effective way to purge the spies.
The important thing was—they were alive. That in itself was a good outcome.
As they filed out, soldiers in the corridors caught sight of them and froze, struck dumb.
"Captain… you're not dead?"
Bichen didn't answer. He simply kept walking, straight toward Damoro.
When they reached the vast bowl-shaped pit, Damoro was the first to notice. He gestured toward the approaching group and told the soldiers around him:
"Whoever claimed the Captain was dead—look for yourself. The Captain is right there."
All the soldiers turned to look.
Sure enough—there stood Bichen and the others.
The warship's high command wasn't dead after all. For some, it was a relief; they felt they'd regained their leaders. But for many more, fury boiled up. They thought these officers had been hiding away while everyone else fought and bled.
Bichen felt the swell of anger immediately and knew things were turning dangerous.
He hurriedly addressed Damoro: "Mr. Damoro, thank you for eliminating the spies on our warship. But I think it would have been better if you'd released us when the outbreak first began. We've been locked up like criminals these past days."
He was trying to shift the soldiers' anger away from himself.
The crowd hesitated. Was it true? Had the Captain and his officers been imprisoned by Damoro?
Damoro fixed his gaze on Bichen, then said calmly, "The longer you stayed absent, the more reckless the spies became. If you'd shown your faces earlier, many spies would still be lurking in the shadows."
It was plainspoken. He simply didn't care what anyone thought.
He had endured far worse in Hyperdimensional Space—indifference, contempt, betrayal, humiliation, misunderstanding. The judgment of others no longer touched him.
Bichen, however, seized on Damoro's words as an opening to ease the tension.
"I understand. The cunning of the spies exceeded imagination. You had no choice but to act as you did. Now that the warship crisis has settled, Mr. Damoro, what should our next step be?"
Damoro's authority outranked theirs. And his power had already been proven beyond dispute. So Bichen framed his question carefully, treating Damoro as the true arbiter.
But Damoro had no taste for bureaucracy.
"Who said it's over?" he replied coldly.
"Don't forget—our enemies come from the micro-world. Destroying the macro-world infiltrators doesn't mean the micro-world threat is gone. They're still out there. If we don't hunt them down, every one of us will die."
The words snapped every soldier to full alert.
The crisis wasn't over.
"Next, we face the micro-world itself. I already have leads. You'll cooperate with me to wipe them out. Meanwhile, this warship keeps heading at full speed toward Star City Four."
Damoro disliked command—he was a sovereign of individuals, not a commander of legions. But now he had no choice. To cleanse the micro-world, he had to mobilize the entire vessel.
Killing the spies had been the easy part. The true ordeal still lay ahead.
"Are there any star-level scholars aboard?" he asked.
After a quick check, silence. None.
This type of warship carried soldiers, not academics. They knew battlefield basics, not advanced theory. Especially when it came to the micro-world, they were useless.
"Then it falls to me," Damoro muttered, a faint ache running through his circuits.
"Everyone disperse. Stay sharp—there may still be spies in hiding. Captain, convene a council and prepare for what's next."
He didn't want to waste a single moment. Now was the time to strike the micro-world before it had a chance to regroup. Delay would only hand the initiative back to the enemy.
Damoro looked at Bichen and the others. "I must make some trials. The remaining soldiers on this warship are neither brave nor brilliant nor strong. But you—I still trust. At least compared to the masses, you stand above. I need you to enter the micro-world, and perhaps even another world beyond."
Bichen and his officers had wondered what Damoro would ask of them. The answer made their blood run cold. Wasn't this just sending them in as the vanguard—the expendable cannon fodder?
"This…" Bichen began, groping for a polite refusal.
But Damoro's voice cut across him, colder than steel:
"This concerns every soul aboard this warship—and the entire Star Nation. Refuse, and you are deserters. I will execute you on the spot."
It was a threat. A naked, brutal threat.
And there was nothing they could do. Their strength was below Damoro's, their authority beneath his. Whatever he commanded, they were bound to obey.
"How could we refuse?" Bichen raised his voice. "We are citizens of the Star Nation, soldiers of the Star Nation. To sacrifice ourselves for the survival of the Star Nation is our duty!"
One by one, others echoed his oath, some louder, some barely audible.
Damoro's eyes swept across them.
"Good. Then we begin now."
Bichen's heart jolted.
"Now?"
"Of course, now. Any delay is nothing more than waiting for death's footsteps."
"Or perhaps you'd prefer to be slaughtered by the enemy?"
"Main server, transfer all weapons from the armory."
[Understood.]
At once, the main server shifted the entire armory into the vast bowl-shaped crater.
Rows of weapons, neatly aligned and gleaming under the lights, left Bichen and the others wide-eyed with shock.
When had their warship possessed such an arsenal?
Damoro produced a device and placed it before him.
The mechanism unfolded with a metallic hum, revealing a single sphere floating at its core.
"Next, you must shrink and enter this sphere."
As Bichen and the others drew closer, a strange sensation washed over them.
They couldn't describe it—it simply felt wrong.
"Enter this… dust mote?"
"You mean to shrink us?"
Bichen couldn't hide his curiosity about how Damoro intended to achieve this.
But Damoro shook his head.
"No. What we ultimately seek to enter is the super-microscopic world."
"Although it isn't truly two-dimensional, it borders on the overlapping edge of three and two dimensions."
"Ordinary shrinking won't suffice. I will prepare everything for you—you only need to take the final step."
If it were truly so simple to leap across dimensions, then dimensional gateways wouldn't exist at all, and Type II civilizations would already travel freely between planes.
In reality, no one held that ability.
When the super-microscopic world collapses to its threshold—when its length, width, and height are compressed to the Planck scale, or even below—once further shrinking becomes impossible, one must abandon a dimension to step into two-dimensionality.
To make oneself infinitesimally small to cross dimensions—this was the ultimate pursuit of microscopic civilizations, such as the Flyer Civilization, and the end goal of a Type III Civilization's path.
There was another path: to make oneself infinitely large.
But this step was even harder.
For to become infinitely large was to become a black hole. And a black hole could pierce through countless dimensions.
Yet the cost was annihilation of consciousness. Death. And so, no civilization willingly chose that path.
Instead, most civilizations created black holes artificially and used them as bridges into other dimensions.
The so-called super-microscopic world was nothing more than three-dimensional space, compressed to the sub-atomic scale—still three-dimensional at its essence.
Even a string, at its core, was still three-dimensional.
A string might exist in one dimension, but to a three-dimensional civilization, when its energy ripples were perceived, it would always be experienced as three-dimensional.
Damoro separated a portion of his body.
That "portion" amounted to hundreds of basic units.
Each of these units was strong enough to bear the full consciousness of an individual. Into these, he would place every soldier present.
"Are you ready?"
Damoro asked the question—
But he didn't wait for anyone's reply. With a single motion, he triggered the device grafted into his body.
A violent surge of energy erupted, shattering their bodies on the spot. Flesh and bone collapsed, scattering into nothingness.
What remained was their consciousness—suddenly exposed, fragile, and on the verge of unraveling.
In certain niche disciplines, consciousness was also called the soul. Many scholars argued that when ancient human civilizations spoke of the "soul," what they were really describing was consciousness.
And that claim wasn't entirely baseless.
Everything in the universe is energy. Consciousness—and the so-called soul—both possess their own energy signatures. The distinction lies in interpretation: in some models, the soul can couple with matter, while consciousness itself, like a photon, has no mass at all.
Not rest mass, not even dynamic mass. It is something stranger than light—an existence beyond photons. At least, by the standards of current human civilization, there is still no unified explanation for it.
It is like the way primitive species once wielded fire and ice.
They knew how to use it. They didn't understand it. That was no contradiction.
Consciousness, however, was deeper, more elusive—an enigma no civilization had yet pierced.
Damoro extended his will and pulled their consciousnesses into the cluster of basic units he had split from his own form.
But the process wasn't flawless.
Three of them failed to make the passage. Their consciousnesses scattered into nothing—true death.
Damoro's heart remained undisturbed, not a single ripple.
He looked upon the survivors and said,
"No need to panic. We'll proceed step by step. I never promised success at the first attempt."
"Right now, the success rate is less than one in ten thousand. But with enough trials, perhaps the probability will rise."
Those bound to the basic units could no longer form complex thoughts.
Yet when Damoro's words reached them, a raw anger stirred within their diminished states of mind.
He ignored it.
"You are soldiers," he continued, voice cold.
"If you are unwilling to sacrifice for the Star Nation, then who else will?"
"Perhaps you simply don't trust me with your lives. But understand this—this plan was not devised by me."
"It was handed down from those far above. Those who rule you. Those who rule even me."
This plan was indeed not Damoro's own.
It had come packaged with the information stored inside the armory.
After all, he lacked the talent for such design. To expect him to craft a plan of this scale would have been absurd—an exercise in futility.
The higher echelons must have known this.
And yet, Damoro had always wondered what kind of entity truly governed his existence.
Over the years, during countless missions, he had interacted with many of humanity's high-ranking officials. But not one of them had the faintest knowledge of Hyperdimensional Space.
That was what troubled him.
If they weren't merely putting on an act, then perhaps Hyperdimensional Space had not originated from human civilization at all.
And yet, every mission he carried out was framed around salvation or conflict resolution. That alone seemed to refute the idea.
If so, then the real controllers of Hyperdimensional Space stood even higher than the officials he had met.
The highest he had ever encountered was Second Rank.
Above that existed only First Rank—the supreme leaders of the Federation. They were phantoms, existing only as images and videos on the net. No one had ever seen one alive, in the flesh.
If that was the case… then who was managing the Star Nation?
Even the Second Rank had no reach into this level.
These thoughts flickered only briefly in Damoro's mind. Once he calmed, he issued the next order.
Five individuals were instructed to enter the particle.
The particle itself was nothing remarkable—just a fragment of matter, no more than several hundred thousand atoms.
Its purpose was simple: to anchor the quantum field.
It was like this—imagine ten transparent liquids, each in a bottle. Labeling them makes them easy to tell apart. But if those bottles are poured out and mixed with others, how do you distinguish them again?
Each liquid could be colorless, odorless—even lethally toxic.
The quickest solution is elegant in its simplicity: add pigment. A tiny, harmless trace that doesn't alter the liquid's properties but makes each distinguishable at a glance.
That was the role of this particle.
Damoro had to keep every action focused on a single target. This speck of dust was that anchor.
The five individuals, their consciousnesses fused into the basic units, now entered the particle.
Damoro detached a device, sealing it above and below.
The cube contained a hollow, spherical chamber within. Damoro enveloped the construct with his own body, interfacing through rigid connections, ensuring the sphere's precision.
He could now see the particle, suspended inside.
And then—he activated the device.
"Dimensional stripping… commence."