The financial networks across the ocean dissolved entirely, but the true nightmare for humanity had only just begun.
Although the Goddess had retreated back into the untouchable void, She had left a set of fully automated, relentless dead code inside the servers of the Blue Planet. This code possessed no human emotion and cared nothing for wealth. It recognized only one metric—how much innocent blood stained your hands.
BOOM!
Across the Blue Planet, every reactivated giant LED screen, smartphone, and vehicle dashboard terminal suddenly flashed in a violent frenzy. The once-dead black interface of the Room B hijacked the world again.
There were no introductory remarks, nor filler animations. Row after row of glowing, stark white text burned directly into the retinas of all humanity like a brutal system patch note:
[BLUE PLANET KARMIC NETWORK UPDATE: VERSION 1.01 GRAND CLEARING IS NOW LIVE.]
[NOTICE: THE HIGHEST ENCRYPTION KEYS OF FRONTIER TECHNOLOGY'S OFFSHORE FOUNDATIONS HAVE BEEN VIOLENTLY CRACKED BY HUMAN ACTOR HANS. THE ENTIRE MEMBERSHIP LIST OF THE DARK WEB ANIMAL RETRIBUTION PREMIUM PREMIUM DONORS HAS BEEN MERGED INTO THE RETRIBUTION DATABASE.]
[PUNISHMENT MECHANISM: KARMIC LIABILITY DATA-CONVERSION PROTOCOL INITIATED.]
Hum—
A localized, physical rumble—sounding like a heavy bass subwoofer exploding into static—vibrated straight through the brainstems of all humanity. Before billions of people across the Blue Planet could comprehend what the text meant, a numbing, freezing electrical current bolted down from the sky, locking onto the crown of every individual standing along the streets.
"Holy shit! What the fuck is that on your head?!"
On a commercial street in the southern region of the Long Nation, a young office worker filming a live stream froze. His eyes bulged as his remote selfie stick dropped with a clatter to the pavement. He pointed at his colleague in pure terror, stumbling backward until he crashed straight into a trash can.
He was far from alone.
At this exact second, a semi-transparent, horizontal energy bar roughly half a meter long materialized out of thin air, hovering silently above the head of every single person among the billions of the Blue Planet's population. It looked exactly like a character health bar from an online video game.
The vast majority of ordinary citizens carried a soothing, vibrant jade-green bar, explicitly labeled with values like:
[KARMIC VALUE: +12 (FED A STRAY CAT BY THE ROADSIDE)]
However, within the city's premium private hospitals, the high-end executive penthouse suites, and the gated luxury villa communities of the self-proclaimed elite—dense, jarring clusters of sticky, crimson health bars erupted into existence, pulsing like fresh wounds.
The numbers following those red bars were all negative. Staggering, terrifying negative numbers.
"No... this isn't real! This is a CGI special effect! It's a cyber attack by hackers from the Long Nation!!"
Inside that private elite hospital in Furinlan City within the Bald Eagle Nation, Professor Evans—his face still masked in blood from slamming his forehead against the mud before a stray dog—looked up. He caught his own reflection in the corridor's dressing mirror.
Floating blindingly above his head was a stark, blood-red metric:
[KARMIC LIABILITY BAR: -150,000 POINTS (DARK WEB PREMIUM DONOR; MULTIPLE PREMIUM CONTRIBUTIONS TO CUSTOM LIVE EXPERIMENTAL VIDEOS)]
Faced with this hardcore data-driven tribunal, the anonymous gold cards hidden away in bank vaults and the encrypted IP addresses shielded by the dark web were as flimsy as a piece of discarded tissue paper. When the universal law of karma came to collect your debt, it didn't bother sending an enforcement officer to knock on your front door.
Beep—
A crisp, mechanical chime—sounding exactly like a supermarket scanner logging a barcode—echoed directly inside Evans's brain. Following the sound, his massive negative health bar began flashing frantically, violently draining toward the left like a kite with its string cut.
[KARMIC CODE SYSTEM DEDUCTION: TOTAL ASSETS OF TARGET ACCOUNT DETECTED AT 32,000,000 USD.]
[ASSET STATUS: BLOOD DEBT RETRIBUTION PROTOCOL ACTIVE. SYSTEM FORCIBLY EXECUTING FULLY AUTOMATED LIQUIDATION AND TRANSFER OF ALL ASSETS.]
[TARGET DESTINATION: REALLOCATION TO THE MATRIX OF 20,000 STRAY ANIMAL SANCTUARIES ACROSS THE BLUE PLANET.]
"Fuck! My money! My trust funds in the Swiss bank! My stocks!!"
Professor Evans shrieked hysterically, pulling out his smartphone to desperately log into his private wealth portal. But on the screen, the long string of digits that had fueled his arrogance for a lifetime was resetting to zero at a manic speed of millions of dollars per microsecond.
It took exactly one second. His available balance flattened into a freezing, absolute "0.00".
Yet, it was far from over. Even after the wealth was entirely drained, the crimson liability bar hovering above his head had still not cleared.
Beep—
The second system chime resonated through his skull.
[WARNING: TARGET WEALTH AND ASSETS ARE INSUFFICIENT TO OFFSET KARMIC LIABILITY. FORCIBLY ACTIVATING SECONDARY CLEARING SEQUENCE—DEDUCTING LIFEFORCE CONSTANTS.]
Before the horrified, weeping gazes of over a hundred nurses and patients filling the hospital corridor, Professor Evans—a top-tier expert who just moments ago looked to be a healthy, red-faced forty-year-old—underwent a terrifying physical decomposition within a ten-thousandth of a second.
His skin went entirely slack, sagging down his frame in heavy, loose folds. His meticulously groomed blonde hair withered into bleached straw in less than two seconds, shedding onto the linoleum floor in heavy clumps. His hands, which had wielded countless scalpels with smooth, trembling power, broke out in dense clusters of black age spots, the knuckles warping and turning completely brittle before everyone's eyes.
"Ah... ah..."
Evans opened his mouth to scream, but the motion shattered his healthy teeth, dropping them onto the tile with a sharp, hollow chatter. His lungs rattled violently like a pair of broken bellows. Stripped of the physical strength to even remain standing, he collapsed like a pile of rotting mud directly into his own waste.
The deity did not strike him down with thunder. Instead, the cosmic source code had simply executed a single-click uninstall of everything he had ever extracted through malice—taking with it his very flesh and marrow.
Before the giant LED media walls across the Blue Planet, countless internet trolls and contrarians who had been stubbornly holding out wet themselves in sheer terror.
"This is the law of the new era. Money is useless, guns are useless! Compassion is the only fucking passport left!!"
On that commercial street in the southern region of the Long Nation, the young office worker who had fallen into the trash can wiped the cold sweat from his face. Staring up at his own safe, jade-green metric displaying [KARMIC VALUE: +12], he suddenly bounded off the pavement, laughing hysterically at the sky.
Thousands of miles away, on the western coast of the ocean, amidst the ruins where physical constants had fractured, the absolute hegemony of the New Eastern Era was descending with the most ferocious, unadulterated cold-weapon violence.
Before Fengqi had withdrawn back to the Long Nation, she had casually dismantled the electromagnetic and gravitational constant stabilization patches surrounding the Bald Eagle Nation.
As a result, the conventional firearms, explosives, and quantum-chip weapons inside the Western military installations had been reduced entirely to scrap metal.
Masses of black-market syndicates, who had previously claimed territory with the intent of using hidden exoskeleton armies to plunder divine gold assets, were currently trapped inside their alloy bunkers, roaring in impotent fury.
"The gunpowder won't ignite! Even the firing pins on the electromagnetic rifles have softened like butter! How the hell are we supposed to fight?!" a bearded cartel leader bellowed, smashing his useless rifle against the wall.
Yet, in this lawless wasteland where the logic of thermal weaponry had been permanently locked down, a heavy, earth-shuddering crack suddenly resonated through the dense fog.
THUD—!!
This was absolutely not the roar of a combustion engine. This was a terrifying, thunderous boom born of pure, mechanical kinetic tension.
The mist was violently torn open.
More than a dozen rugged heavy war-chariots, forged entirely from the dark gold alloy known as Divine Gold-001 and driven strictly by primitive clockwork springs and hydraulic transmissions, crushed the ruined masonry beneath their massive treads, forcing their entry into the battlefield.
Standing atop the war-chariots were elite special operators of the Long Nation's Loong Shadow sequence, their expressions stone-cold beneath their dark, heavy armor. In their hands, they carried no automated rifles of the old world; instead, each soldier braced a two-meter-long electromagnetic rail-heavy crossbow driven by high-tension divine gold springs.
These crossbows required no gunpowder, nor any digital microchips. They operated strictly on the core mechanical mechanics developed by Dean Hao Xue of the Academy of Sciences—utilizing his hard-core "Equilibrium Mechanics Reconfiguration" engineering.
"Long Nation Loong Shadow sequence, acting under orders to cleanse all lawless coordinates."
The squad leader spoke without a shred of emotion, not even bothering to raise his ballistic visor. His right hand violently engaged a hydraulic lever.
"Fire!"
WHOOSH—BOOM!!
More than a dozen alloy bolts forged of pure divine gold, each as thick as a grown man's thumb, shot forth instantly. They tore through the atmosphere, generating terrifying white vapor cones as they traveled at a kinetic velocity exceeding Mach 5.
The enemy's alloy bunker possessed exceptional structural integrity, rated to withstand point-blank fire from heavy machine guns. Yet, faced with these Mach 5 divine gold bolts, the half-meter-thick specialized steel plating was as fragile as a rotten biscuit soaked in water for three days.
Pfft!!
The bolts pierced through three layers of reinforced defensive walls without losing an ounce of momentum. The massive centripetal force generated upon striking human flesh violently pulverized the thirty-plus cartel thugs inside, instantly converting their bodies into a fine mist of blood that filled the air.
There was no conventional flash of explosive fire—only the rawest, most primitive kinetic butchery.
"To declare war is to execute. To cross the perimeter is to be erased on the spot."
The Loong Shadow leader's voice echoed coldly across the ruins as the alloy clockwork springs of his heavy crossbow once again emitted a grating, teeth-grinding sound of mechanical winding:
"The gods have departed. The regulations of the Long Nation are your new divine retribution."