"DING! Congratulations! You have obtained 8 Skill Points."
Next.
Seraphine grabbed the second bottle and unscrewed it.
"DING! Congratulations! You have obtained 17 Skill Points."
Excellent!
She opened the third bottle.
"DING! Congratulations! You have obtained 15 Skill Points."
Thereafter, Seraphine opened the rest of the bottles in one continuous streak.
DING! DING! DING! DING!
A moment later, empty bottles were scattered at her feet. She had obtained a total of 324 Skill Points.
A massive harvest!
Seraphine immediately opened her interface and began upgrading her skills.
She spent 128 points to push [Aura Condensation] to the next tier.
[Aura Condensation] 〔8〕(Level 60 Class Skill): Killing intent enters the body, slaughtering all foes.
Reduces Max HP by 76,800, increases Damage attribute by +38,400. Costs 6,400 MP per second.
Skill Points remaining: 204.
Scanning her skill list, Seraphine thought for a moment before choosing to upgrade her most frequently used skill: [Ruthless Blade Qi].
Just like [Aura Condensation], the cost to upgrade [Ruthless Blade Qi] doubled with each level. Each upgrade provided a subtle increase to the blade-qi's range and size, while its power, the base damage multiplier, increased by 0.2.
Spending 1 point raised it from level 0 to 1.
Spending 2 points raised it from 1 to 2.
Spending 4 points raised it from 2 to 3.
Following this pattern, Seraphine spent a total of 127 points to complete the upgrade.
[Ruthless Blade Qi] 〔7〕(Level 70 Class Skill): A heartless being, loving only the blade in hand.
Unleash physical blade-qi (Base Damage × 3.6). Costs 1,300 MP.
Factoring in her Base Damage, Equipment Damage, the 1.5x multiplier from [Blade Intent], and the 3.6x multiplier from [Ruthless Blade Qi], each of her blade-qi strikes now dealt over 200,000 damage.
Feeling satisfied, Seraphine reached for a stack of skill books and began flipping through them.
[Photonic Rapid-Healing], [Summon Extreme-Cold Helium Hound], [Dark Matter Wraith Transformation], [Plasma-Flow Barrier], [Protection of the Saturnian Goddess].
They felt mediocre.
Seraphine grabbed a few more.
[Prelude to the Winter God], [Volcanic Eruption Cannon], [Electronic Sanctioner], [Biochemical Gas Cannon], [Swamp Behemoth Transformation], [True Form of the Corpse Demon].
Still not very impressive.
Shaking her head, she pocketed them all and continued browsing through the others.
[Nano Shield], [Minotaur's Rage], [Magnetic Spider Snare], [Hydra King Transformation], [Phantom Blade], [Gravity Field Generation], [Demonic Boar Heavy Cannon], [Summoning the Swarm], [Calamity from the Heavens], [Earth-Shattering Great Mudra].
"Ah, these last two aren't bad."
Seraphine's eyebrows arched as she immediately learned the two skills.
[Calamity from the Heavens] (Extra Skill): If you can block the first one, what about the second?
Summons a meteor to crash from the sky (Base Damage × 3). Shatters everything within a thousand-meter radius. Summoning range: ten-kilometer diameter. Each meteor costs 6,000 MP. (Cannot be leveled up).
[Earth-Shattering Great Mudra] (Extra Skill): I am a remnant of the old era, there is no ship in the new era capable of carrying me.
Strike with both palms to unleash a colossal circular shockwave. Attack range: ten kilometers. Damages all enemies in its path (Base Damage × 5). Costs 8,000 HP and 8,000 MP. (Cannot be leveled up).
"Not bad at all. And this."
Seraphine reached up to the highest shelf in the warehouse and pulled down a massive bone-blade, blood-red and covered in demonic inscriptions. She scanned it and laughed: "Cool."
[Bloodthirsty Mad-Blade] (Legendary): Damage +3350, Skill: [Blood-Drained Frenzy].
[Blood-Drained Frenzy]: The wielder is transformed into a Void Blood Demon. Defense +950, Damage +3000, Agility +450, HP -5000.
The blade can drain blood, targets struck by this weapon have 2,000 HP forcibly drained.
Just as Seraphine equipped this Legendary-grade weapon, footsteps echoed from just outside the warehouse.
Step, step, step
Without even looking, she unleashed a diagonal [Ruthless Blade Qi] strike.
SWOOSH!
After the skill upgrade, the blade-qi, previously only as thick as a thumb, had expanded to be wider than a palm.
The brilliant white blade-qi shredded the air as it flew out of the warehouse gate. Accompanied by a series of jagged, tearing sounds, it demolished a ruined wall and reduced several Royal Guild players hiding there to dust, which quickly flickered and vanished.
Yet, immediately after killing them, a rhythmic, earthquake-like thumping echoed from afar.
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!
"Never-ending."
Seraphine frowned as she stepped out of the warehouse, looking toward the source of the noise.
Several hundred meters away, a colossal mech, resembling Gipsy Danger from "Pacific Rim", was charging toward her. The difference was that this machine was several times larger, standing roughly 300 meters tall.
CRASH!
CRASH!
CRASH!
The mech's footsteps shook the ground as it neared the warehouse entrance. It suddenly raised its right fist, rocket thrusters in its elbow erupting with immense power. It lunged forward, channeling massive kinetic energy into a downward strike aimed directly at Seraphine.
Facing such a blow, most people would feel an overwhelming sense of pressure.
Seraphine merely shook her head slightly. She swung her blade, unleashing a towering, blazing blade-qi streak dozens of meters high to meet the incoming mechanical fist.
CLANG!!
Amidst brilliant blue electrical sparks, billowing black smoke, and a deafening roar, the mech's massive fist was instantly cleaved down the middle by the [Ruthless Blade Qi]. The strike tore upward through the shoulder and neck, finally causing the limb to explode into thousands of flying mechanical parts.
The mech, unable to withstand the irresistible force of the impact, lost its balance. It stumbled back several hundred meters before crashing heavily onto the ground.
"Like I said, humanoid mechs are useless for anything other than looks," Seraphine chuckled softly. "One little push and they fall over. A giant tank would've been more useful."
As she joked, she unleashed another [Ruthless Blade Qi] streak that tore through the ground. It struck the fallen mech as it struggled to rise, slicing from the waist through the torso to the neck, thoroughly bisecting the machine and rendering it scrap.
Glancing at the smoking, sparking wreck that was about to detonate, Seraphine ignited into flames and blurred away, flying toward another section of the base.
...
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Along the shattered main roads connecting the various sectors of Pixiu Base, thousands of Royal Guild players were being chased and slaughtered by a solitary figure: Seraphine.
With a casual swing of her arm, a colossal, brilliant white air-blade, nearly fifteen stories high, would manifest. It would thunder along, plowing through and tearing up two or three thousand meters of reinforced alloy flooring, butchering and scattering hundreds of screaming, cursing Royal Guild players.
"AHHHH!!"
"HELP!!"
"DAMN IT, RUN!!"
"MOTHER..."
"THIS IS RIDICULOUS!!"
"HOW THE HELL ARE WE SUPPOSED TO FIGHT THIS?!"
Those who dared to strike back were instantly countered to death by [Startling Thunder Blade-Armor] before Seraphine even had to lift a finger.
BOOM!
Another massive, roaring streak of blazing light, carrying terrifying damage, sliced through the air, butchering hundreds more Royal players.
In just two strikes, Seraphine had annihilated nearly a thousand people.
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!
Her arms danced wildly as she unleashed dozens of chilling blade-waves in rapid succession. Mid-flight, these massive streaks collided, resonated, and merged into a single, cohesive torrent of blade-qi. It thundered toward a structural stress point on the long boulevard several kilometers away.
BOOM!!
With a world-shaking roar and a burst of ten thousand rays of light, the thousand-meter-wide stretch of road centered on the impact point suddenly buckled and exploded, instantly crushing and consuming several thousand Royal Guild players.
SWOOSH! SWOOSH!
A few scattered players with flight capabilities managed to escape the carnage in time, trailing long plumes of fire as they scrambled desperately toward the sky.
Facing Seraphine, a near-unstoppable bug of a player who ignored attacks, moved like the wind, and dealt catastrophic damage, their courage had utterly shattered. They fled in a broken panic, desperate to escape.
No player in "Brilliant Games" wanted to die, death meant losing levels and attributes. And when attributes dropped in the game, the physical body in reality would undergo a corresponding, violent degeneration. The higher the level, the more severe the regression. No player ever wanted to experience that overwhelming sense of weakness and agony.
Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. Every game has its stubborn few.
Like 『Royal I'm Proud, What Can You Do』.
While Seraphine was leisurely hunting down fleeing players, 『Royal I'm Proud, What Can You Do』 strode out of a respawn point in a corner several kilometers from the boulevard, his face dark with fury. The sensation of losing a level was miserable, he had spent quite a while writhing on the floor in reality before gritting his teeth and logging back in.
As someone who had been killed by Seraphine at the Novice Square until he was afraid to log on, he had immediately confirmed through the system notifications that it was her who had killed him again.
The irony!
He had spent a fortune and exerted immense effort to join the Royal Guild, hoping to use the guild's power to find that grandson and settle the debt from his previous humiliation. Who would have thought the Royal Guild was this pathetic! He had been killed in an important military base, theoretically the safest of places.
"This is ridiculous!"
Muttering a curse, 『Royal I'm Proud, What Can You Do』 narrowed his eyes and scanned his surroundings. "That Great Demon King is certainly bold, daring to raid a major Royal Guild base. Hmph, she's probably been besieged to death by now."
"But how did she level up so fast?!" he wondered as he walked. In the split second before his death, he thought he'd seen a golden 2nd Ascension icon above her head. Did that mean the Great Demon King Seraphine was already at the 2nd Ascension?!
"That leveling speed is completely insane."
『Royal I'm Proud, What Can You Do』 shook his head, quickening his pace toward the plaza. "In case she's not dead, maybe I can get a few stabs in. Don't die yet, don't die! Please, just let me stab you a few times."
As he walked, he suddenly heard a rhythmic thumping from his right.
It was getting closer.
Frowning with curiosity, he stopped and turned toward the silent, greyish-white wall to his right.
THUD! THUD! THUD!
As the violent, heavy thumping drew nearer, he walked to the wall and reached out to tap it. But the moment his finger touched the surface
BOOM!!!
The wall exploded. A flaming figure shot through, slamming into him and sending him flying. Spinning wildly through the air as his health plummeted to zero, 『Royal I'm Proud, What Can You Do』 strained his neck, glaring through gritted teeth at the fiery silhouette.
He wanted to see exactly which grandson had just killed his newly respawned self.
In the next heartbeat, he saw her face clearly.
She saw him too, a flicker of surprise in her eyes. It was as if she were saying: You again?
In that instant, his face twitched with a mixture of rage and humiliation. He only had time to bark out a single "DAMN IT!" before he died and flickered into smoke.
"DING! You killed player 『Royal I'm Proud, What Can You Do』."
"Hmm?" Seraphine paused. "It really was him. How does this guy keep ending up in my way?"
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Suddenly, a system message forced itself into her vision without her permission.
"Player 『Great Demon King Seraphine』, please note: you have slaughtered over ten thousand people and have become a Red-Named Player. Upon death, a Red-Named Player will lose 10 levels and drop one-third of their Equipment, Currency, and Items."
A second later, her ID above her head began to flash a deep, pulsating crimson. She gave it a single glance before dismissing it.
"Only ten thousand after all this time? My efficiency is a bit low; I need to find a better way."
As she rubbed her chin in thought, she noticed a faintly glowing blue circle in the corner.
"This is... a respawn point."
She hadn't seen one since leaving the Novice Square.
Impulsively, Seraphine drew her blade and unleashed a brilliant [Ruthless Blade Qi] strike, slamming it into the respawn point.
BANG!
A massive blast reduced the surrounding rubble to ash. However, the blue circle remained completely unresponsive.
"Ah~" Seraphine murmured, her interest piqued. "Since the game says everything is destructible, can a respawn point be broken too?"
With that thought, she unleashed several more massive blade-qi streaks at the circle.
BANG! BANG! BANG!
The circle remained unmoved.
"Stubborn, isn't it?"
Seraphine's Transcendental Perception suddenly stirred, providing her with a faint, cryptic intuition: Shattering this respawn point, a link between "Brilliant Games" and physical reality, could reveal the underlying rules of the game and might even offer a slim chance at finding a 'cheat.'
"Interesting. Let's find out."
Seraphine walked to the edge of the respawn point and activated [Abstruse Truth of the Blade].
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
In an instant, boundless blade-qi manifested, blanketing the circle in a relentless, violent assault. The surrounding rubble, scrap metal, and debris were lifted and ground into fine dust by the swirling blades.
Buzz
Suddenly, the respawn point flickered. Amidst a humming sound, a figure materialized out of thin air, cursing, it was 『Royal I'm Proud, What Can You Do』 yet again. But the moment his form manifested and he saw Seraphine, he was shredded to pieces by the Blade Domain and flickered back out of the game.
After this happened five or six times, 『Royal I'm Proud, What Can You Do』 ceased to appear. Perhaps he had finally 'peacefully' let go of his grudge.
"..."
After several minutes of relentless assault from [Abstruse Truth of the Blade], the light flickering around the respawn point began to dim and waver irregularly.
"Finally reaching its limit."
Seeing this, Seraphine unleashed several hundred more strikes directly at the center of the respawn point.
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!
The [Ruthless Blade Qi] barrage was relentless. Under the continuous, violent assault, the respawn point began to shake violently.
Sizzle Sizzle
At that moment, the ruins, mechanical scrap, rubble, and even the surrounding air began to warp and blur eerily. Seraphine narrowed her eyes at the anomaly.
"Is the game experiencing regional instability because the respawn point is being destroyed?"
Realizing that continued attacks would likely trigger more anomalies, she chose to push even harder. A bit of chaos was exactly what she wanted; in the disorder, she could find system loopholes and profit from them. Simply grinding levels for eternity was far too slow.
"Just a bit more."
She drew the [Bloodthirsty Mad-Blade] and used [Piercing Blade] to strike the blue circle repeatedly, slamming it hundreds of times in a single breath.
Finally, amidst a series of violent flashes, the respawn point exploded and was utterly destroyed.
BOOM
The explosion tore up the ground for several kilometers, revealing the bedrock and metallic framework beneath. In the blast, countless hiding Royal Guild players were killed, and the level-up notifications flooded Seraphine's ears yet again.
Suddenly, the world flickered between light and shadow. In Seraphine's vision, everything around her grew distant and blurred.
Where the respawn point had once been, a jagged-edged void, a hole filled with a mixture of light and shadow, appeared.
WHOOSH
A surging, phantom torrent erupted from the hole in the void.
"This matter stream... its mass is an imaginary number?" Seraphine noted with surprise. "Imaginary matter. This is a tachyon stream... no, not just tachyons. There are other unknown imaginary particles here."
"Things are getting interesting."
A strange light flickered in her eyes as she walked to the edge of the breach and peered inside. She saw an endless, dark, and silent void.
"This is..."
Driven by curiosity, Seraphine slowly leaned in to look deeper into the hole.
Buzz
In an instant, her health bar began to plummet, dropping by thousands, then tens of thousands, and finally millions of points every second. It was as if that void beyond the hole was filled with boundless malice and destructive power.
Yet, in the same heartbeat, the missing HP was replenished, filling the bar back to its limit.
Thus, Seraphine's health bar became the site of a frantic tug-of-war. The battle was so intense that the space above her head pulsed with a scorching red glow, bathing the ruined area in crimson.
Seraphine remained indifferent to the chaos, focusing her attention on the bizarre visions within the breach.
Through her eyes, this unknown void behind the game world revealed a spatial structure that was chaotic and warped. At first glance, it resembled a massive, 3D abstract oil painting that had been splattered and trampled with paint.
Within this distorted space, she saw countless fragmented, inverted structures and starships of all sizes drifting aimlessly. Surrounding these greyish-white ruins were many monsters and instance bosses she recognized, and many she didn't.
But they were all a dull, lifeless grey. They were like corpses, possessing the form of life but devoid of any vitality.
Boundless streams of tachyons, moving millions of times faster than the speed of light, blanketed vast regions of the void. Within these tachyon torrents, numerous slower-moving imaginary particles and intricate energies were entangled, overlapping and merging into complex microscopic structures.
Just as Seraphine's curiosity drove her to study them further, the breach seemed to react to her presence. It began to shrink rapidly, erupting with an invisible, powerful force that acted like a wall, slamming her back into the normal game space.
Buzz
The void breach instantly vanished. The blurred, chaotic anomalies in the surroundings also faded away.
As the tachyon torrent thinned, Seraphine grinned. "Haha. What kind of secret are you hiding that makes you so afraid of me looking?"
Reflecting on everything she had just witnessed, she immediately activated the triple combo of Eye of True Revelation, Chaos Calculation, and Transcendental Perception to begin her deduction.
Buzz
A mere few seconds later, Seraphine had the answers she sought.
That silent void she had just glimpsed was actually the space outside the game's map boundaries.
According to her deductions, "Brilliant Games" was not a simple virtual reality game, but a trans-dimensional experience straddling the line between reality and illusion. In the original design of the unknown creator, Coo, the game likely wasn't intended to look as it does now. It would have been crude and filled with flaws, evolving into its current state through generation after generation of "updates."
Yet, even now, the game was riddled with flaws of varying sizes, the [Nightmare Deep-Port] instance being a prime example. Throughout the process of constant updates and optimizations, vast "dead zones" were created: meaningless, non-traversable spaces.
Commonly referred to as "out-of-bounds" areas.
The silent void Seraphine witnessed after destroying the respawn point was exactly that, a region beyond the game's map. Her deductions revealed that these areas were essentially the "waste products" of the game's design and manufacturing process. These discarded zones often contained elements from current game versions, as well as remnants from older ones.
This explained the presence of twisted, shattered buildings and the "models" of unactivated monsters and bosses. While some of these void regions might be interconnected, most were isolated. Completely deleting them proved impossible.
After deeper analysis, Seraphine quickly understood why.
The answer was simple. In a sense, "Brilliant Games" was like a colossal, sprawling "mountain of legacy code", a mountain composed of countless "processes" and "components" of all sizes, all piled together, writhing and functioning as a singular, massive entity.
The infinite flaws scattered across its surface were not isolated; they were woven into the very fabric of the "mountain," serving as indispensable structural supports. These flaws featured different architectures, thousands of redundant logic loops, and countless unknown branching paths that reached deep into the core of the system.
Ironically, it was the way these flaws coupled and supported each other that provided stability to the massive, convoluted entity known as "Brilliant Games".
Cleaning up or fixing any single flaw was nearly impossible. Correcting one minor glitch could cause a seemingly unrelated component tens of thousands of miles away to malfunction, birthing an entirely new flaw.
Seraphine guessed that maintaining and updating "Brilliant Games" must be a constant headache for the unknown Dimensional Artist, Coo. Higher-order beings typically suffer from a psychological need for perfection; only a desperate "it works, don't touch it" attitude could explain leaving so many blatant flaws unchecked within the game.
Therefore, the fact that destroying a respawn point revealed an out-of-bounds void must be linked to some vital, unknown function. Attempting to fix it would likely break something else. That was the only explanation for why Coo left such a massive glitch unpatched.
In the [Speedrun Strategy Guide], some players had detailed techniques for "glitching" themselves out of the normal map and into these redundant spaces. However, players who reached these silent, meaningless voids usually died instantly.
Because these void spaces were structurally incomplete and rules-deficient, they couldn't support a player's continued existence. This lack of fundamental spatial structure was why Seraphine's HP had plummeted when she leaned into the breach. The force that had violently repelled her back was the "invisible wall" used by "Brilliant Games" to seal off these dead zones.
In reality, almost all large-scale games feature invisible walls, boundaries that prevent players from accessing restricted areas. Visually, a player might see a vast hill ahead, but they are blocked by an entirely transparent barrier, breaking the sense of immersion and realism.
A more sophisticated game design would use natural boundaries to limit movement, rivers, walls, dense forests, mountain ranges, or even piles of crates and abandoned buildings.
But in "Brilliant Games", these out-of-bounds regions were so vast and numerous that the developer clearly relied on invisible walls to keep players within the intended play areas.
Regardless of how clever a boundary design is, eccentric players always find a way around it.
"DING!"
As Seraphine was deep in thought, a message from the system arrived:
"『Great Demon King Seraphine』, you have killed 50% of the members of the Royal Guild's large military base, [Pixiu]. Do you wish to declare a Guild War against the Royal Guild?"
Seraphine casually clicked "Yes."
"DING! 『Great Demon King』, you have initiated a Guild War. Destroy 125,827,043 Royal Guild bases, kill at least 50% of the total Royal Guild membership, and kill the Royal Guild Master 『Royal Cold Youth』 within 120 hours to dissolve the Royal Guild.
Upon completion of the Guild War, you will receive 1,000 Free Attribute Points, 50 Skill Points, and 1,000,000 Currency.
We wish you martial success."
After reviewing the message, Seraphine chuckled:
"So many bases to destroy for such a small reward? No wonder nobody bothers to dissolve guilds. It's a massive waste of time."
As she spoke, she swung her blade to her right, unleashing a flying streak of blade-qi.
BOOM
Several hundred meters away, a few Royal Guild players lying in ambush were instantly shredded and sent offline.
Seraphine's form blurred, trailing wisps of scorching flame as she sprinted toward the heart of the massive base in search of more respawn points.
She wanted to find several more, shatter them, and further study the underlying game rules hidden within the silent void spaces. With her transcendent wisdom, that brief glimpse into the void had already allowed her to peer into a fraction of the game's core architecture.
With more profound insight, she could exploit the game's fundamental rules and its myriad flaws to create her own personal "Cheat."
Why grind levels, farm mobs, or push instances when she could simply use a cheat to modify her attributes? Effort is only for those who haven't found a shortcut; perseverance is only for those who can't bypass the struggle. Given a safe opportunity to hack the system, who wouldn't choose instant Ascension? Who would willingly choose the miserable grind?
In this era, traditional level-grinding is simply too slow.
SWOOSH
Wreathed in flames, Seraphine covered several kilometers in a single stride.
Minutes later.
BOOM!!
After blowing up another respawn point and spending those precious seconds analyzing the game's core code, Seraphine moved onto the next one without pause. Throughout the process, several small-to-medium starships descended from above, only to be sliced apart in mid-air by her [Ruthless Blade Qi].
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
After an hour of this, shattering five respawn points, obliterating over 100 landing craft, and killing several thousand more people, Seraphine had finally mapped out the path to creating her "Cheat."
She was just one step away from pushing open the door.