After deciphering the data, Seraphine realized that beyond the River of Primordial stretching across tens to hundreds of trillions of light-years within the Gravitational Primeval Rivers multiple super-civilizations on par with the Houiste Federation existed.
The number was likely well into the double digits.
Furthermore, she believed that both Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Sons and Perfected Ungrateful Sons within these Primeval Rivers likely reached double-digit numbers as well.
One must never underestimate the significance of "double digits" in this context.
Even the weakest, most common Ungrateful Son possessed the cosmic might to annihilate trillions of galaxies across tens of billions of light-years with a single strike.
If two Perfected Ungrateful Sons fought, beings capable of clearing an observable universe at full power, their terrifying mobility of a hundred billion light-years per second would take their battle to the fringes of the Matter Sea. They would erase the four fundamental forces, shatter the Gravitational Primeval Rivers into fragments, and entomb tens of trillions of vast galaxies.
"Shattered and broken... Hmm?"
Seraphine suddenly wondered: could the "shorter" Primeval Rivers recorded in the data packet be the result of eons of repeated wars between Perfected Ungrateful Sons?
Among the thirty-six ancient rivers, the River of Pale Mist, River of Dim Departure, River of Radiant Wings, River of Night Watch, River of Sealed Borders, and River of Secret Spirit were notably short, especially when compared to titans like the River of Celestial Net, River of Primordial Beginning, or River of Colossal Marsh.
"Ah, Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Sons."
Seraphine shook her head with a nonchalant smile. "It doesn't matter. A thousand or ten thousand of them, they're nothing more than soap bubbles waiting to be popped."
Indeed. Whether it was a standard Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Son or a Perfected Ungrateful Son capable of obliterating an observable universe of trillions of galaxies, she viewed them as nothing more than fragile froth.
Why say that?
Because while a Perfected Ungrateful Son's cosmic Interference Force is vast enough to blanket a hundred-billion-light-year universe in a second, their execution is sloppy.
The precision of their power only reaches the level of elementary particles. When they strike, they merely vaporize trillions of galaxies into a soup of photons, electrons, bosons, neutrinos, and raw heat.
Truthfully, that level of destruction is leagues below Seraphine's sensory and interference precision. Within the scope of the Endless Scale Net, the gap in scale is millions of times greater.
And that's just a one-dimensional comparison. In terms of actual 3D volume and mass, the difference in interference precision is a staggering hundred quintillion times.
To Seraphine, a Perfected Ungrateful Son's epic hundred-billion-light-year strike was less lethal than the gentle breeze from a household fan on old Earth.
Actually, the fan is better, at least it provides comfort. The Perfected Ungrateful Son just creates annoying light pollution.
Their attacks lack the precision to threaten Seraphine. To her, they're just low-resolution garbage images on an old computer, flashy, sure, but utterly harmless.
When precision is low, density suffers. Their power is as loose as a sieve.
If a Perfected Ungrateful Son clashed with Seraphine, their power would be like a soggy cream puff hitting a neutron-star-dense decaying matter. There is no comparison; the gap is simply too vast.
Even if a Perfected Ungrateful Son utilized 4D spatial strikes, concepts incomprehensible to 3D beings, it would be meaningless against Seraphine's Five-Dimensional True Form.
Attacking 5D with 4D? What a joke.
4D has no right to touch 5D. No amount of sheer mass can bridge that divide.
Consider the geometric entity known as Torricelli's Trumpet.
Named after the 17th-century Italian mathematician, it's formed by rotating y=1/x (where x≥1) around the x-axis.
Torricelli's Trumpet has a fascinating property: its surface area is infinitely large, but its volume is finite, equaling π.
Theoretically, if a 2D being tried to paint the entire surface of this trumpet, it would take them literally forever. It's an impossible task.
But jump up a dimension to 3D, and even a primary school student could buy a bucket of paint with volume π and simply fill the trumpet. The painting task would be finished instantly.
Of course, dimensions in the real material world aren't as idealized as pure mathematical theory, after all, the existence of full-dimensional elementary particles complicates things, but this analogy illustrates the massive chasm between 5D and 4D.
This chasm is an unbridgeable gap for a Perfected Ungrateful Son, a 4D non-steady-state energy-matter entity, placing them worlds away from Seraphine.
Conversely, for Seraphine, slaughtering these true rulers of the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea is laughably simple.
From a Spirituality standpoint, her Root Divinity can easily suppress a Perfected Ungrateful Son's semi-materialized Spirituality. By paralyzing their mind and will, she can force their delicate balance of reality-warping forces to collapse. The resulting self-destruction would create a super-void larger than an observable universe.
But that would be a waste.
Seraphine could also use her divinity to forcibly ascend their semi-materialized Spirituality, ruthlessly brainwashing them into slaves, loyal dogs willing to die for her.
Now, that's a better idea.
Of course, even without using her divinity, Seraphine has plenty of tricks to handle these Perfected Ungrateful Sons.
They have high mobility, right? A hundred billion light-years per second?
Fine. Seraphine could simply activate Instant Time Compression, freezing the entire universe's time for five full minutes. Then, with a flick of her finger, she'd launch an upgraded [Boundary Obliteration — All Perish] imbued with 5D spatial structures to vaporize them instantly.
Or, she could simultaneously open ten quadrillion Real Number Channel portals around and inside their bodies, shredding them into pieces and scattering them to ten quadrillion unknown coordinates across space-time.
Maybe she'd use her new technique, [Wind of World-Piercing], which replicates the power of the Big Bang based on Singularity like Inflation Field research.
Or perhaps [Rain of Final Annihilation], born from the non-continuous 4D spatial structures hidden within the 3D super-curved space-time of this Grand Universe.
No matter the choice, the Perfected Ungrateful Son would face an inevitable dead end.
As for her transcending Authority of Change? Let's not. That would be bullying.
Whether erasing their existence entirely, slashing their Interference Force range, severing their interaction with the outer universe, or deleting massive chunks of space-time to expose the singularity like cores drifting in nothingness, triggering multiple Big Bangs to flip the board and destroy the entire Matter Sea, none of it is a power a Perfected Ungrateful Son could withstand, or even perceive.
These thoughts flickered through Seraphine's mind for a fraction of a second before another piece of data caught her eye:
[...The River of Primordial is located in the outer layer of the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea. Its tail-end structure lies adjacent to the Matter Sea's peripheral Destruction Layer, in close proximity to the outer Dark Ocean...]
"The Dark Ocean? So that's it. Hahaha, the Dark Ocean... is right outside the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea!" Seraphine laughed in realization. "Separated only by this so-called Destruction Layer."
The moment she saw the term Dark Ocean, waves of realization surged through her mind.
A series of previously disconnected facts suddenly snapped into place.
First, Seraphine recalled the cultist named Swetha.
Long ago, when she first descended upon the Drugana star system, she had seen the term Dark Ocean within his memories.
She remembered that Swetha had returned from deep space to Zciya City specifically to use his kin and the hundreds of millions of lives in other city-states as sacrifices. His goal was to conduct a Digro Sabbath, a cruel occult ritual, to communicate with the Dark Ocean and receive the blessing of the Great Eyes, thereby ascending to become a formal member of the Cult of the Evil Eye.
Next, she recalled a cryptic bit of information from the memories of the Gluttony King, Tu:
Within the God of Hunger race's shelter, the strategic research lab and the cosmic intelligence department had speculated that the Houiste Federation's disappearance was likely due to some action that awakened an Evil God slumbering within the Dark Ocean, ultimately inviting destruction.
That deep space Evil God most likely refers to the Great Eyes.
Then, Seraphine remembered one more thing:
The Holy Emperor Augustus had once personally piloted a level 9.9 warp ship, leaving the River of Primordial for over a hundred million years.
At the time, she had calculated that with that ship's speed, a round trip taking roughly fifty million years each way would place Augustus's destination at a distance of five septillion light-years.
That staggering distance clearly couldn't be contained within the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea's diameter of a few hundred trillion light-years.
Therefore, the Holy Emperor's destination must have been outside the Matter Sea, within the Dark Ocean.
"Dark Ocean... Deep Space Evil God... Great Eyes..."
Seraphine gazed into the distant cosmos, her Eye of Transcendence flashing with divine light. "I see. So the Great Eyes exist in an unknown region of the Dark Ocean, five septillion light-years outside the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea. The Holy Emperor's journey... was likely related to the so-called Final Order, which may involve probability manipulation technology. And ultimately, that technology... might even be connected to the Great Eyes."
BUZZ
In an instant, her Eye of Transcendence swept across the five trillion light-years ahead, perceiving everything, macro, cosmic, and super-cosmic, with absolute clarity.
"Is only the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea like this... or are other places the same?"
Driven by curiosity, she activated her Authority of Change, instantly cracking the passcode locks on the data packets belonging to the other players. She plundered every shred of information contained within.
BOOM
A massive, terrifying ocean of data completely enveloped Seraphine's mind. Yet, in mere seconds, she had read and organized every bit of it.
Once the data was processed, Seraphine confirmed her suspicions.
Indeed, all players in the Brilliant Games originated from various Matter Seas throughout this space-time.
The total number was roughly ten octillion.
This meant that there were at least ten octillion Matter Seas in this space-time.
The structure of these Matter Seas was basically the same as the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea, each built from a different number of Gravitational Primeval Rivers.
The differences lay in their size. Some Matter Seas were tiny, only slightly larger than an observable universe. Others were gargantuan.
The largest had diameters reaching a hundred quintillion light-years, containing a staggering ten million Primeval Rivers. Compared to such super-massive Matter Seas, the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea was as insignificant as a speck of dust.
Yet, no matter how vast a Matter Sea was, when compared to the all-encompassing Dark Ocean, it instantly became infinitesimally small.
"The Dark Ocean... an absolute darkness as boundless as the sea. That description... is quite fitting."
"So..." Seraphine murmured softly. "At least ten octillion super-massive matter clusters, like the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea, composed of quadrillions or even quintillions of galaxies, drift like lonely specks of dust. They are separated by vast, desolate distances of decillions of light-years, scattered throughout this Dark Ocean, which spans at least a googol light-years. And there they float, alone, until the end of time?"
In the depths of her mind, she saw it: a sea. A dark ocean so unimaginably vast it inspired only despair.
Upon the surface of this eternal, lightless expanse, an infinite number of tiny specks of light drifted like scattered plankton.
Over eons, these specks of light, infinitesimal to the Dark Ocean, constantly expanded, evolved, flourished, perished, and were... reborn, driven by the winds of time.
Within these tiny lights, birthed and destroyed countless times, civilizations rose and powerful beings emerged.
But in the end, they all vanished.
Swept away by the surging tides of time, swallowed by the silent Dark Ocean, leaving no trace that they had ever existed or thrived.
Even more staggering was the realization that as the River of Time thundered forward, every single moment spawned an infinite, septendecillion number of parallel realities within this vast Dark Ocean and its countless Matter Seas.
Each parallel reality was a solid, material universe in its own right. Each contained its own boundless Dark Ocean and its drifting Matter Seas.
And under the majestic power of time, every moment within those universes would continue to spawn another infinite, septendecillion set of parallel worlds.
Without beginning, without end, and without limit.
"So... what role do the Great Eyes, independent of the Matter Seas and dwelling deep within the Dark Ocean, play in all of this?"
Seraphine pondered in silence, her gaze fixed on the infinite deep space.
This was an Intergalactic Void, a region devoid of light and dust, a boundless dark expanse forgotten by both life and the universe itself.
Within this abyss-like void, there was no gravity, no matter, no energy, and no information. No twinkling stars, no colorful nebulae, only a heavy, suffocating darkness capable of diluting everything in the universe.
It was a darkness so absolute it felt as though time and space had stalled, lost in an eternal, silent slumber. A stillness so profound the entire universe seemed to have become a distant, ghostly piece of music with no end, no melody, no rhythm, only the resonance of ultimate silence.
Then, within this motionless, lightless void, nearly a thousand star-sized clusters of brilliant, white light suddenly ignited in perfect unison.
BANG
These blinding lights behaved like living things. The moment they appeared, they twisted and spread outward like a spider's web, instantly turning the vast, tranquil void into a chaotic, boiling, and turbulent mess.
BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ
After flickering and surging for only a few seconds, the thousand massive clusters of light quietly vanished.
The boundless void returned once more to its original state of absolute, eternal darkness.
No, that wasn't quite it.
Within that abyss at the edge of the universe, where the great clusters of light had vanished, 999 powerful lifeforms suddenly appeared. Each radiated an aura as heavy and profound as the universe itself.
At a glance, every one of these beings possessed a form several times larger than a typical yellow dwarf star.
And each was a monstrosity.
These powerful lifeforms were a menagerie of the grotesque: some were three-headed scorpions with ape-like arms; some were tiger-headed serpents; some were masses of pulsating flesh covered in weeping pustules; some were spheres as hard and bright as diamonds. Others were jagged masses of spikes, or roiling, abyssal mists. Some were tangles of bloody limbs, or entities with millions of smirking faces. There were those that vibrated with enough force to shatter space, those composed of infinite, intersecting cracks, or those draped in shimmering silver. Some burned as bright as suns, or were shrouded in mist studded with ten thousand eyes. There were skeletal forms that creaked and bent, or beings that breathed clouds of stardust; tangles of dark threads, or entities glowing with every color imaginable.
The variety was endless, yet not a single one bore even a remote resemblance to a human. They were all freakish beyond words.
These 999 beings, monsters that shared no common ground with any human concept of beauty, were the Perfected Ungrateful Sons who had been imprisoned by the Dimensional Artist, Coo, for untold eons.
Thanks to Seraphine's mercy and divine intervention, these beings, who had been ruthlessly crushed and trampled by Coo, were finally free from their ancient seals. With their spirits shining with a newly ignited blaze, they had returned to the physical universe through the thousand Real Number Channels opened by Seraphine.
WHOOSH
The moment these 999 Perfected Ungrateful Sons appeared, they simultaneously projected their powerful spiritual senses toward the infinite void a hundred million light-years away.
There stood a cosmic titan, twelve million light-years tall.
Their absolute master, Seraphine herself.
From the perspective of these Perfected Ungrateful Sons, their master, who seemed to be forged from infinite radiance, stars, and dark space, made the surrounding universe look withered and shallow.
It was as if Seraphine were the true, massive universe containing all complex phenomena and infinite matter-energy, while the vast void around her was merely a crude, 2D sketch scribbled on a piece of paper.
They could sense that her continued presence caused the quantum energy sea behind the void and the complex cosmic laws themselves to boil and roar in a violent frenzy.
"Greetings, Master!"
Within the void, the Perfected Ungrateful Sons erupted with a psychic wave of profound humility and loyalty. This pulse washed over several hundred million light-years of space, churning the Dirac Sea into a chaotic torrent and triggering billions of quantum bursts that resembled gamma-ray bursts.
"Excellent."
A hundred million light-years away, Seraphine stood silently in the void and nodded with a soft laugh. "999 Perfected Ungrateful Sons. In terms of numbers, that's likely more than double all the Ungrateful Sons in the Verdant Ancient Matter Sea combined. Quite enough to serve as my assistants and bolster my prestige."
Seraphine had been disappointed by that massive galaxy. Despite providing them with such favorable conditions and eons of time, not a single semi-materialized Spirituality had emerged. It had made her wonder if her cultivation methods were simply too difficult, so grueling that three billion years hadn't produced a single genius.
But this was perfect. The Dimensional Artist had practically delivered a grand gift: nearly a thousand loyal subordinates at the peak of cosmic combat power.
Any one of these beings was the ultimate essence of an entire, vast Gravitational Primeval River, birthed from countless lives over untold ages. Each was capable of dominating any massive Matter Sea and looking down upon the entire universe.
If they were to strike in unison, their combined power could utterly annihilate four Rivers of Primordial, each over a hundred billion light-years wide and 23.6 trillion light-years long, leaving not a single proton behind.
"As expected, raising talent yourself is too much work. It's much faster to just seize them and ascend them," Seraphine chuckled. "Next time I see Coo, I'll have to thank him properly."
In the midst of her joking, a thought occurred to her: What if she formed these Perfected Ungrateful Sons into a Reincarnation Squad and threw them into the Divine Space? What a sight that would be. The Divine God would probably have a massive headache trying to design missions for them.
Amused by the idea, Seraphine continued to daydream:
"If I were the Divine God, what kind of difficulty would I set for a squad of Perfected Ungrateful Sons?"
She tilted her head, considering. "Such a world... would at least need to be able to withstand a few thousand observable-universe-level cataclysmic strikes to even be considered a stage."
BUZZ
Suddenly, the [Infinite Attributes] system vibrated, beginning its next cycle.
"Ah, right. It's time for the doubling again."
Seraphine snapped out of her daydreaming and immediately activated her Authority of Change.
As the mysterious power from the Essential Realm, channeled through the system and burning across the infinite divide between realms, rushed toward Seraphine in the Phenomenal Realm, her Authority of Change instantly merged with it.
BOOM
The system's attribute interface vibrated violently. The values for Physical Strength and Soul flickered in a chaotic, blurred frenzy.
BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ
In an instant, all tremors ceased. The values on the attribute interface had undergone a staggering transformation:
[Host: Seraphine]
[Physical Strength: 3 Quadrillion Galaxies]
[Soul: 3 Quadrillion Galaxies]
Compared to yesterday's data, Seraphine's Physical Strength and Soul attributes had increased exactly... five hundred times!
At this moment, her Physical Strength and Soul possessed the physical power equivalent to the total mass of three quadrillion Milky Way galaxies.
"Power equivalent to the total mass of hundreds or thousands of observable universes."
Seraphine slowly clenched her fist and suddenly struck the distant universe with a heavy blow.
BOOM
Instantly, the vast void 3.6 billion light-years away shuddered violently. Massive, chaotic waves as large as Superclusters surged forward, their thunderous roar churning the Dirac Sea and triggering energy tides across tens of billions of light-years. The delicate micro-structure of the space-time fabric was swept into utter chaos.
Though the 999 Perfected Ungrateful Sons within this region weren't harmed, they were tossed around like leaves in the wind by the millions of surging currents.
It couldn't be helped; their loyalty was rooted in the depths of their souls. Even if Seraphine ordered them to commit suicide, they wouldn't offer the slightest resistance, let alone complain about a little storm like this.
Of course, Seraphine knew that the gargantuan tides she had unleashed, forces capable of tearing apart or vaporizing multiple Laniakea Superclusters, wouldn't scratch her subordinates, so she hadn't held back.
"The power output is sufficient. Now... I need to increase the breadth."
After her brief test, Seraphine prepared for her real task: a massive upgrade to the breadth of her Interference Force.
A diameter of 3.6 billion light-years was far too small to meet her needs. Whether for combat, control, or mobility, it was woefully inadequate.
Thus, Seraphine intended to create a new interference field for herself: the [Domain of Spatial Hegemony].
I came, I saw, I conquered!
She would use this new field to declare her supreme hegemony over the boundless universe.
The foundation of this Hegemony Domain was Seraphine's Light of Infinity. She took her inherent, constant field structure and modified it. Using [Space-Time Leaping Resonance Technology], developed from studying the micro-spatial fluctuations of 3D space-time topol fragments, including perpetual weaving, shifting, overlapping, and twisting, she redesigned the Light of Infinity into a multi-fragmented, super-space-time emission structure.
Then, she filled this framework with [Great-Range Tachyon Interface Field Overlay Technology], derived from the advancement of the Black Scepter Array, Phantasm Field, and Holographic Domain.
Finally, she integrated the most crucial component: the [Multi-Super-Cosmic Quasi-Reality Fixation Construction Technology] used by the Dimensional Artist, Coo, when building the 999 servers for the Brilliant Games. This technology utilized quasiparticles, tachyons, low-speed virtual matter, and 3D to 4D space-time structural assembly. She expanded this into an immense, faster-than-light quasi-reality interference field with precision reaching the level of the Endless Scale Net.
"Begin."
Within the infinite void, Seraphine focused her mind and immediately began the construction and assembly of her new interference field.
BUZZ
In a flash, her Light of Infinity spanning 3.6 billion light-years violently boiled and exploded into septillions of minute, formless, hazy units resembling free quarks. Using the Endless Scale Net, these units instantly leaped outward in every direction, saturating a vast expanse of space over a hundred billion light-years wide.
WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH
Like countless streaks of light piercing the void.
In a single heartbeat, the vast universe within a diameter of 250 billion light-years centered on Seraphine was completely and meticulously permeated by these infinitesimal Light of Infinity fragments.
An instant later, these scattered units, now blanketing the dark void, suddenly radiated fine filaments of Light of Infinity at a super-microscopic level nearing that of the Endless Scale Net. Again, utilizing the Endless Scale Net, these filaments leaped and connected with every other fragment across the vast expanse.
Thus, in a short span, the 250-billion-light-year region of space, once filled with trillions of points from the Light of Infinity fragments, transformed into a super-space-time lattice structure of points and lines.
Immediately following, within the countless pockets of 3D void created by this intricate lattice of fragments and radiation lines, infinite clouds of hazy light erupted. Some were as small as dust, others as large as stars, the Tachyon Interface Fields.
These Tachyon Interface Fields acted like millions of pieces of living flesh. The moment they appeared, they filled the skeletal, 250-billion-light-year-wide framework of the Light of Infinity super-space-time lattice, saturating every inch of it instantly.
At that moment, just as the colossal interference field, saturated with Seraphine's boundless consciousness, was completed, 999 spherical 3D cosmic pockets, each a million light-years in diameter, materialized around the domain's center.
These cosmic pockets, each large enough to swallow tens of thousands of Milky Way galaxies, began to circle Seraphine at the center of the field with incredible speed.
BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ
As their circling speed increased, they began to assemble in a way incomprehensible to 3D lifeforms. In a short span, on a massive cosmic scale, they roughly constructed a super-massive, 4D tesseract, a lattice structure that constantly rotated, collapsed, twisted, and overlapped across multiple dimensions.
Because the current framework was still raw, it appeared only as a blurry mass of chaos, even to 4D vision. Detailed features were indistinguishable.
However, as time passed, the chaos began to clarify. One minute later, this upgraded version of a Brilliant Core was finally, thoroughly formed.
The moment it took shape, the interference field blanketing the surrounding 250 billion light-years of the universe suddenly surged.
BOOM ROAR ROAR ROAR
It was as if hundreds of Big Bangs were occurring simultaneously.
This interference field, whose scale and mass far exceeded the observable universe, vibrated through an even larger portion of space, expanding without limit.
Violent! Boiling! Surging!
With every passing second, the interference field doubled in size, swallowing greater swaths of the universe in every direction. It churned the fundamental 3D space-time structure into a distorted, inverted, and mutated mess, causing massive torrents of quantum energy to erupt out of nowhere.
ROAR ROAR ROAR
Ten seconds later, the violent expansion finally ceased.
The [Domain of Spatial Hegemony], saturated with Seraphine's infinite wisdom, power, and will, had reached its final diameter: five trillion light-years.
This meant that once she deployed her Hegemony Domain, she could exert absolute control over the spherical 3D space-time within a five-trillion-light-year radius.
Within this region, all space-time, matter, energy, information, and laws would be subject to Seraphine's tyrannical will, to be molded, trampled, crushed, or destroyed at her whim.