Inside the Divine Battlefield, the three clashes deciding the fate of the universe approached their end at a speed incomprehensible to mortals.
The Emperor's Golden Throne hovered in the void. He did not rise; instead, wherever his gaze fell, endless golden flames ignited out of thin air. These flames did not burn matter; they burned concepts.
Shub-Niggurath's proud, blasphemous, and twisted laws of "life" and "abundance" melted like snow beneath a scorching sun before this purest fire of order.
Her flesh-and-blood offspring dissolved into the most basic streams of information amidst their wails, and were then completely erased.
The Mother Goddess of the Black Goat of the Woods herself, that ever-multiplying nebula of flesh, along with her very existence, was burned to nothingness, leaving not a single trace of contamination behind.
On another battlefield, the Infinity Titan faced the God of a Thousand Faces, Nyarlathotep.
Nyarlathotep shifted through thousands of masks, each representing a power of deceit capable of toppling civilizations. But the Infinity Titan's response was merely a single punch.
Pure physics, pure rules, pure power taken to the absolute extreme.
This punch shattered space-time and causality, reducing all of Nyarlathotep's masks and the disguises behind them to dust.
In the end, all that remained was a trembling core desperately trying to escape.
With a backhanded grab, the Infinity Titan crushed the core.
Yog-Sothoth was dragged into an endless sea of corpses by Zambo, subjected to an eternal cycle of being devoured and assimilated. Its existence as both the key and the gate was forcibly dismantled and consumed, completely destroying the foundation of its being.
In the blink of an eye, the main forces of the Outer Gods were entirely eradicated.
Within the entire void, only the final battlefield remained.
It was a sea of concepts, constantly shifting between creation and destruction, forged by Ian and the Blind Idiot God, Azathoth.
Here, every collision birthed and destroyed billions of illusory universes.
Ian was thoroughly enjoying himself.
He didn't go for the kill; instead, he treated Azathoth as the perfect "Heartsteel" sparring partner.
Every time his Titan form swung the Titan Blade and the Sword of the Cosmos, it wasn't to slay, but to "stack" another layer of his own analysis and suppression upon Azathoth's chaotic origin.
Countless profound and incomprehensible block runes began to automatically generate and brand themselves onto his Titan body. The birth of each rune represented a deeper understanding of the essence of chaos.
Azathoth merely followed its instincts.
It continuously "dreamed" that Ian did not exist, attempting to completely erase him from the very root of existence.
Waves of irresistible foundational setting power washed over Ian.
However, these erasing forces were like gentle streams washing over the hardest diamond. Not only were they completely ineffective, but they were also analyzed and absorbed by Ian's body, transforming into "new materials" to build his own system.
On the bridge of the flagship Unyielding Truth, The Emperor's figure quietly returned to the Golden Throne.
He acutely sensed that although the physical forms of the Outer Gods had been purged, a far more bizarre Information Plague was quietly spreading through the fleet's massive psionic network and logic engines.
"Warning! Unknown energy invasion detected!"
A Magos responsible for monitoring the overall situation suddenly froze.
The psionic light in his eyes, which calculated all things, instantly extinguished, replaced by a chaotic pitch-black void.
His metallic prosthetic limbs raised uncontrollably, using energy to etch bizarre geometric symbols onto the holographic screen before him—symbols that mortals could not comprehend and would induce severe dizziness with a single glance.
His vocalizer no longer emitted precise data reports, but rather unconscious murmurs.
"The gate is the key... the key is the guardian..."
The Emperor cast his gaze over.
A pure golden will instantly descended. There was no energy eruption, no physical impact.
The contaminated Magos, along with the entire set of instruments he was touching, was completely purified on an informational level, as if the anomaly had never occurred.
But The Emperor's expression was unprecedentedly solemn.
He knew this was not an isolated malfunction.
This was a Mental Brand from a higher dimension. As long as the primordial chaos at its source remained unextinguished, this contamination would be endless, breeding like a virus wherever logic and information existed.
Right at that moment, in the sea of concepts, the playful smile on Ian's face suddenly vanished for a split second.
After countless times of "stacking" and analyzing, he had finally touched upon Azathoth's simplest, yet most terrifying core essence.
His smile resurfaced, but this time, it carried a hint of madness.
"I can't kill it, but I can 'tamper' with it," he muttered.
A crazy plan took shape in his mind.
'Since the meaning of its existence is to "dream," then why not... change the content of its dream.'
He was going to usurp Azathoth's Dream Dominance.
The Emperor seemed to sense his intentions and cast over an inquiring will.
"Watch me," Ian responded briskly.
He was no longer satisfied with passive defense and analysis; instead, he took the initiative to attack.
His "block" laws, like an undeniable and incomprehensible super-virus command, were forcibly injected into Azathoth's dream core.
The sea of concepts underwent an earth-shattering transformation.
The originally chaotic, twisted, and indescribable scenes of universal creation and destruction began to develop clear, "pixelated" borders.
A surging nebula of chaos, under the erosion of his laws, was forcibly "formatted" into a pixel-art nebula composed of countless glowing blocks.
Randomly erupting energy storms were corrected into Redstone Energy Flows that followed concise rules.
On the bridge of the Unyielding Truth, Lin Qiye was staring intently at the star map, trying to comprehend even a fraction of this divine war.
Suddenly, an irresistible suction force acted directly upon his consciousness. In the next second, his world spun wildly.
For the first time, Lin Qiye's consciousness was thrown directly into that origin of chaos.
In an instant, he felt his "self" on the verge of dissolving.
His thoughts, memories, emotions, and even the very concept of "Lin Qiye's" existence began to disintegrate, rapidly losing meaning like a drop of water tossed into the cosmic ocean.
'Who am I?'
'Where am I?'
These questions all seemed superfluous, because the concept of "I" itself was being obliterated.
He was on the razor's edge between life and death.
Deep within his bloodline, the block laws were triggered.
Illusory blocks quietly emerged at the core of his consciousness, which was on the brink of complete collapse.
A searing pain washed over him, yet it made him incredibly lucid.
Right at that moment, a grandiose voice, like the sound of creation itself, echoed directly within his consciousness.
It was Ian.
"This is your graduation exam."
"Before I completely 'assimilate' this place into my world, how much you can comprehend and take away from here will depend entirely on your own abilities."