Seraphine had forcibly triggered vacuum decay within the void.
She concentrated her combined Physical Strength and soul power, a staggering 13.32 million times the mass of the Milky Way, into a single point, brutally shattering the continuity of that microscopic space-time under a true vacuum state.
In a flicker, the flow of time within that microscopic void and its adjacent space-time came to a screeching halt. This wasn't a hyperbolic description, nor was it the indirect time-stop caused by Seraphine's Instant Time Compression, it was a genuine, direct cessation of time.
Thus, while time in the rest of the universe flowed normally, the time in this one tiny patch of space-time froze.
Under these conditions, Seraphine's Light of Infinity, which even the dual horizons of a black hole couldn't sever, was physically split across the spatial and temporal dimensions between the moving and stationary regions. It was snapped into two pieces.
SWOOSH!
While she was momentarily stunned, the Transcendental Perception hidden within her Root Divinity suddenly stirred. Through some mysterious mechanism, it ignored the constraints of the frozen time.
In an instant, it forcibly reconnected the two severed temporal layers, weaving the broken Light of Infinity back into a unified whole.
Within that spatial region, which had been isolated from the mainstream space-time of the Grand Universe by the time-stop, Seraphine's Primordial Soul perception, having broken through the temporal shackles via the mysterious might of her Transcendental Perception, suddenly witnessed a sight at the very center of that tiny, silent void. It was a dim, formless, and shapeless void, clearly infinitesimal, yet impossible to describe using any concept of size or scale.
It was nothingness.
After Seraphine had utterly shattered the fabric of space-time, a circle of nothingness had emerged. Even the surrounding time and space had frozen solid under its influence.
In a literal sense, nothingness is the antonym of reality, the domain that remains after time, space, and all tangible things within them are removed.
However, as she faced that void, Seraphine realized this was merely a crude, surface-level understanding. She knew intuitively that this perception might not be entirely accurate.
Her Transcendental Perception, which had become inexplicably active, offered a vague revelation:
This small, empty, formless nothingness was not a domain that could be defined by any concept of space-time range.
It was simply nothingness, and nothing else.
"So what is this nothingness, exactly?" Inside the Eye of Transcendence of Seraphine's true body, a deep curiosity flickered.
Driven by this intense desire to know, her logic-based Eye of True Revelation, Chaos Calculation, and Cosmic Intellect, along with her transcendent Transcendental Perception, began operating at maximum capacity, rapidly deducing the true essence of this circle of nothingness.
"It has no 3D volume, no 2D plane, no 1D line, and no 0D point. It is completely disconnected from matter, energy, information, time, and space," Seraphine murmured softly. "So this nothingness, or rather, this circle of what I perceive as nothingness, what is it, really?"
BUZZ BUZZ BUZZ!
Time flowed.
It wasn't until five minutes had passed in the outside world, and the true vacuum bubble had expanded to a diameter of 90 million kilometers, that a tentative answer finally emerged in Seraphine's mind:
[Nothingness might be a Negative Dimension.]
"A Negative Dimension! Negative dimensions actually exist?!"
Even Seraphine was struck with awe. "A zero-dimensional point is already infinitesimally small, without volume or size. What state could a negative dimension possibly be in? Something that is a dimension, or multiple dimensions, smaller than a volumeless point, what could that be?"
She couldn't visualize what a world of negative dimensions would look like, so she began to deduce.
As expected, it failed.
Faced with this brain-melting question, her Eye of True Revelation, Chaos Calculation, and even Transcendental Perception couldn't even find a starting point for the deduction.
Left with no choice, Seraphine carried this question with her.
She manipulated her Light of Infinity, struggling through the frozen space-time, reaching out toward that streak of nothingness.
The journey was not smooth.
Though the physical distance between them was shorter than the radius of an atomic nucleus, in this silent domain where even time had stopped, the Light of Infinity found it nearly impossible to move. It took nearly an hour of crawling before it finally managed to touch that streak of nothingness.
The moment of contact.
HUMMM!
That streak of nothingness vibrated invisibly, taking with it the surrounding frozen space-time region, and vanished into nothingness.
The flow of time in the surrounding void returned to normal. Seraphine's Light of Infinity, which had been constrained, was free again.
However, her focus had abruptly shifted.
Seraphine was stunned to discover that the moment her Light of Infinity touched and stirred that streak of nothingness, the [Infinite Attributes] system also inexplicably trembled for an instant.
It was in this split second that her Transcendental Perception, operating at full capacity, suddenly grasped some thing that the system implicitly emanated.
A thread of something impossible to define with information, perhaps entirely transcending the informational level, was fundamentally, undeniably, of the same origin as that streak of nothingness.
Theoretically.
"The System was birthed in a Negative Dimension!"
Seraphine's Eye of Transcendence flared. "Even if not directly birthed there, the System's origin must be connected to a Negative Dimension! So that's it, hahaha, so that's it!"
As this thought struck her, she immediately planned to perform another spatial fragmentation experiment, then excavate the nothingness for proper study.
For a long time, Seraphine had been intensely curious about the origins and purpose of the [Infinite Attributes] system.
In this world, there was no baseless love, no baseless hatred.
Why, out of all things, did the System choose her?
And was her transmigration, or perhaps reincarnation, connected to the System?
Seraphine wanted to know the answers to all these questions.
"Huh? It's expanded this much already?"
Just as Seraphine prepared for her experiment, she noticed that the true vacuum bubble had abruptly expanded to a diameter of nearly 1.2 billion kilometers.
Seeing this, Seraphine, without a second thought, immediately unleashed an Astralglow Reversal.
HUMMM!
In a flash, a power of profound, mystical divinity erupted.
It transformed into countless tiny flecks of luminescence, flashing and leaping as it instantly enveloped and covered a trillion-kilometer expanse of the vast void.
A massive true vacuum bubble, rapidly expanding at the speed of light, was caught within the range of the Astralglow Reversal.
Over this period, while Seraphine's fundamental biological nature had been evolving and ascending through dimensions, her various space-time abilities, which she hadn't used in quite some time, had not ceased their own advancement.
For instance, the range of Astralglow Reversal, which could rewind time within a specific region, had expanded from a celestial scale to 200,000 light-years. The time scale it could reverse had surged from seconds and minutes to as much as ten centuries.
Theoretically, should Seraphine choose to unleash this skill, she could instantly and completely reverse the now-gone Milky Way, along with all its matter, energy, and information, back to its state over a thousand years ago.
SWOOSH!
After being enveloped by the infinite, mystical luminescence, the turbulent, boiling tides of light and heat at the edge of that massive true vacuum bubble instantly ceased their attack.
Then, like a film being rewound, every single element, inside and out, began to reverse its direction through time and trace back its original path.
This included the massive explosions and intense combustion triggered by the expansion of the void, the boundless tides of light and heat evaporating from its surface, the countless molecules and atoms that had been drifting through space, and the endless, radiant cosmic rays that had been surging in every direction.
Under the divine-tier majesty of the Astralglow Reversal, everything was forcibly twisted, corrected, and pushed back to its original state on the past timeline.
What had vanished was restored; what had been shattered was reorganized; what had radiated away was pulled back.
Most notably, the immense scale and mass of the true vacuum bubble, which had swollen to over a billion kilometers, collapsed inward and shrank with a speed far greater than its initial expansion, ruthlessly returning all the matter, energy, information, and space-time it had devoured back to the cosmos.
In just a few seconds, that colossal true vacuum bubble vanished into nothingness.
Only a few traces of the void remained in the dark universe, and before they could re-ignite, they were erased from existence by Seraphine's will, as if they had never been there at all.
As for the Gods of Hunger that had been swallowed, including the second Tu, they reappeared in the vast void. Although their bodies were intact, their Spirituality was completely gone.
Seraphine didn't bother restoring it; she simply plundered all their memories and information, then ignored these husks.
Having finished this, just as she prepared to shatter the vacuum once more to study the nothingness, the vast ocean of information from the Gods of Hunger's memories caught her eye.
"Dark Flow... River of Primordial..."
Seraphine's Eye of Transcendence flickered as she leisurely browsed through the data within the Gods of Hunger's memories. Within them, she found significant information regarding the regions beyond the observable universe.
Seraphine had previously encountered the concept of the River of Primordial in the memories of the six Galactic Core races and other galactic civilizations, but their understanding paled in comparison to that of the Gods of Hunger.
...
"Does the universe have an edge?"
"If so, what lies beyond that edge?"
These are questions that astronomers and the general public on Earth have long been curious about. Most people know that the universe is expanding at speeds exceeding the speed of light, and that this expansion is accelerating.
This means even if one travels at light speed in a single direction, the universe's expansion will reach further regions before the traveler can. Consequently, there will always be a point travelers can never reach, which, in a broad sense, is the so-called edge of the universe.
In the understanding of most life forms within Earth's civilization, the universe is typically equated with the Hubble volume, the observable universe.
This refers to a spherical region of space-time with Earth at its center, boasting a radius of 46.5 billion light-years and a diameter of 93 billion light-years.
Every galaxy humans have discovered, or will ever discover, exists within this sphere.
Of course, there are likely a vast number of galaxies beyond this region. However, due to the universe's expansion, the light they emit will never reach Earth, nor will they ever be observed by Earth's inhabitants.
Thus, the universe beyond the 46.5-billion-light-year mark is collectively known as the unobservable universe.
However, these concepts are merely the shallow perceptions of the beings within Earth's civilization. At the very least, in the memories of the God of Hunger race, the true geographical landscape of the universe is entirely different.
Their understanding of the River of Primordial spans a spatial range far exceeding that of the observable universe.
In the common perception of Earth's inhabitants, the universe is made up of galaxies, galaxy groups, galaxy clusters, and superclusters drifting aimlessly here and there.
For a long time, Seraphine believed this as well.
But the memories of the God of Hunger race painted a different picture.
First, there has never been an absolutely stationary celestial body or object in the universe. Whether stars, planets, neutron stars, black holes, or sparse cosmic dust, everything is eternally in motion.
Even larger celestial structures like the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Triangulum Galaxy share this regularity of movement. This galaxy-level celestial motion is known as peculiar velocity.
At first glance, the peculiar velocities of the various galaxies in the universe seem chaotic and random. However, when observing a sufficient number of galaxies, one discovers that their peculiar velocities are not random at all. They are all moving toward a specific, determined direction.
On the scale of the Milky Way, star systems are the basic structural units.
Stepping out of the Milky Way onto a larger scale, galaxies like the Milky Way become the basic units.
But on a cosmic scale, only galaxy clusters or even superclusters like Laniakea qualify as basic structural units.
Galaxy clusters and superclusters, with their immense mass, naturally warp the surrounding space-time fabric, creating gargantuan gravitational fields.
These clusters interact with one another, eventually forming even larger and more terrifying gravitational influences. These massive fields cause galaxy clusters and superclusters to follow extremely complex orbital trajectories across the vast universe.
Within these intricate movements, many galaxy clusters converge to form superclusters or even larger, more dispersed galactic structures. In other areas, galaxy clusters drift apart, forming vast, empty regions of sparse matter, Cosmic Voids.
More often than not, these colossal gravitational fields command vast numbers of galaxy clusters to surge toward a specific direction in a grand, relentless flow, with time measured in billions of years, much like undercurrents beneath Earth's surface.
This super-astronomical phenomenon, involving countless galaxies across ranges of tens of billions of light-years, is the Dark Flow.
In the memories of the God of Hunger race, there isn't just one Dark Flow, but thousands, or even millions.
Just as Earth's rivers eventually converge into the sea, these dark currents scattered throughout the universe's regions also converge and coalesce under the influence of gravity.
The ultimate structure formed by the interweaving and clumping of these millions of massive cosmic undercurrents is the Gravitational Primeval River.
The observable universe that Seraphine had previously known is permeated, encircled, and traversed by one such boundlessly massive Gravitational Primeval River.
This river is the River of Primordial.
And in the memories of the Gluttony King Tu, the spatial influence of the River of Primordial far exceeds the simple limits of the observable universe. Its span across space-time likely exceeds two hundred billion light-years.
Furthermore, from Tu's exchanges with other ancient cosmic beings millions of years old, it seems the River of Primordial may not be the only Gravitational Primeval River in the universe.
Beyond this river, there likely exist several, or perhaps many, other Primeval Rivers.
Thus, for the true universe, the observable universe is merely one slightly large corner.
In fact, even without the memories of the God of Hunger race, Seraphine's intense sensitivity to gravity allowed her to clearly feel that her surroundings, and the vast universe beyond, composed of countless massive galaxies, were all moving in a peculiar velocity directed toward a specific location between Centaurus and Hydra.
This location is the Great Attractor, 150 million light-years away.
Furthermore, after ascending to the 5th-dimensional level, Seraphine could sense that the Great Attractor itself was moving over eons toward an even larger gravitational anomaly at an even greater distance.
This massive point was likely a far more colossal and ancient supercluster, or perhaps a super-strong gravitational field formed by the merging of multiple superclusters.
By synthesizing various data points, Seraphine roughly calculated the coordinates of this gravitational site to be approximately 3 billion light-years from her.
However, it was unlikely that this super-strong gravitational point was the destination. In the even more distant space behind it, there undoubtedly existed more and stronger gravitational nodes.
These super-strong nodes shared a delicate, mutually-reinforcing connection.
Essentially, they were the skeleton of the massive cosmic undercurrent Seraphine was in, supporting the surge and flow of the entire current.
Within the vast universe, countless galaxies of immense mass were constantly pressing upon the 3D space-time, contributing their majestic gravity to the Dark Flow of their respective locations. After flowing through space-time and converging into rivers, this gravity, in turn, influenced and shaped the boundless, cosmic large-scale filament structures formed over eons.
It swept these structures along like an eternal torrent, surging through the deepest reaches of the distant universe.
Upon reaching those unknown, vast depths, these currents from all directions and all vast spatial sectors would merge into an even more gargantuan, heaven-defying river.
With unstoppable momentum, it roared toward regions a hundred billion, or even several hundred billion, light-years away.
I empower you, and you influence me.
This is the Dark Flow.
This is the Gravitational Primeval River.
"Faced with actual cosmic-scale astronomical magnitudes, even the Laniakea Supercluster..."
Standing in the pitch-black void, Seraphine gazed toward the boundless, radiant expanse of space and sighed leisurely, "is merely an insignificant structural unit."
Following her lament, she activated the Eye of Transcendence.
HUMMM!!!
In a flash, an immeasurably majestic and surging visual power erupted from Seraphine's colossal eyes. Moving septillions of times faster than light, it instantly pierced through the endless deep space, traversing tens of thousands of shimmering galaxies.
SWOOSH!!!
As if the journey itself didn't exist.
In a heartbeat, Seraphine's gaze completely saw through all space within the next 3 billion light-years. Every galaxy within this vast cosmos, distinct in color, shape, and size, was captured in a single glance.
Indeed, after ascending to the 5th-dimensional level, the visual range of Seraphine's Eye of Transcendence within this universe had surged from a mere 10,000 light-years to 3 billion light-years.
Beyond this exaggerated range, its observational precision had also sharpened from sub-celestial levels down to approximately three meters.
This meant that Seraphine could now easily look across a distance of 3 billion light-years and clearly see exactly what an alien lifeform was doing on the surface of some planet deep within a remote galaxy.
While this precision was still a far cry from the sub-atomic level needed to calculate exact space-time coordinates, it was more than sufficient for her needs.
Within Seraphine's vast and profound vision, the countless galaxies, some dim, some bright, some magnificent, and some bizarre, within that 3-billion-light-year radius seemed both to converge and disperse.
Vaguely, they formed a massive, sprawling, flickering Dragon, winding and overlapping as it stretched across the entire universe.
"Dark Flow... Indeed, the name is quite fitting. At first glance, it's a very accurate description."
After her cold remark, Seraphine withdrew her trans-dimensional gaze and rapidly shifted her focus. Finally, she moved her sight to a region 500 million light-years away.
There, she beheld a magnificent Great Wall formed by countless galaxy clusters of all shapes and sizes. Spanning 500 million light-years in width and 1.4 billion light-years in length, it was the South Pole Wall.
The shape of this cosmic Great Wall resembled a long arm, seemingly surrounding and intercepting the Laniakea Supercluster, where Seraphine was located, spanning 520 million light-years, along with the even more massive Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex, which spanned billions of light-years.
Based on the data obtained from the Eye of Transcendence, the total mass of this terrifying Great Wall was at least 650,000 times that of the Milky Way, making it over ten times more massive than the Laniakea Supercluster.
In other words, given Seraphine's current Physical Strength and Soul attributes, she could, at full power, drag twenty South Pole Walls or two hundred Laniakea Superclusters through the vast universe.
After admiring the South Pole Wall for a few more moments, Seraphine continued to shift the Eye of Transcendence. Hundreds of millions of light-years flashed by in an instant.
Finally, she focused her vision on a dense sector of space 150 million light-years away, located near the Hydra Supercluster.
That was the Great Attractor.
Through the Eye of Transcendence, Seraphine instantly took in its full landscape.
The source of the Great Attractor's extraordinary gravitational effect wasn't quite what she had initially suspected.
That region of space, which influenced the movement of millions of galaxies across a range of several hundred million light-years, didn't possess its terrifying gravity because of a black hole, or multiple black holes, with mass tens of thousands of times that of the Milky Way, nor was it due to the mass of the God of Hunger race.
Under the scrutiny of the Eye of Transcendence, Seraphine discovered that the true face of the Great Attractor was the Norma Cluster.
However, while this cluster contained over ten thousand closely-packed galaxies, its total mass was only about a thousand times that of the Milky Way.
As for the Gods of Hunger, they all lived within and around the Norma Cluster in human form. Their massive black hole true forms remained hidden within the Realm of Phantasm, unmanifested in material reality and thus unable to influence the cosmos.
After careful observation, Seraphine concluded that the Great Attractor's anomalous gravity was actually the result of the combined influence of the Norma Cluster, the Shapley Supercluster 650 million light-years away, the Vela Supercluster 870 million light-years away, and various other scattered galaxy clusters in the vicinity.
Its core essence was merely a perturbation of the standardized phenomena of Hubble's Law. Normally, according to Hubble's Law, large-scale space-time in the universe exhibits redshift. This redshift value is roughly proportional to distance, a ratio expressed as the Hubble Constant.
According to Seraphine's observations, the Great Attractor, or rather, the Norma Cluster and its surrounding area, hadn't completely altered this redshift rule. It was just a disturbance, a lack of perfect alignment, and nothing more.
Standing in the vast void, her long-standing confusion finally resolved, Seraphine slowly raised her hand. She gazed into the infinite deep space, her Eye of Transcendence flickering with divine light, as if endless galaxies were revolving within its depths.
"As a child, I gazed at the starlight, reaching up as if to pluck it."
With a leisurely murmur, Seraphine extended five gargantuan fingers, each longer and larger than the Milky Way's Orion Arm. As the shimmering rays of the Light of Infinity erupted, she aimed her palm, roughly the size of half the Milky Way, at the celestial sector of the Great Attractor, 150 million light-years away.
"Now, with this body... even the high heavens are within reach."
With those words, she closed her fingers and gave a sudden, violent pull.
BOOM!!!
In an instant.
It was as if a god of ultimate annihilation had descended, tearing through layers of space-time. Centered on Seraphine, the vast universe for hundreds of millions of light-years ahead shook violently.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The hundreds of thousands of galaxies of all sizes within this massive stretch of space, along with the quadrillions of star systems they contained, including the countless intelligent civilizations and sentient beings living within them, suddenly and inexplicably began to 'evaporate.'
Shrinking the perspective down to a super-microscopic level quadrillions of times smaller than a hydrogen atom, one would see the infinite space-time topological cross-sections that 'constructed' these millions of light-years of space vibrating violently, as if ignited by countless torches.
Pulling back once again to a cosmic perspective, in a single nanosecond, a span of time in which light can only travel thirty centimeters, all the matter and energy of the galaxies within those millions of light-years were reduced to boundless light, heat, and basic particles.
They were scattered into the now-empty void.
Along with them, the lives of those countless sentient beings and their civilizations' histories bid farewell to this boundless universe, becoming vague legends with no one left to tell them.
In an instant, a vast region spanning over a hundred million light-years became desolately empty. So empty that not even a single proton remained. Seraphine had, out of thin air, created a cosmic Great Void spanning over a hundred million light-years.
Yet, she did not lower her arm.
Instead, she tightened her fist, as if she were pulling on something.
If one were to pull back the perspective to a distance of countless light-years away and look back, they would see a terrifying sight.
The Great Attractor, 150 million light-years away from Seraphine, was being gripped by the massive, invisible hand of a God, physically 'crushed' into a mangled, irregular shape.
Indeed, the transformation of that galaxy cluster was Seraphine's doing.
The annihilation of those hundreds of thousands of galaxies across millions of light-years was the result of massive collateral damage. It happened because she had attempted to remotely grasp the Norma Cluster by manipulating the deep-seated, fine structure of 3D space-time without using the Light of Infinity.
The result proved that the harsh constraints of this 4D hyperspherical 3D universe, specifically regarding the faster-than-light manipulation of massive celestial structures, were unforgiving.
It was practically impossible for Seraphine to transmit her immense power, enough to drag a hundred Laniakea Superclusters, and her Light of Infinity to the far reaches of the universe without harming the innocent galaxies along the way.
The tragic destruction of those hundreds of thousands of galaxies was proof of that.
But there was no other way. Her Light of Infinity had a range of 80 million light-years, which was still far from the Great Attractor. She had to first transmit the Light of Infinity across those millions of light-years, using that remote region as a new starting point to reach her target.
This was the fourth application of the Light of Infinity Seraphine had devised: Jump-Leap Coverage.
Although billions of intelligent beings had perished during this first attempt, Seraphine was unconcerned. She was confident that with another twenty or thirty practice runs, such violent scenes would not occur again.
Failure is the mother of success.
Next time... next time, she would surely achieve a perfect, long-distance transmission of her power.
"Forget it."
Seraphine leisurely inhaled the endless Root Spirituality surging from the deep space at faster-than-light speeds and sighed, "I'll try to stick to the Light of Infinity from now on."
With that, she gave a sudden, final pull.
CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!
In a flash, the Norma Cluster, 150 million light-years away, was enveloped and crushed into a single mass by the abrupt descent of the Light of Infinity. It was forcibly dragged across the cosmos toward Seraphine's position at faster-than-light speeds.
As for the 150,000 members of the God of Hunger race scattered throughout the Norma Cluster, they were instantly frozen in place, regardless of what they were doing.
They were paralyzed from soul to body by the sheer, majestic terror emanating from the strands of Light of Infinity, infused with Seraphine's divine will, that now permeated the vast space-time.
From a grander cosmic perspective:
The Norma Cluster, ruthlessly 'grasped' into a radiant ball of light by the Light of Infinity, was now surrounded by massive space-time waves, measured in tens of thousands of light-years. It tore through the vast universe at a terrifying speed of quadrillions of times the speed of light. Like a force set on shattering the entire cosmos, it roared through the void toward the space where Seraphine stood.
The silent, empty void was left boiling in its wake. As the cluster swept through, it birthed massive waves of void-energy, millions of light-years high, with energy levels intense enough to overturn and pulverize thousands of Milky Way galaxies.