The misty void, boundless and infinite.
In the vast expanse of the cosmic vacuum, Seraphine strode forward, unbound and free.
With every leisurely step, the three-dimensional space within a radius of tens of millions of light-years warped and boiled like surging waves.
As she walked, each fleeting moment saw the phantom glow of billions of stars swirling around her form, illuminating the pitch-black, ink-like darkness of the deep universe.
To an observer, she would appear surrounded by infinite, shimmering colors, a primordial giant of chaos condensed from the cosmic mist.
Magnificent and mystical.
BOOM!
The universe roared; the firmament trembled.
Hundreds of galaxies, large and small, collapsed and perished due to Seraphine's advancement.
This was not intentional; it was simply because the Endless Scale Net was far too difficult to manipulate with fine precision.
Seraphine had considered that if she delved deeper into her research of the Scale Net, her movements might not cause such explosive destruction.
However, this was a labor of time, requiring eons of experimentation and study to master.
For now, if things shattered, they shattered; there was no other way.
BOOM!
Another step, followed by continuous cosmic tremors.
By now, crossing over a hundred million light-years with every stride, Seraphine had reached a distance of forty billion light-years from the new Milky Way.
She was only a minute's journey away from the edge of what humans called the "observable universe."
But to the current Seraphine, the so-called observable universe was merely an outdated concept born from the limited astronomical knowledge of human civilization.
The true universe was far, far larger.
For instance, the River of Primordial she inhabited was staggeringly massive.
After collecting vast amounts of data and performing rigorous deductions, Seraphine concluded that the length of the Primordial-Reach was at least thirty times the radius of the observable universe.
It could even be forty or fifty times as long.
As for the average width of the River of Primordial, she determined it was definitely no less than the diameter of the observable universe, 93 billion light-years.
In other words, the "observable universe" known to humanity was likely just a "tiny" segment of the River of Primordial.
Furthermore, after reviewing vast amounts of the God of Hunger race's historical scenes, Seraphine keenly "captured" information regarding five Gravitational Primeval Rivers located relatively "near" the River of Primordial.
If their names were translated, they could be called: the River of Floating Deities, the River of Dark Abyss, the River of Thousand Coarse Fibers, the River of Reckless Vastness, and the River of Phantom Vibrations.
Although intelligence on these five Gravitational Primeval Rivers was completely nonexistent and the distances were likely astronomical, Seraphine felt that since all of them, including the River of Primordial, had erupted from the same "Singularity" 13.7 billion years ago, their underlying space-time structures should not differ too significantly.
At most, there might be varying degrees of differences in factors like electronic charge, the speed of light in a vacuum, physical parameters, the chemical properties of matter, or space-time curvature.
Of course, Seraphine was completely ignorant regarding the even more distant Gravitational Primeval Rivers beyond the River of Primordial and these five.
But she didn't focus too much on those far-off matters.
For now, Seraphine poured most of her mental energy back into the historical records.
...
"All plans, trials, battles, setbacks, sacrifices, and deaths will ultimately point in one direction,
Leading humanity toward greatness."
This was the Holy Emperor's inner voice, or rather his belief, as deduced by Seraphine.
Anything or anyone that threatened this belief would face the Holy Emperor's thunderous wrath.
Furthermore, although the Holy Emperor had effortlessly annihilated the various gods, he did not dare to be careless regarding the legendary Creator God, Houiste.
His powerful innate foresight told him that Houiste... might be unimaginably strong.
Yet, his peerless conviction and confidence meant the Holy Emperor felt not a shred of fear for any so-called deity.
"Do not think, do not look back, and certainly do not waver, for weakness stems from cowardice, while strength stems from resolve. Faith decides everything.
The weak are born to be conquered; they lack even the qualification to fail. Only the strong understand struggle; only they have the right to impose their will and ultimately obtain everything.
Thus, gods are nothing to fear; the only thing truly fearsome is... lacking an absolute, extreme faith."
Embracing this relentless conviction, after achieving absolute unification of Earth, the Holy Emperor turned his gaze toward the infinite void.
He prepared to launch a Great Cosmic Crusade to pursue and seize the status humanity deserved, the rulers of the universe.
But before that, the Holy Emperor decided to perform a massive restructuring of Earth's entire civilization to maximize the evolutionary potential of all mankind, allowing them to evolve into a true interstellar race as quickly as possible.
This plan, formulated by the Holy Emperor to deeply influence all of humanity... lasted for a thousand years.
During those thousand years, the Holy Emperor's radical methods were enough to make even Seraphine frown.
"Hmm, this Holy Emperor... his style of action is a bit too extreme."
In the blurred fragments of history,
Driven by the Holy Emperor, technologies such as controlled nuclear fusion, antimatter energy storage modules, and high-efficiency wireless power transmission quickly matured and spread throughout Earth, leading humanity into an era of sustainable energy.
Under this premise, high-tech products like material printers, space elevators, the Internet of Things, intelligent robots, large-scale integrated farms, maglev vacuum tube networks, mega-cities, and sub-light speed spacecraft appeared, rapidly enveloping human society.
Thus, an era of prosperity lasting two hundred years arrived.
During this golden age, issues that previously plagued society, such as the unequal distribution of housing, healthcare, education, food, and water, were significantly improved.
While Earth hadn't quite become a Paradise, it had reached a state of universal sufficiency, where every person, regardless of effort, could live with relative dignity rather than just struggling to survive.
Then, after waiting quietly for two centuries, the Holy Emperor decided the time was right and began his cold-blooded plan.
The first step was the forced abolition of currency and private property, causing all corporations and business groups to dissolve.
Next, he carried out a global, violent dismantling of all clan and family structures.
Following that, he forcibly abolished the institutions of marriage and family for all of humanity, thoroughly "atomizing" every individual.
Finally, the Holy Emperor even forcibly stripped humanity of the right to free love and free reproduction, mandating that all pairings be executed by a supercomputing system containing the genetic and soul data of the entire human race.
Furthermore, Gene-seed would be collected via scientific instruments, and offspring would be bred through millions of "Nurturing Centers" he painstakingly researched and built.
For their entire lives, people were forbidden from reproducing through any primitive physical contact.
Discovery of such acts would lead to imprisonment and punishment.
These so-called "Nurturing Centers" were essentially clusters of massive artificial wombs, each nearly a thousand meters tall and conical in shape.
Within these clusters, human infants were cultured for a full thirty months before they were "born."
Although the gestation period was longer, during this time, the infants underwent a series of complex optimizations from their genes to their soul structures.
Note that these optimizations followed the direction of natural human evolution rather than forced, specific modifications.
This was because the Holy Emperor realized that humanity itself possessed terrifying potential.
Once unleashed, this potential would be immeasurable.
He suspected this potential likely came from the gods... or perhaps from that unknown Creator Deity, Houiste.
After the thirty-month cultivation process, these optimized infants could walk and eat normally the moment they were born. They possessed mental capacities approaching those of a teenager and emotional stability similar to an adult.
Furthermore, all physical functions, including organ activity, metabolic capacity, muscle movement, acid removal, endurance, as well as overall bone strength, flexibility, and the computational and connectivity capabilities of their neural networks, would be greatly enhanced.
This was just the beginning.
According to the Holy Emperor's meticulous plan, a new generation would be born every twenty-five years.
After forty generations of optimization over a full thousand years, all of humanity would inevitably evolve into a capable interstellar race, qualified to embark on the path of cosmic conquest.
Of course, Seraphine had her own evaluation of the Holy Emperor's actions:
"Selective breeding, crossbreeding, reproductive management, pigs leaving the crate, then back to selective breeding and crossbreeding... Ah, what madness. It's the exact same operation as a pig farm. There will surely be opposition to such edicts, and the numbers will be vast."
Clearly, she didn't entirely agree with the Holy Emperor's excessively cold and impersonal methods.
While Seraphine was ruthless and unfeeling toward her enemies, her "Great Love" made her appear quite gentle toward her loyal subjects when compared to the Holy Emperor.
Infinite lifespan, infinite energy, infinite resources, no need for work, no oppression, harmless and painless, with instant resurrection even after an accidental death.
They could indulge in excess, party hard, strive for excellence, lie down and do nothing, or travel the four corners of existence.
They could play if they wanted to play, create if they wanted to create, or destroy if they wanted to destroy, no KPIs, everything according to their heart's desire.
Compared to the humans of ancient Earth, the infinite subjects within Seraphine's "Eden world" lived lives so blissfully happy it was almost absurd.
As Seraphine expected, the mere issuance of those few edicts by the Holy Emperor drove all of humanity into a frenzy.
In a very short time, the entire Earth civilization erupted in riotous upheaval; almost everyone opposed the Holy Emperor in one form or another.
Through words, violence, and even self-destruction, it was chaos.
Even many of the Holy Emperor's followers and a vast number of his soldiers suddenly stood in opposition to him.
Overnight, the Holy Emperor was abandoned by all.
Yet he didn't panic at all, maintaining an incredibly stubborn stance.
His attitude toward all dissenters was simple... anyone who dared to resist would be killed!
In the Holy Emperor's eyes, only he knew what was beneficial for humanity; non-compliance equated to betrayal.
And traitors deserved death.
As for compassion...
The Holy Emperor had always believed that compassion was a cardinal sin, especially compassion for the weak, which was an affront to nature.
Thus, the cold and unfeeling Holy Emperor initiated a Great Slaughter of the entire Earth civilization.
Against the Holy Emperor, who possessed star-shattering combat power, the Earth civilization, which didn't have a single transcendent being, naturally had no power to resist.
In a short period, the global population plummeted by 95%.
Of the world's twenty billion people, only one billion remained.
The Holy Emperor, single-handedly, crushed all of human society.
After that, the thousand-year plan proceeded smoothly.
There was no more resistance; all who dared to resist were dead.
Generation after generation, ten generations, then forty.
Ten years, a hundred years, a millennium.
After forty full generations, the difference between the new humans and those of a thousand years prior had reached the level of reproductive isolation.
The modern humans were now far superior to tungsten steel in terms of physical strength, yet possessed a flexibility no less than high-quality rubber.
In terms of power, their grip strength reached two to three tons per square centimeter, a single punch delivered five hundred to seven hundred tons of force, and their leg strength reached thirteen hundred to sixteen hundred tons.
Consequently, their speed was also vastly enhanced.
When running on land, after accelerating for a certain distance, they could exceed the speed of sound, with some reaching several times that speed.
Regarding survival, their internal organs, muscles, bones, skin, and nervous systems were all heavily reinforced.
They could breathe various toxic gases and easily adapt to extreme environments of low or high temperature, dryness, or extreme pH levels.
In terms of the brain and nervous system, the five senses were doubled in strength, accompanied by a powerful sixth sense.
Their brain capacity had significantly increased; their memory reached the level of photographic recall, far exceeding that of ordinary humans, allowing them to easily learn various types of knowledge and skills.
Regarding vitality, they were nearly identical to the movie version of Wolverine; in a normal state, as long as more than half of the brain remained intact, they could rapidly absorb Ether and repair themselves even if their bodies were blown to bits.
Then there was their terrifying adaptability to environments.
This ability was somewhat similar to Kars.
Any new human submerged in water would automatically evolve gills and fins; if falling from a great height, they would evolve bat-like wings or feathers.
Under intense light, they could absorb light energy; in high temperatures, they could absorb heat; in low temperatures, they could release and preserve heat; and when attacked, they could grow hard carapaces or scales.
Finally, there was their ultimate energy absorption capability.
They had completely abandoned food, surviving solely on the heat, electricity, and kinetic energy prevalent in nature.
Because of their ability to devour and absorb various forms of energy, these new humans were effectively immune to most ordinary low-vibration physical attacks.
In a sense, throwing any single adult new human into the 21st century would turn the entire world upside down. Unless nuclear weapons were used, nothing could truly kill them.
After waiting for a millennium, the Holy Emperor felt that everything was ready and immediately launched the Great Cosmic Crusade.
...
Seraphine shook her head as she watched the records of ancient Earth. The people spent their days in either grueling labor or exhaustive training, with almost no time for leisure, and their capacity for family or romantic love had completely withered away.
"Humans aren't machines. They can't just sleep after work and work after waking up. Humans need entertainment; they need emotional release.
It's like the office workers on Earth who come home late after overtime. Logically, they should sleep to recover, but they still stay up late scrolling through short videos, almost as an act of retaliation.
These are signs of the body and soul trying to save themselves; without doing so, they would collapse.
Hmm, the Holy Emperor was far too short-sighted and extreme in his actions."
But then, Seraphine considered the dire situation of ancient humanity and the inevitable appearance of the God of Hunger race, and she began to understand the Holy Emperor's choices.
"Even if he didn't know the specific identity or power level of his enemy, with the Holy Emperor's naturally powerful foresight and Spirituality..."
Seraphine hesitated. "He must have constantly sensed a deep, bone-chilling malice emanating from the entire space above his head.
Thinking about it that way, his somewhat brutal actions become understandable."
At this point, Seraphine suddenly recalled a game she had played in her previous life, "Frostpunk".
The game was set in a post-apocalyptic era after a sudden global drop in temperature. In that apocalypse, humanity was on the brink of extinction.
The player took on the role of a Mayor, managing the last city on Earth. In the game, you had to manage the survivors and infrastructure, making decisions and strategies to ensure the city's survival as biological resources dwindled.
The interesting part was that the survivors living in such extreme, harsh conditions didn't seem to have enough awareness.
They would complain about too much overtime, they'd complain about eating too much soup, they'd complain about hospital beds being too crowded, and if the heating wasn't warm enough, they would get so angry they'd explode.
Once this discontent value spiked, the survivors would unite to cruelly exile the player outside the city, where they would freeze and starve to death.
Inevitably, a survivor would jump out and say: 'I know we're all doomed, but seeing you lose your position before we die makes me so happy!'"
Essentially, if the player didn't serve these survivors perfectly, they'd rather collectively self-destruct.
The situation of ancient humanity was somewhat similar. The difference was that the Holy Emperor was powerful enough that no one could exile or overthrow him.
Furthermore, the ancient Houiste Civilization had more time to maneuver.
However, this supposed leeway might have been an illusion, because the moment a single God of Hunger descended upon that ancient human galaxy, the civilization would be instantly annihilated.
And the timing of such an arrival was unknown.
Thus, the Holy Emperor, sensing this impending doom, issued those brutal edicts, coldly deciding to mold ancient humanity into an anti-social, dystopian, totalitarian state.
"So, it comes down to a single question: humanity and freedom are indeed admirable, but on the scales of value..."
Seraphine spoke leisurely to herself, "Are they more important than the survival of the species and civilization?"
The answer was self-evident.
If the species and civilization were wiped out, what meaning would freedom and humanity have?
Weren't these concepts defined by intelligent beings in the first place?
If the people were gone, where would freedom and humanity find a place to exist?
Seraphine remained non-committal toward this dilemma.
Simultaneously, watching the ancient Earth launch its Great Cosmic Crusade in the historical records, Seraphine developed a theory regarding why the Holy Emperor forcibly stripped ancient humans of their reproductive rights.
"Perhaps it was to bypass a filter mechanism the universe 'set up' for intelligent civilizations, the Evolutionary Pit."
The Evolutionary Pit is also known as the limit of Mutation Load.
Generally speaking, once an intelligent race becomes the apex predator of its planet, natural selection gradually deactivates.
However, this brings about a terrifying consequence: the pollution of the species' gene pool.
Why?
It's simple.
In a normal population, individuals with congenital disabilities, chronic weakness, hidden diseases, or harmful mutations, those unqualified to pass on their genes or even survive, would naturally be eliminated by natural selection, preventing their genes from entering the pool.
However, as a civilization develops, its survival capacity increases, and its living environment improves.
Consequently, individuals who shouldn't have passed on their genes mostly do.
In this way, the species' gene pool naturally becomes a repository for a vast amount of harmful mutations.
However, the capacity and lifespan of this repository are limited.
If a civilization's technology doesn't advance enough to reach the space age, especially in an ancient era where the Sentience Realm Hallway hadn't even appeared, no one knows what happens once that limit is reached.
Regardless, it won't be good.
It's highly likely the civilization would directly go extinct under the simultaneous weight of internal and external decay.
"But calling it optimization, in a sense..."
Seraphine hesitated silently. "The thousand-year optimization plan the Holy Emperor implemented on ancient humanity, in essence, should be called potential excavation."
As for where that potential came from, one would have to ask the God of Hunger, Houiste.
Eons ago, that group of Gods of Hunger led by him used various methods to torment the ancient Earth civilization for hundreds of millions of years. While inflicting endless agony, they also left behind a staggering number of traumas within the human genetic and soul structures.
Seraphine believed that these shocking traumas, or rather 'traces', were the actual source of the ancient humans' potential.
To use an analogy, one could look at Earth's evolutionary history.
Based on Seraphine's research from long ago, she found that the humans from her Earth, while ancestrally related to the byproducts of Saknussim's creation of the Aurora clan, had a different core driver for their evolution. That driver was the numerous viruses present in nature.
While still on Earth, Seraphine discovered that since the dawn of humanity, at least 30% of the changes in the structure and composition of synthesized proteins in the human body were caused by viruses.
Driven by intense curiosity, she conducted a series of meticulous studies on the human genome.
Seraphine discovered that within the human genome, there were over a thousand segments left by ancient retroviral invasions.
These segments accounted for 8% of the total 2.9 billion base pairs in human DNA.
One should never underestimate this number.
Seraphine's research showed that these 8% of genetic segments dominated and shaped many physiological functions vital to humans, or rather, they hid many potential abilities.
For example, parts of the human brain's memory function, the size of the heart, the activation and development of embryos within the female uterus, the production and operation of stem cells, the formation and function of the umbilical cord, and the activation and deactivation of the immune system, even many physical superpowers, were all closely related to the encoding of numerous endogenous retroviruses.
Therefore, many hereditary traits passed down through each historical stage of human evolution were likely the result of long-term random mutations derived from endogenous retroviral genes.
Among these "results," some became normal physiological functions familiar to modern humans, while others remained hidden within the human genome, serving as the source and operational basis for many superpowers.
In her subsequent extensive research, Seraphine also found that many viral segments in the human genome were likely brought by dozens of infections.
Such viral infections affecting all of humanity's distant ancestors may have occurred hundreds or thousands of times throughout the long history of human evolution.
From a more macro perspective, it could be said that the entire history of human evolution shows signs of extensive participation and shaping by viruses.
These signs, or rather, the "traces" left by viral invasions, were the potential of the humans on Earth.
While the ancient humans looked identical to the humans on Earth, the core driver of their evolution was entirely different.
The force that shaped them and gave them unparalleled potential clearly came from the God of Hunger race and Houiste's various modifications over hundreds of millions of years.
Seraphine even hypothesized that the reason the Holy Emperor could evolve to the Transcendent level and then to Overlord-class so quickly was essentially because he had fully tapped into his inherent, boundless potential.
"However, the Holy Emperor's subsequent progress likely broke free from concepts like modifications, genes, or bloodlines, because true, peerless experts have never had anything to do with genes or bloodlines."
Seraphine smiled leisurely. "True experts all possess their own unique 'Reason,' and they absolutely believe in that 'Reason,' regardless of whether it is right or wrong, good or evil, black or white.
All 'Reason' is perception, and perception is composed of three elements: concept, logic, and standards. Language and writing will always just be labels for concepts.
As long as one believes in their 'Reason' and their perception, and that perception is successfully verified, then a powerful confidence will be born.
And confidence will decision all things.
Confidence, taken a step further, becomes faith; deepened and sublimated, it coalesces into a conviction.
This confidence will unleash immense potential and create a state of fearlessness. Under these two influences, Spirituality will gradually transform, and strength will steadily grow."
After finishing her thoughts, Seraphine quickly flipped through the historical scenes.
Having satisfied her curiosity, and now possessing Supercluster-level combat power, she lost interest in the Holy Emperor's subsequent history of interstellar wars and didn't bother to look closely.
It was just a simple sweep through space, exterminating numerous alien races.
Seraphine had done and seen this too many times; there was nothing new to see.
She preferred to find a way, or rather, a path, to the Houiste ancestral land.
In fact, after completely devouring the memories of the six galactic core races and vast amounts of information from the various races in the hallway galaxies, Seraphine had thoroughly deciphered the legend of the Divine Trial that circulated among civilizations during the old Milky Way era.
The legend was fundamentally a misunderstanding accumulated over ages, a monumental error.
Because those "Keys of Order" circulating everywhere were, in essence, fragments of a "Portal" Saknussim used when returning to the Houiste ancestral land across countless light-years.
The fragmentation of those shards created the Order Vortex, the core of the Abraham Machine on Earth.
And the reason Seraphine wanted to find the Houiste ancestral land was to obtain the probability manipulation technology that likely existed there, the very "promise of the gods" recognized by the various civilizations of the Milky Way.
As for why these civilizations knew about this, Seraphine hadn't actually found a clear answer.
She only suspected that Saknussim, during his eons within the Milky Way, might have had brief exchanges with the early ancestors of many intelligent civilizations. In these exchanges, he likely revealed some information about the ancestral land.
After all, those ancestors were effectively Saknussim's children.
Of course, this was all just Seraphine's speculation and couldn't be taken as fact.
"Trying to reach the sixth dimension by absorbing the Spirituality of sentient beings is clearly impossible."
Seraphine quietly "gazed" at the ascension gauge within the Cosmic Intellect, which remained at 0%. "So how do I reach the sixth dimension? Perhaps that probability manipulation technology can help me find the answer."
With this thought, she continued her strides through the vast universe.
"Hmm?"
At that exact moment, Seraphine froze. She shifted her perspective to her clone in the Realm of Phantasm.
Deep within the infinitely distant Realm of Phantasm.
In a region of chaotic darkness.
Seraphine (Clone) took a crystal-diamond-like object, resembling an invitation, from Mox, who was kneeling respectfully before her.
Engraved on this crystal-diamond invitation was:
『Hello, welcome to the brilliant game of the great Dimensional Artist, Mr. Coo
Participate: Yes / No』