When Abzu perceived that tiny existence, it was hovering outside the lunar orbit, performing a routine mass calibration before field synchronization.
It did not know why it had suddenly appeared here, because analyzing the "past" was meaningless to it.
Upon detecting the existence of "civilization" on Earth, it had simply followed the "rules" and immediately converged the gravity generated by its mass, attempting to avoid the direct destruction of this civilization, as per the rules.
But its "avoidance" rule did not take effect... it had never taken effect since it possessed this rule.
It received an attack, the attack broke through its defenses, and it revealed its disguise.
As always.
Then, a tiny existence flew in reverse from the planet's pole, trailing a mottled tail of light.
Its sensor array completed a full analysis of its composition, energy level, and even threat coefficient the moment it appeared.
Threat Assessment: Low.
It did not prioritize this target; field synchronization was the highest priority protocol at the moment.
Earth would be incorporated into its existential domain, just like the countless planets it had incorporated over billions of years.
That tiny light found the wound on the surface of its body. It had not deliberately repaired it.
Just a wound. It would heal naturally after three thousand seven hundred cycles.
But that tiny existence stopped after seeing this wound.
Then, he calmly raised that dim scepter, attempting to defend against its probe... and failed.
But he also succeeded. It needed to attack once more to complete its objective.
Then, that tiny silhouette attempted to communicate with it, and failed.
Then, it began the so-called "struggle."
It waited for the other party to make the first round of attacks before starting its counterattack, and after the first counterattack ended, it prepared to send this civilization off, completing the "field synchronization."
But...
Something seemed different.
The first volley of mass warheads. Eighteen gravitational singularity bullets with one-third the density of the moon's mass simultaneously bombarded that silhouette at one-third the speed of light.
This was a deep combat protocol it had saved for dealing with "high-order Honkai" such as the merger of galaxy-class black holes, supernova explosions, and even cosmic topological defects, and it had not been activated for a long time.
And the rule was: when encountering an anomaly that requires "full strength" to deal with, all available resources should be mobilized.
It did not distinguish whether this "anomaly" was a black hole or a supernova, or just a tiny individual whose existence density was below the threshold but had not yet dissipated.
It just executed.
However, the eighteen mass warheads... hovered three meters away from that silhouette.
Not intercepted, not canceled out, not even repelled.
It was hovering.
Its calculation core generated seventeen possible explanations in 0.005 seconds, all of which were falsified in 0.006 seconds. The eighteenth calculation was still in progress, but it already knew the result.
Incomprehensible.
Those eighteen warheads were emitting a warm golden-orange light from within.
It was the afterglow of a certain star they had orbited billions of years ago when they were still nebula dust.
And this afterglow should have been extinguished long ago.
It did not stop.
Second volley.
Third.
Fourth.
Fifth...
Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of mass warheads poured toward that silhouette like a tsunami in completely different orbits and timings.
Then it saw—
The warheads bloomed in mid-air, turning into silver-white light dust, like raindrops falling into a puddle on the ground called a "lake."
The warheads seemed to have been domesticated, like a subordinate race/flock of sheep led by the dominant race/shepherd, quietly circling that silhouette.
The warheads were singing.
Its sensors clearly captured a resonance with a stable frequency and a beautiful waveform that lasted for a full three seconds.
It was the memory of the nebula era, compressed for billions of years inside the warheads, singing.
It stopped the volleys.
[Unidentified Authority characteristic detected.]
[Characteristic nature: Suspected to have temporary redefinition authority over basic physical rules.]
[Threat assessment: Unquantifiable. Unquantifiable. Unquantifiable.]
This was not a battle, but a translation of the language of the universe.
Every warhead it launched was retold by the opponent in a language it could not understand, could not simulate, and could not even "cognize."
The story of the warheads was rewritten, the essence of the warheads was replaced, and the existential meaning of the warheads was gently but firmly replaced from "killing" to something else.
[Meteor]
[Raindrop]
[Fallen Leaf]
[Musical Note]
[Flower Seed]
Its combat behavior was being poeticized by the other party.
Poetry?
It did not know what that was.
Only the white in its vision grew larger and larger.
A piece of unsolicited information suddenly flooded into its sensory network.
That was... once.
[It "saw" itself curled up inside a giant, indescribable silver-white hollow sphere.
A Dyson Sphere.
It was a new civilization, a civilization that had not yet unlocked interstellar travel technology.
They had just cheered for barely landing on their own home planet's satellite; they had not even completely left the surface.
Their aircraft were clumsy, slow, struggling at the edge of the planet's atmosphere.
It could easily destroy them.
The mass of their home planet was thousands of times smaller than its own. Its own gravity could tear their fragile crust, and its tentacles could melt their simple space stations.
But it did not.
Because that civilization was the first existence to send it an invitation of "harmony."
It remembered when it descended into the sky above that planet, it had expected fear, flight, and the desperate counterattack of a dying struggle.
But that civilization did not.
Their communication network opened up to it, repeating the same content in countless languages, the tone carefully adjusted to the frequency band it could receive.
"Hello."
"Would you like to join us?"
It did not understand.
It still does not understand.
But it accepted the invitation because it had never been treated like this before.
So, it stayed.
That civilization exhausted all its resources, spending immeasurable time and lives to build that containment device for it.
They called it "home."
It did not understand.
What is "home"?
It is a word corresponding to "a place for organisms to stay for a long time." This was the definition it retrieved from that civilization's corpus.
But that definition did not match the light that shone in their eyes when they built this Dyson Sphere.
It knew it did not match.
It just... had never thought about it.
Why they did this.
Why they were not afraid.
Why they called it "family."
It just existed here, just as it had existed in countless star fields later.
Then, that civilization was destroyed.
"Honkai"—it searched for this word countless times afterward, trying to understand what had happened.
Energy imbalance, collapse of social structure, chain disintegration of the biosphere... its data modules gave three hundred and seventy-two causal analyses, each logically self-consistent.
But it still did not understand.
Did not understand why their last broadcast before extinction was not a cry for help to it, but...
"Abzu, I'm sorry."
"And... thank you."
It floated beside the gradually cooling wreckage of that Dyson Sphere, silent for a long time.
Then it turned and left, continuing its existence.
The information remnant ended here.
Its sensory core detached from that sealed data.
The battle was still ongoing.
It mobilized deeper combat protocols.
Gravitational Dominion · Full-Spectrum Deployment.
With itself as the center, it broadcast its gravitational authority to the entire solar system and even adjacent interstellar space.
This was its ultimate Authority to establish its ecological niche on a galactic scale.
The balance of hydrogen-helium fusion in the sun's core was disturbed, and the frequency of sunquakes soared.
The Earth's magnetic field trembled violently, and auroras spread to the equator.
The turbulence inside Jupiter's Great Red Spot was compressed to its limit, and the intensity of its radiation belt soared by nine orders of magnitude.
The entire solar system trembled under its Gravitational Dominion, about to be fused into a small black hole by it.
And that silhouette's response was—
[Imagination: Continuation of the definition of "gravity."]
It sensed its gravity broadcast being intercepted.
Rejected by the entire solar system—every planet, every satellite, every speck of dust.
The sun no longer trembled.
The Earth's magnetic field returned to calm.
Jupiter's atmosphere began to slowly heal.
The four thousand asteroids it had driven toward Earth stopped in their drift.
They no longer obeyed its command.
They chose to stay.
Gravitational Dominion broadcast intercepted.
Field synchronization preparatory process interrupted.
Mass Ring Three lost control and began to spontaneously disintegrate.
Warning: Enemy is rewriting the main body's basic definition—
It did not understand.
It invoked an attack protocol, and the opponent translated the attack into something else.
It invoked a dominion Authority, and the opponent translated the Authority into something else.
It invoked its mass reserves, and the opponent translated mass into something else.
How many more protocols could it invoke?
How many more Authorities had not been translated?
How many more—
That wound.
That wound, which should have healed after three thousand seven hundred cycles, was now heating up.
Resonance.
The silver-white crystal flowers growing inside the wound had a frequency completely identical to the memory light threads flowing within the scepter in that silhouette's hand.
And its calculation core was forced to retrieve another memory in this resonance.
[Earlier.
Earlier than the Dyson Sphere.
It was its birth.
In that primordial nebula, it was not the only existence.
Along with it, another mass, slightly smaller but brighter than it, condensed from the turbulence as a companion.
They intertwined, pulled each other, and "guarded" each other in this cradle of a nebula three light-years in diameter for tens of millions of years.
It had thought this was eternal.
Until the first supernova exploded at the edge of the nebula.
The shockwave tore the cradle apart, pushing it into the dark abyss and the companion in the opposite direction.
It struggled to survive in the gravitational turbulence, devouring and evolving.
It survived.
And that companion—
It never saw it again.
It even forgot it.
Billions of years... enough to erode any warm memory into unanalyzable data fragments, buried in the empty folders at the very bottom of the database.
This folder was not even allowed to exist.
Until this moment.
Resonance... that is the echo emitted only when frequencies are completely identical.
It is the last glance two existences from the same origin cast at each other before their final farewell.
"Here, there were once twin stars."
This sentence can be written in two ways.]
Its eighteen main tentacles, for the first time, drooped.
It "gazed" at that silhouette.
That silhouette also "gazed" at it.
Then, that silhouette "smiled."
He was like an understander, saying: So, you too once had a twin star.
In endless loneliness, you forgot that bright existence born in the same nebula as you.
And the reason you hold "continuing existence" as the highest rule is not because of greed, not because of fear—
But because you promised some long-dissipated existence that you would "live" on.
Billions of years is too long. You forgot its face, forgot its voice, even forgot that there was such a promise.
But you did not forget "to live" itself.
It was silent.
It said—
That is meaningless.