Dimensional Stripping.
This wasn't about simply peeling apart one dimension inside three-dimensional space—that sort of technology was far too terrifying.
Instead, drawing on the unique advancements of the unknown civilization that had appeared near the Flyer Civilization, and combined with humanity's own progress in four-dimensional exploration, mankind had learned to forge pseudo-dimensions.
The scale was tiny—mere millions of cubic meters, utterly insignificant compared to the vast capabilities of the four-dimensional powers surrounding the Flyer Civilization.
But for their present needs, it was enough.
When Damoro first wove together a pseudo-dimensional interlace, the moment Bichen and the others entered the zone, they immediately felt the stark difference between ordinary three-dimensional space and this pseudo-four-dimensional construct.
Because its volume was so small, the main server could maintain this pseudo-dimension indefinitely.
In truth, a pseudo-dimension was carved by harnessing a black hole to generate chaotic dimensional turbulence. At the boundary between chaos and order, a fissure opened outward into a pocket of new space.
Crucially, this did not involve creating space from nothing, but rather drawing it from the black hole's chaotic interior.
So long as the black hole remained stable, the pseudo-dimension would persist without end.
If expansion was desired, matter would need to be steadily fed into it, inflating it like the growth of the universe itself.
Calculations suggested that sustaining the pseudo-dimension near the Flyer Civilization alone would require no less than 311 solar masses. The sheer cost invested by that four-dimensional civilization could only be described as staggering.
Of course, for a Type 2.7 or Type 2.8 Civilization, amassing that many stars was not impossible—merely a question of time and resources on a cosmic scale.
The process could be likened to nuclear fusion and fission:
Fusion fuses light atoms into heavier atoms, releasing energy.
Fission splits heavy atoms into lighter ones, also releasing energy.
So too did the birth of a pseudo-dimension unleash staggering amounts of energy, giving it a natural expansion phase at its inception. Likewise, collapsing or extracting a pseudo-dimension released equally massive energy, violent enough to warp local space and dimensions.
On rare occasions, this dimensional disruption could spark the birth of a dimensional gateway—a fleeting tear leading to another dimension.
But the odds were astronomically small, perhaps one in a trillion. And even then, such a gateway would last only for a blink of time—too brief for any living creature to cross. Even a stream of photons from a flashlight would stand almost no chance of passing through.
Traveling to another dimension was not their aim. Their purpose lay elsewhere: in penetrating the super-microscopic world.
This brought another, more practical benefit of dimensional extraction.
Objects inside pseudo-four-dimensional space possessed an added axis of existence. Stripping this axis away could rip out a slice of that object's spatial makeup. In simple terms—it could tear a piece of space itself.
And when space sealed itself back up, the object would be shortened. A one-meter rod, if half a meter of its space were stripped and closed, would shrink to just half a meter.
It was the same principle as when C28 entered a dimensional gateway and emerged missing half its mass.
Damoro intended to apply this same principle.
But on a scale far smaller.
He wanted to shear the fabric of the super-microscopic world, opening passages so that particles from the normal microscopic realm could slip through into this deeper layer.
Because the fundamental units of matter were tens of thousands of times larger than what the super-microscopic world could admit, Damoro would not perform the extraction just once.
Instead, he would overlay and strip dimensions dozens, even hundreds of times.
An object extracted once might still hold its original form.
But what would remain after being extracted a hundred times?
It was like cutting an apple. Slice it once and you still recognize it as an apple; it retains nearly all of its qualities. But slice it in half again and again, hundreds of times, and what remains?
At some point you would be left with nothing but a layer of atoms. Who could say this was ever an apple? Not only would it lose the apple's qualities—it would lose the very function of being an apple at all.
That was why Damoro estimated the plan's success rate at one in a hundred million.
And this wasn't like a game, where a one-in-a-hundred-million chance might be guaranteed to happen after a hundred million rolls. Each attempt was independent. Each was nearly impossible.
Still, Damoro began.
The first trial collapsed almost immediately. Because of precision-control errors, the particles destabilized on the second cut, killing five people outright.
The difficulty was greater than he had imagined.
On the second attempt, he reduced the risk—only a single subject.
But was it truly necessary to use people?
Yes. It was unavoidable. Matter itself, when cut tens of thousands of times, would always collapse. The transition into the super-microscopic world could last only for an instant. The cutting process was merely a delivery system. What truly needed to be carried across was consciousness. Consciousness was the real cargo.
The second attempt failed as well.
But this time there was progress: five cuts were achieved before collapse.
Normally, advancement would not have come so quickly. This suggested that the device itself was adaptive, built to learn.
Searching its embedded interface, Damoro found a manual. Inscribed within was a line:
[Beginner's Guarantee: The first 20 attempts are guaranteed to succeed.]
So what, then, were these "failures"?
He began to doubt his own role.
Fortunately, the manual included tutorials, and the device even contained an automatic mode.
After activating it, the third attempt still ended in collapse—but not before eighteen cuts.
Even so, the ceiling of automatic mode was low. Direct main server control promised much higher precision.
So Damoro relinquished control.
And instantly regretted it.
The main server did not manipulate the device. It seized his body instead.
[With the main server's computational capacity, this device can be controlled with sufficient precision. However, all high-precision instruments require anti-interference measures. This construct is far too small, far too exposed. The main server's presence overwhelms it. Therefore, the operator must still be you.]
[However, the main server can optimize the procedure by piloting your body directly.]
And then, the server began.
The fourth attempt reached nearly thirty-eight cuts, a breathtaking leap that spoke to the main server's precision.
But soon, the trials plateaued.
Subsequent attempts hovered between thirty and fifty cuts.
The device was clearly well-tested, fully functional. Yet probability itself remained the true enemy.
To succeed would require nothing less than relentless repetition.
But even that wasn't enough. It required luck.
Every attempt demanded a life.
With each failure, the number of subjects dwindled. The panic among the warship's officers grew. They were like fish laid out on a butcher's block, waiting for the knife.
Had they known this fate, some whispered, it would have been better to die outright in the beginning—better than enduring this slow, merciless torment.
Damoro, though his body was still under the main server's control, maintained unwavering focus, scrutinizing every test.
On the 176th attempt, he sent a thought into the system:
"Let me try again."
[Understood.]
The main server had no reason to refuse. It released its hold on his body.
Damoro carefully prepared.
From his long observations, he had learned something subtle: with each dimensional interlacing and extraction, particles shifted ever so slightly in position. These positional shifts were the hidden cause of failure.
And these shifts threatened the one thing required above all: stability.
The main server was more stable than he could ever be—but also too fast. Its precision was undermined by its speed, striking again before spatial aftershocks had fully dissipated.
Damoro believed he could do better.
He launched his attempt. But his body betrayed him. On the sixth cut, the trial collapsed.
He had the theory, but not yet the control.
Undeterred, he pressed on—forty-one more trials. The fortieth nearly reached forty-eight cuts.
And the forty-first attempt—It surged past seventy cuts.
Each trial lasted mere seconds, no more than a few dozen at most. The dimensional slices were counted in milliseconds.
Eighty cuts.
Damoro was completely absorbed.
Ninety cuts.
Another twenty seconds bled away.
Finally—one hundred cuts. And still it continued.
The minuscule carrier of consciousness was being torn apart, slivered down, collapsing smaller and smaller. Even quarks now loomed vast compared to it.
The difficulty had multiplied. This was no longer the difference of halving a meter into half a meter. It was slicing a meter into 0.9 meters, then less.
It was brushing against the edge of the super-microscopic world.
And Damoro's consciousness itself, clinging above, was nearing that same threshold.
Consciousness has no measure of size. It held fast by something like an invisible adhesive force, sticking to that vanishing unit.
It was like dripping water onto a coin. Normally the droplets would build until they spilled over the rim. But Damoro's process was shrinking the coin beneath the water, again and again.
150 cuts.
200 cuts.
Damoro endured.
Finally.
He had done it.
Or perhaps not achieved it so much as erased it—the cut unit was gone. In his measurements and observations, it had vanished into the micro-world.
If it hadn't shattered outright, then it had slipped into the super-microscopic world.
And with that, the consciousness of the warship officer—forced through Damoro's experiment into that alien realm—became utterly blurred.
Even if the basic unit retained only the size of fundamental particles in the micro-world, at least there it still adhered to certain physical laws. Within that framework, he could faintly sense his surroundings through his consciousness, perceiving in the familiar three-dimensional way.
But in the super-microscopic world, all such familiarity collapsed. This was a realm utterly unlike either the macro-world or the micro-world.
In truth, the first step down from the macro into the micro had always been like this. When life first touched the micro-world, its perceptions too had been utterly disordered—until eons, measured in tens of thousands of years, had refined adaptation into instinct.
Take the Eternal Cycle Star Nation for example: its lifeforms' basic structures were rooted in the micro-world. At their core, they were fundamentally micro-world lifeforms, distinct from ordinary physical beings.
The threshold of a true micro-world lifeform is this: without external aid, it can shrink itself to microscopic scale while retaining a measure of computational power.
The Eternal Cycle Star Nation had achieved precisely that.
Other life, by contrast, had not. With rare exceptions buried deep in gene pools, most beings could not. Some might regenerate an entire body from a single drop of blood, but at the DNA level—if DNA itself fractured—the lifeform would still perish.
At that point, preserved consciousness could only inhabit a new shell. It could not restore the original.
Metacellular technology had reached no further. Powerful, yes—but not transcendent.
By comparison, the Eternal Cycle Star Nation had long surpassed such limits. For them, entry into the micro-world was almost effortless, no greater than a change in environment. Damoro would never have needed to use physical lifeforms for such trials.
It was like a semi-aquatic animal: you could push it onto land, and you could push it back into water.
But could humans do the same?
Even with scuba gear and an oxygen tank, the first plunge into deep water could still trigger instinctive panic—the drowning terror of holding one's breath even with air available.
And the transition from the macro-world to the micro-world was far harsher than water. The leap from the micro to the super-microscopic was harsher still.
At this moment, Wuca was unraveling. Control was impossible. Sensing the environment was impossible. Even thought itself—complex or simple—was impossible.
Only instinct remained.
And instinct screamed danger. Instinct drowned him in fear.
That danger, that fear—it was magnified tens of thousands of times beyond the sudden terror of someone grabbing you from behind. Worse—it was continuous.
An unbearable pressure hammered directly against his very being.
His form itself began to dissolve.
Yet as it dissolved, his consciousness swelled outward. His perception sharpened by orders of magnitude.
And yet, compared to his former state, he was still no more than a grain of sand in the desert.
What he could now perceive was a billionth—perhaps less—than what he had once perceived as a living being.
Chaotic. Confused. Afraid. And hypersensitive.
Every tiny fluctuation, every faint ripple, ignited overwhelming unease.
And so he strengthened himself through sensation—because sensation was all he had left.
In this world, he was nothing but consciousness.
There's a saying: When God closes one door, He opens a window.
The same principle applied here. When everything is stripped away, something within you still grows stronger.
At this moment, Wuca's external sensitivity of consciousness was amplified beyond anything it had ever known.
Slowly—from total blindness, it began to perceive.
The world around it was vast and dark. The only visible things were scattered points.
Those points were particles of the super-microscopic world.
They still existed in three dimensions, yet they far exceeded what Wuca could interpret with its former macro-world senses.
It was like a nearsighted person stumbling in the dark, with hazy lights flickering in the distance. These distant lights blurred together into a single indistinct glow. Each one seemed the size of a clenched fist—but in truth, they were likely unimaginably small, beyond its ability to resolve.
Even Wuca didn't know for sure.
The initial transformation had already been overwhelming. Its perceptive capacity had multiplied hundreds, perhaps thousands of times.
But that was the limit of what its new state of consciousness could reach.
So it began to strengthen elsewhere—focusing on sensation.
These sensations were once familiar, easy for consciousness to simulate.
A consciousness entity, by nature, is transcendent. Normally, it shouldn't feel in such ways.
If it did, then it would no longer be pure consciousness—
but something else. Something closer to a demon.
It resembled the process of resentment evolving into a demon, but in truth, it wasn't that.
It was simply that the rules had changed.
Here, in the super-microscopic world, the physical laws of the macro and micro worlds no longer applied.
Fundamental forces didn't exist here—not even gravity, perhaps.
Matter here was untouched by gravity directly; instead, gravity warped space, and space in turn acted upon matter.
And consciousness—consciousness could reach into the super-microscopic realm itself.
If consciousness could truly touch it… then what did that mean?
Could it be that the civilizations dwelling here were not mechanical, not physical, not natural—but civilizations of pure consciousness?
Everything that existed here—was it all consciousness?
Macro-world.
Damoro had already noticed this possibility.
"If even here, in the super-microscopic world, there is consciousness… impossible."
"How could thought itself attain such high-level intelligence? Consciousness always requires attachment to macro-level matter, leveraging its mass to generate intelligence."
"But the super-microscopic world doesn't even have…"
When he reached this thought, the truth struck him like lightning.
He had been wrong. Completely wrong.
His earlier conjectures collapsed in an instant.
If the super-microscopic world held no possibility of high-level intelligence, then his entire concept of biological-level delay had no foundation.
And yet—his mistake wasn't a total failure.
He still clung to the principle of biological-level delay.
But what had changed was the frame of reference: it was no longer a hidden world, no longer a clandestine society buried within the micro-world.
It was a lifeform.
A colossal lifeform, tethered to the far side of the pseudo-quantum field.
The so-called pseudo-quantum field—he now realized—wasn't merely a field at all. It was its sensory organ. Through quantum fluctuations, it "felt" the disturbances of both the macro-world and the micro-world, just as human skin feels wind and touch.
That organ had pores. It could expand. It could contract.
And that expansion-contraction was the very "switch" Damoro had theorized.
Each contraction or expansion released signals—feedback to the great conscious lifeform, enabling it to choose whether to act, whether to attack.
When its scale grew large enough, thought emerged.
When its body reached colossal proportions, intelligence arose.
And the more vast its form, the sharper its intelligence became.
Wuca, meanwhile, felt as if it had dissolved into freedom.
It was no longer itself.
Its sensations were primitive, stripped of any coherent thought—more rudimentary than the reflexes of plankton.
There would be no resolution for it. It was nothing more than a shard, a fragment.
Though its macro-world body had been vast, human civilization already possessed fragments of data for gauging the scale of consciousness entities.
For a human, the "size" of a consciousness entity might stretch anywhere from 20 micrometers to 5 millimeters.
The difference was astronomical. But no precise measurement method for consciousness existed.
The only approach was trial and error.
It was like being blindfolded and asked to hurl a ball at a hidden target. Throw enough times, and you could approximate where the target stood, even its size.
Consciousness entities were no fixed thing. Some speculated they fluctuated.
Fluctuations not just within space, but across dimensions.
One instant, the bulk of a consciousness entity might lie anchored in three dimensions. The next, it might flicker into a fourth. A measurement taken in one second could differ entirely from a measurement taken the next.
But this was conjecture.
The truth was, human civilization had no real understanding of what a consciousness entity was.
It might not even exist as an "object." Perhaps it was nothing but a statistical artifact, its apparent presence collapsed out of the interference of human brainwaves. A phantom born of electromagnetism.
And yet, phantoms could shape the real universe.
This was where science dissolved into paradox.
Something unreal could still carve ripples into reality.
Most, when confronted with such contradictions, simply believed it was not that consciousness didn't exist—only that human technology had not advanced far enough to properly measure it.
Human consciousness was neither the smallest nor the largest.
The Eternal Cycle Star Nation, however, had pushed the frontier much farther.
Their largest measured consciousness entity was only 1.8 millimeters.
So small.
And with that size, even if "converted," there was no way such a consciousness could contain vast intelligence.
Consciousness was not a hyper-advanced microchip.
It was simpler—so simple that even civilizations of the highest tier could overlook it entirely, blind to its existence.
Its crude, primitive nature meant its ultimate ceiling was no higher than that of a single-celled organism.
And that was only if its volume exceeded that of a single cell.
Compressed down to the scale of a single-celled organism, its intelligence might barely reach one-thousandth of such a being.
At this stage, Wuca's consciousness entity could only drift.
Its sensory growth slowed further and further—so slow that progress of even a ten-thousandth took what felt like an eternity.
It drifted.
It didn't know how long.
Then, suddenly—an attraction.
It sensed a pull, faint yet undeniable. From kin—so it seemed.
Instinctively, it approached.
And when it clung to this kin, clarity surged through it.
In an instant, its thoughts sharpened. Its surroundings became crisp, its awareness brightened.
And it realized it was now anchored to something colossal.
A monster.
So vast that it felt like standing on the surface of a planet, its body stretching beyond sight, no end visible.
"What is this?"
The thought echoed within Wuca.
No one could answer. Only the truth awaited discovery.
But truth was not easily found.
Tentacles erupted.
Countless appendages shot forth from every direction of the monster, lashing toward it. Wuca dodged frantically, darting and weaving. For a moment it escaped—but the tentacles pursued. They struck again and again, multiplying, growing denser, until there was almost no space left to evade.
The surface beneath it was immense, but nowhere offered safety.
And leaving was impossible. Returning to chaos was unthinkable.
Not only would the mission fail—Wuca despised that state itself.
"How to escape?"
It looked downward, into the body of the monster.
"Only by entering."
And so it plunged inward.
The moment it crossed inside, it was caught. Its body seized, bound. No amount of thrashing made any difference.
It had walked into another trap.
Without knowledge, without context, without information to guide it, Wuca was helpless.
Something began to consume it.
Not by tearing or gnawing, but by enveloping it, absorbing it—a slow, unstoppable encroachment.
A fusion.
And as the fusion deepened, Wuca felt its being expand.
Where before it had sensed only a radius of one meter, now it reached ten.
Then fifty.
Then a hundred—and still climbing.
Perception spiraled outward, widening without limit.
And with this widening came understanding.
This was no planet.
No inert landmass.
It was alive.
And what was attacking Wuca now was not even the monster itself.
It was its immune system.
Like a human host never feels the clash between virus and white blood cell, Wuca never sensed the command.
Defense was automatic. Instinct. Reflex.
At this moment, Wuca was the virus.
It was being consumed—yet, in the same instant, fused—integrated into the colossal beast itself.
And it felt the size.
If Wuca was a mote of dust, then this beast was an entire continent.
The gap between them was immeasurable.
Its body could stretch a million meters. Ten million. A thousand kilometers.
Or more.
Wuca couldn't tell.
As assimilation deepened, it began to glimpse other facets of this entity.
Intelligence.
A vast, oceanic wisdom that brushed against it—then shared itself with it.
Enough to restore thought, memory, identity.
For a moment, Wuca felt like itself again.
"No… how can I still remember?"
"My memories should all be bound to my body in the macro-world."
And yet, here it was—thinking complex thoughts again.
Back when Damoro first forced it into a basic unit, most of its memories were gone. Only fragments survived.
Now it was reduced to nothing but raw consciousness.
But clarity returned.
Theft.
The beast was stealing computational power from the macro-world.
It bent matter into its own design, forcing atoms into the shape of processors, sensors, and storage.
And Wuca's discarded body was one of its components.
Through those hijacked nodes, it could harvest every thought.
Damoro's thoughts among them.
"So… there really is a colossal conscious entity hiding in the super-microscopic world," Damoro mused. "Fascinating. Then—how do I kill it?"
"By destroying its host matter? Its skin? Or the warship itself—and everyone aboard, including me?"
Wuca shuddered.
Damoro had guessed the truth.
Even more terrifying, the beast knew his thoughts the instant he formed them.
How could any plan succeed against something like this?
They might not be able to defeat the enemy, this colossal beast!