In that very same instant.
From the nothingness of the Negative Dimension flanking the outer perimeter of this empty 3D universe.
Faint ripples drifted through, carrying a surge of... informational fluctuation that felt chillingly familiar to Seraphine.
No.
Describing it as "information" was fundamentally inaccurate and woefully inadequate.
It was an obscure phenomenon, far more ethereal and elusive than mere information: an ethereal essence nestled within the void itself, sharing an identical origin and root with the [Infinite Attributes] system.
Indeed, it was identical to that mysterious pulse she had detected during her very first contact with nothingness. (See chap 127)
"After that encounter, despite numerous active and passive brushes with the nothingness of the Negative Dimension, I never sensed this fluctuation again until now..."
Seraphine's Eye of Transcendence blazed with dazzling radiance. "Finally, after all this time, I cross paths with you once more.
Who are you? Are you... another system bearer?!"
Indeed, an instinctual realization welled up from the depths of her soul: that source of fluctuation was very likely another host of the [Infinite Attributes] system.
BOOM!
Triggered by her surging emotional tempest, the entire 3D universe shuddered violently before detonating on the spot, utterly erased into nothingness.
In that very same instant, plunging back into the nothingness of the Negative Dimension, Seraphine unleashed her Transcendental Perception without hesitation, sweeping out to engulf the mysterious source radiating those cryptic pulses.
SWOOSH!!!
The moment her perception locked onto the enigmatic source, Seraphine engaged the Real Number Channel, dragging it out of the Negative Dimension's nothingness in an instant.
Transcending infinite space-times, she descended directly into the Non-Static 3D universe housing one of Heavenly Hegemon's branch offices.
BOOM!!!
Space-time shattered as the cosmos groaned under the impact.
Naturally, she paid no mind to such collateral damage.
Upon entering this vast universe, Seraphine subtly manipulated her interference field, seizing the unknown source that radiated those mysterious pulses and suspending it directly before her eyes.
She focused her gaze, examining it with meticulous precision.
The entity gleamed with a brilliant silver sheen, towering roughly a hundred thousand meters tall, bristling with a hundred arms, a hundred legs, and over a million writhing, silvery-black tentacles.
Across its roughly rectangular, pale-gray face, thousands of crystalline, luminous eyes flickered incessantly.
From within those searchlight-like eyes poured an unceasing, boundless stream of frenzied bloodlust and voracious appetite.
The sole target of this feverish hunger was none other than Seraphine herself.
Intriguingly, Seraphine found herself experiencing an equally intense hunger toward this bizarre creature.
An inexplicable urge gripped her, compelling her to swallow this entity whole: flesh, bones, and all.
Instinctively, she understood that devouring this creature would grant her all of its knowledge and power.
More fascinating still, Seraphine could clearly discern that this intense impulse piercing through her Divinity, cognition, and consciousness.
Originated straight from the [Infinite Attributes] system nestled deep within her Greater Divinity.
Naturally, this so-called "intense" impulse was overwhelming only to beings at or below the materialized Spirituality tier.
To a terrifying existence like Seraphine, it was completely inconsequential.
Faint to the point of being nearly imperceptible.
Similarly, Seraphine's vision, far surpassing that of any deity, effortlessly perceived an ethereal entity drifting within the creature's Spirituality that looked shockingly familiar: another [Infinite Attributes] system.
"Fascinating..."
Noticing the alien yet intimately familiar system, and sensing that the creature's Root Spirituality vibrated at the exact frequency of her own prior to her breakthrough into Dawn's fourth realm, much like Seraphina, Seraphine threw her head back and laughed uncontrollably. "This is... just too damn interesting! Hahahaha!"
Clearly, this bizarre entity drifting through the nothingness of the Negative Dimension for reasons unknown.
Was none other than her second pseudo-alternate space-time counterpart following Seraphina.
Another bearer of the [Infinite Attributes] system... a Mercury Race incarnation of Seraphine.
"Sure enough, across infinite parallel space-times, literally anything can happen."
Slowly wiping away her smile, Seraphine willed the total extraction of all memories from this hideous Mercury Race counterpart of hers, absorbing and reviewing the complete archive in a single instant.
Born in some unknown parallel space-time, this Mercury Race incarnation was named Murray Manson, the ninth princess of the Mercury Empire, an unloved, virtually invisible figure within the royal court.
Filtering out endless pages of useless noise, Seraphine was surprised to discover that after Murray Manson acquired her [Infinite Attributes] system.
In a mere eight days, her Physical Strength and Soul attributes skyrocketed from an initial baseline of ten thousand tons to a horrifying scale rivaling, and ultimately surpassing, the total mass of the Sun.
On that very eighth day, Murray Manson violently butchered the entire Mercury royal family along with every dissenter, claiming absolute rule over the Mercury Empire.
Eight days... to scale that rapidly.
Evidently, her system's attribute growth curve far outstripped Seraphine's own baseline system.
A deeper inspection proved this was indeed the case.
This Mercury Race counterpart named Murray Manson possessed a system with a daily scaling multiplier of exactly 1,000 times.
With each passing day, Murray Manson's power surged by a factor of 1,000 from its previous baseline.
By comparison, Seraphine's initial doubling capability appeared almost modest.
Yet Seraphine also witnessed in those memories that just three days later, after her Physical Strength and Soul attributes had multiplied by a billionfold, Murray Manson underwent an abrupt, unprovoked psychological collapse.
Shifting from a brooding, ruthless tyrant into a horrifying arch-fiend driven entirely by homicidal mania, her entire psyche was consumed by a singular impulse: the absolute slaughter of all living beings and the utter annihilation of all existence.
On the thirteenth day, Murray Manson slaughtered every single compatriot on her home planet without a shred of mercy.
Another day passed, and her power swelled to approach the total mass of the entire Milky Way.
Armed with this colossal might and her monstrous attribute scaling, Murray Manson spent the subsequent era tirelessly traversing the cosmos like a demon possessed, seeking out anything and everything she could reduce to ash.
Intelligent civilizations, rocky planets, blazing stars, spiral star clusters, the Golden Bough Civilization Zone, the Orion Arm...
Anything capable of being destroyed within her reach was pulverized with extreme prejudice.
While elevating absolute annihilation as her supreme purpose in life, Murray Manson relentlessly plundered and mastered any knowledge, art, or apparatus capable of amplifying her destructive yield and blast radius.
Consequently, countless civilizations and species were wiped out under her demonic tyranny within a very short span of time, including the six dominant races of the Galactic Core.
Having erased the Milky Way, Murray Manson charged into intergalactic space, ramping up her frenzy of devastation.
The Local Galaxy Group, the Virgo Supercluster, the Laniakea Supercluster, the Sloan Great Wall, the South Pole Wall, the Dark Flow, the observable universe, the River of Primordial...
Within merely another month, Murray Manson completely annihilated the entire Verdant Ancient Matter Sea, bursting into the boundless, dark cosmic expanse beyond the Matter Sea to bare her vicious fangs against other colossal Matter Seas.
A few centuries later, after shattering a pocket of 3D space during a rampage, Murray Manson tumbled inevitably into the profound, eldritch nothingness of the Negative Dimension beyond the cosmic boundaries.
Within that time-frozen nothingness where all existence was void, she underwent an inexplicable, anomalous metamorphosis, acquiring the capability to drift through nothingness and freely traverse across countless parallel space-times.
Thus, Murray Manson resumed her slaughter and systemic destruction across parallel universal fabrics.
Across that protracted campaign of annihilation, it was virtually impossible to tally how many 3D space-times were erased by her hands.
Throughout these journeys across space-times, Murray Manson encountered other bearers of the [Infinite Attributes] system.
In total, she met roughly over a hundred of them.
Among these system bearers, some were world-ending monsters like Murray Manson who reveled in slaughtering all sentient life and razing existence; others were entirely different, preferring to remain within a fixed territory, cultivating endlessly to expand their personal power.
Upon crossing paths with these counterparts, Murray Manson was gripped by a monstrous, feverish appetite.
She desperately craved devouring them alive.
Instinctively, Murray Manson knew that consuming them would grant her everything they possessed, elevating her power to unleash even greater slaughter across space-time.
Without hesitation, she struck out against these counterparts.
Intriguingly, only the destructive, world-razing type of system bearers experienced that same frenzied, bottomless hunger, retaliating with equal ruthlessness against Murray Manson.
Those system bearers who preferred to remain completely motionless, cultivating in absolute silence like mindless training automatons, offered no resistance whatsoever to Murray Manson's brutal devouring.
It was as though their obsession with cultivation had completely eclipsed any concern for their own survival.
Naturally, Murray Manson adored this variety of counterpart; requiring zero effort on her part, she simply had to open her jaws and relish the feast.
Of course, only a terrifying monstrosity capable of casually obliterating hundreds of millions of cosmic space-times like Murray Manson could effortlessly devour these silent cultivators.
Weaker individuals who could only destroy one or two Laniakea Superclusters with their full might couldn't even scratch these training fanatics whose power surged exponentially every single day.
Even if those fanatics sat completely still and let the weaklings unleash their absolute strongest attacks, they wouldn't breach their basic defenses.
Seraphine also discovered variations among the numerous system bearers Murray Manson had devoured.
Some possessed systems with a daily scaling multiplier of merely one percent, others doubled by a hundredfold daily, while some scaled by ten thousand, a million, or even ten million times per day.
Among the over one hundred system bearers Murray Manson had consumed, the highest scaling individual scaled by an astonishing billionfold every single day.
Had that counterpart held the system for just a little longer, Murray Manson would have been the one served on a platter.
Yet that was precisely Murray Manson's stroke of luck.
Having devoured so many system bearers, she had never once run into a counterpart capable of mounting a lethal counterattack against her.
Ultimately, these entities, unclear whether all were pseudo-alternate space-time counterparts of Seraphine, were reduced to nourishment in Murray Manson's gullet, serving as stepping stones for her exponential growth.
After a hundred million years of traversing, butchering, destroying, and devouring, Murray Manson's two primary attribute values reached an astonishing 10^5685006347712 static Great Boundaries.
While pure physical power did not directly equate to absolute destructive yield.
Before Murray Manson's horrifying strength, concepts like space-time, cosmic laws, and universal rules were rendered utterly meaningless and laughably fragile, shattering upon a single impact.
Unfortunately for this ultimate engine of destruction, she ended up in Seraphine's grasp.
"So after all this time, it wasn't that all systems were inherently useless: mine was just uniquely garbage."
After a casual sigh, Seraphine suddenly recalled a distant memory.
A very long time ago, back when she was still green, wielding a mere fraction of power equivalent to over three million solar masses.
Pitiful, helpless, and weak.
It was during that period that Chaos Calculation had issued an inexplicable warning.
It "informed" her that if she allowed her attributes to balloon endlessly under the system's baseline growth.
The moment her physical body and soul attributes breached the threshold of one hundred million solar masses, the load-bearing capacity of her Root Spirituality would suffer a catastrophic collapse, and her core self-awareness would be completely obliterated or twisted into an aberrant state.
When that day came, there was a 50% probability of becoming an impartial, emotionless cultivation machine.
Alternatively, there was a 50% probability of becoming a ruthless evil god, eternally and indiscriminately annihilating all things. (See chap 70)
Back then, Seraphine had assumed her belief wasn't sufficiently unyielding to bear such colossal power.
That pressure had forced her down the path of Spirituality sublimation, ultimately catalyzing the creation of the "Cosmic Dawn Decree".
Looking back from where she stood now...
The reality was entirely different.
That so-called "insufficient Spirituality load-bearing capacity" had nothing to do with her belief being too weak to bear greater strength.
If that were truly the case, why hadn't those Sage Kings, capable of casually wiping out tens of thousands of Milky Ways, turned into brainless cultivation automatons or heartless evil deities?
They remained perfectly sane, didn't they?
"So the system was the culprit all along. For whatever hidden agenda... it deliberately twists or erases the host's Spirituality, cognition, and conscious identity."
Seraphine mused leisurely, "And that warning from Chaos Calculation about 'insufficient Spirituality load-bearing capacity' was simply pointing out that my Root Spirituality's defensive resistance... was inadequate against the system's malicious corruption."
Seraphine had always maintained a fundamental belief.
Across the boundless expanse of the grand cosmos, there is never unprompted love, nor is there unprovoked hatred.
Behind every curtain of seemingly flawless, ultimate perfection always lurk sinister, deep-seated agendas.
Thus, from the very moment she transmigrated, she had harbored deep vigilance toward the [Infinite Attributes] system.
Why was she so uniquely lucky?
Why was she chosen out of everyone?
Who created the system?
What purpose drove the architect to forge such a construct?
Seraphine had always sought answers to these questions.
Today, a corner of that veil was finally peeled back.
The system's true objective was the mass production of cold, genocidal fiends like Murray Manson, eternally drowning in boundless slaughter to shatter and erase infinite cosmic space-times.
As for the other breed of system bearers who failed to become fiends, the mindless cultivation automatons, they served merely as walking attribute batteries, providing raw fuel for the fiends' ascension.
Indeed, this was Seraphine's deduction.
Or rather, her reasoned assessment based on the available data.
The existence of those training fanatics was likely designed solely to accelerate the growth of these world-enders, serving as their premium refueling stations and supreme stepping stones.
That category of hosts was truly pathetic.
Mindlessly pursuing cultivation only to end up as livestock on someone else's dinner plate.
As the old saying goes: a blessing in disguise.
Fortunately, Seraphine's initial system had been exceptionally low-tier, lagging behind at the very bottom, doubling her attributes merely once per day.
That sluggish pace gave her ample breathing room to elevate her Spirituality, condense the Delusion of Love, and pioneer the Cosmic Dawn Decree.
In doing so, she had unknowingly neutralized the system's insidious attempts to corrupt her Root Spirituality.
Had Seraphine started with an overwhelmingly potent system, one that multiplied her strength by thousands, millions, or trillions of times daily.
She would have likely succumbed like Murray Manson, losing herself completely to become a mindless avatar of destruction.
Alternatively, she might have turned into one of those emotionless attribute batteries, ending up as pathetic livestock in the jaws of fiends like Murray Manson.
Right then, a thought struck Seraphine.
Eons ago, those two pseudo-alternate space-time counterparts who had shared critical temporal data with her... had they also succumbed to the system's corruption, degrading into soulless world-ending fiends like Murray Manson?
Or worse, had they become lifeless attribute batteries, drifting silently in some forgotten corner of their universes, waiting to be consumed?
Given the corruption mechanics of the [Infinite Attributes] system, crossing the threshold of one hundred million solar masses triggered instant pollution, turning hosts into mindless butchers.
As for why the threshold was set precisely at one hundred million solar masses.
Seraphine deduced that in the eyes of the system's architect, only upon reaching this tier did either a world-ending fiend or a cultivation automaton possess basic self-preservation capabilities.
Thinking about it, the idea of those two counterparts meeting such a grim fate was somewhat lamentable.
After all, they had once aided Seraphine.
Their assistance had paved the way for her time-stopping technique: Instant Time Compression.
Yet, remembering that each of those two pseudo-counterparts possessed an infinite sea of alternate counterparts, Seraphine felt a profound sense of nihilism.
At this moment, she finally understood how the 6D String race viewed lower-dimensional lifeforms upon descending into their realms.
Toward non-unique existences, emotional investment was entirely pointless.
It was utterly meaningless.
"Lower-dimensional weeds, hahahaha."
Seraphine shook her head with a wry laugh, then let out a slow sigh. "So this is what it means to be lower-dimensional weeds. No matter how tragic, brilliant, or soul-stirring their lives may be, diluted across an infinity of counterparts, it all becomes cheap and absurd.
Kindness, justice, morality... these concepts that thrive within the domain of Finite Count hold zero meaning in the face of the Infinitely Large."
After a moment of contemplation, Seraphine pondered the matter deeply:
"In short, the system's objective is now clear: mass-produce harbingers of destruction to wipe out as many cosmic space-times as possible.
So... what benefits does this yield for the system's creator?
Or rather... what profound significance does the continuous annihilation of countless space-times hold for such an entity?"
Indeed, following the theoretical models of the String race, any arbitrary cosmic space-time within a Singularity Swarm branches into infinitely many parallel universes within an infinitesimal fraction of an instant, and each of those infinite parallel universes branches into yet another infinite set in the very next infinitesimal moment.
Eternally, ceaselessly splitting without end.
Against a true, actual infinity, what difference could a Finite Count lifeform like Murray Manson make, even if she grew powerful enough to obliterate ten trillion universes per second?
What would that achieve?
Even if you multiplied Murray Manson by 10^37218383881977644441306597687849648128, unleashing them all to wreak havoc and destroy countless space-times simultaneously.
What would it matter?
Did any of this... hold any meaning?
Every Finite Count, when placed before a true infinity, even the smallest infinity, Aleph-null, was effectively zero.
So what madness was driving the creator of the [Infinite Attributes] system?
To be foolish enough to waste such monumental effort on a completely futile endeavor.
Through the mechanics of temporal branching, a Finite Count entity like Murray Manson would indeed possess an actual infinity of alternate counterparts.
Yet trying to use that to contest a Singularity Swarm that expanded infinitely with every infinitesimal instant...
The sheer absurdity of it was almost hard to take seriously.
"There has to be a deeper objective; it can't be this superficial," Seraphine mused intently.
Instinctively, she felt the system's architect... must have a far more profound endgame.
Perhaps she simply hadn't reached the vantage point required to see the whole picture.
"Well... whatever. Time to handle more immediate matters."
Pulling her thoughts back, Seraphine fixed a cold gaze on Murray Manson, who was firmly restrained by her 6D interference field yet mysteriously retained a degree of autonomy and mobility, and chuckled:
"Fascinating. Your body and soul are merely a conventional 3D + 4D composite structure, your Spirituality lingers at the semi-materialized level, and you are heavily corrupted, your aberration far surpasses that of an Evil Eye Cultist.
Yet the true essence of your lifeform isn't that physical shell, your spectral soul, or Root Divinity.
Your true essence is an anomaly nestled deep within that aberrated Spirituality, bound tightly to the system... an anomaly native to the Negative Dimension."
Indeed, Seraphine deduced that Murray Manson might truly be a native entity of the Negative Dimension.
In reality, even with observational precision penetrating sextillions of levels beneath the Planck scale, Seraphine could not perceive the deeper layers of her Spirituality using standard senses.
Her ability to perceive the inner workings of Murray Manson's Spirituality relied entirely on the Transcendental Perception that had taken root within her own soul.
The reason for this was straightforward.
Through long-term experimentation and research, Seraphine had confirmed a fundamental truth.
Root Spirituality was essentially a dimensionless entity, akin to fundamental particles stripped of volume, mass, energy, or standard attributes, neither truly physical nor wholly spectral, conceptually graspable only as [0D].
Only methods operating on the 0D plane could observe or interact with another instance of Spirituality.
Yet... both the [Infinite Attributes] system and the creature's core essence were buried deep within the 0D void of Root Spirituality.
This clearly indicated that both phenomena originated from the enigmatic Negative Dimension.
Because the only thing smaller and more fundamental than 0D was the Negative Dimension itself.
"So, bearers of the [Infinite Attributes] system are fundamentally what they call... Negative Boundary Scavengers?"
Within the scattered memory fragments of the String race, Seraphine had encountered this term before.
According to those vast archival records, the so-called Negative Boundary Scavengers were perilous "pests" that spontaneously materialized across the internal space-times of various dimensions or drifted within the external nothingness.
Following extensive investigations, the apex leadership of the String race civilization collectively concluded that these hazardous entities most likely originated from a deeper, far more enigmatic domain beyond the cosmic nothingness: the Negative Dimension.
Otherwise known as the Negative Boundary.
Once spawned, these Negative Boundary "pests" saw their power surge at an alarming rate; upon attaining a baseline threshold of strength, they unleashed unbridled destruction upon the objective external reality without hesitation.
Senseless, pure annihilation driven by neither cause nor material gain.
Further, Scavengers originating from the same space-time source would, after maturing over sufficient eons, be guided by an unknown force to converge within a single cosmic space-time to engage in a vicious battle of mutual consumption, a brutal battle royale where countless Scavengers were culled to birth a single, terrifyingly potent apex Scavenger.
Against such an apex Scavenger, even a large coalition of String Sovereigns faced the risk of being obliterated in a single instant.
Worse still, this cannibalistic cycle among kindred Scavengers had no ceiling.
Left unchecked over the passage of eons, vast swarms of these apex Scavengers would converge once more to undergo another cycle of "Autocannibalism," breeding an even more horrifying entity.
Through endless iterations of this cannibalistic cycle, an ultra-potent Scavenger would inevitably emerge, powerful enough to give even the highest echelons of the String race civilization a severe headache.
Records showed that the String race civilization regularly deployed causality-tracking methods across infinite space-times to locate threatening Scavengers, executing ruthless extermination campaigns against them.
This campaign of eradication was designated by the String race civilization as the "Pest Extermination Protocol."
However...
"A single Scavenger branches into an infinite sea of counterparts with every passing instant, yet the 6D String race actually tries to deploy Finite Count forces to exterminate an actual infinity of Scavengers... isn't that just as mind-numbingly idiotic? What's the point of such an exercise? Boredom?"
She found it somewhat difficult to wrap her head around.
How was this behavior by the String race any different from the hypothetical goal of the system's creator to erase infinite space-time with an army of Scavengers?
Both were equally pointless.
"Unless the String race reaps tangible benefits from it,"
Seraphine stroked her chin with a massive hand. "Like... the systems themselves?"
After a moment of contemplation, she cut off the unproductive line of thought.
"Whatever. Time to deconstruct the system's exponential growth mechanics and see if I can extract something useful."
Lifting the amber-locked, immobilized form of Murray Manson, Seraphine activated the Authority of Change:
"Erase... 10^64 years of my time."
VROM!!!
In a fraction of an instant, Seraphine stepped into an isolated timeline belonging strictly to her, spanning a duration of 10^64 years.
This span of 10^64 years represented the absolute maximum temporal length the Authority of Change could currently erase in one go.
Its execution time was a single Planck second (5.39×10^-44 seconds).
In other words, if Seraphine triggered the Authority of Change to erase her time every single Planck second, she could stretch one real-world second across a staggering 10^112 years.
Throughout this unimaginably vast stretch of time, she painstakingly set to work, bit by bit, carving Murray Manson's [Infinite Attributes] system out of her Root Spirituality.
This surgical extraction inflicted catastrophic damage on Murray Manson.
Though she didn't die on the spot, her comprehensive power and foundational life-tier suffered a devastating collapse.
Not only did she lose her exponential attribute scaling, but her baseline power tier plummeted from the trillionth power tier down to the millionth power tier.
It was an epic-tier demotion.
Murray Manson's already fragile sanity suffered severe trauma following the loss of her system.
To put it plainly, she was reduced to a drooling vegetable.
Though Seraphine repeatedly shoved the system back into Murray Manson's Spirituality, successfully activating and running it multiple times.
Brain-dead remained brain-dead; short of deploying the Authority of Change to forcibly rewrite her, there was no reversing the damage.
Seeing this outcome, Seraphine opted for caution and refrained from recklessly carving out her own system.
Keeping it around posed no downside for now anyway.
Through analysis of Murray Manson's version of the [Infinite Attributes] system, Seraphine discovered that its maximum scaling ceiling was vastly superior to her own baseline system.
Under the boundary testing of the Authority of Change, Manson's system could reach a peak scaling multiplier of 10^50000 times.
Compared to 10^300, the difference was night and day.
While conducting these system experiments, Seraphine thoroughly reviewed every memory extracted from Heavenly Hegemon and his thousands of subordinates.
Among the archives, she uncovered several fascinating pieces of intel.
For instance... approximate power definitions regarding the tiers of String God and String Ancestor.