Vision drowned in a radiance too brilliant to endure, and hard on its heels came a roar that shook the soul itself — as if every star in the universe had gone supernova in the same instant, a singularity detonating alongside them.
Astronomical figures of the sort Miss Bronya Rand would never bother reading crammed themselves into the Simulated Universe until it burst.
After that blinding, endless-daylight flash, Stelle felt her consciousness snap loose like a kite with a cut string and plunge into a cold, dark chaos.
How long that lasted, she had no idea. Awareness surfaced by degrees, the way a swimmer breaks water.
The grey-haired girl forced her eyelids open a crack, and what filled her golden eyes was a figure she could burn to ash and still never forget.
"Congratulations, the frontal lobotomy was a complete success. You've officially forgotten the fact that you're an idiot."
A voice drifted down at her, unhurried.
"…?"
Her mind, just dragged out of deep unconsciousness, was still thick as paste. Stelle mumbled back on reflex:
"I… I was never an idiot to begin with…"
"See? What a successful operation!" Caelus clapped his hands at once, his expression as theatrical as a surgeon collecting an MVP award. "Perfect results! Instant effect!"
"…"
A brief silence. Then Stelle's painting-perfect brows drew together, she thought it over for a second, and let fly with some choice words.
"Caelus — cub!!"
Knowing full well that verbal jabs were basically flirting when aimed at someone — herself, technically — whose hide rivaled the wall of Preservation, Stelle very wisely skipped straight to violence.
Her core snapped tight, and with a speed that left no time to cover one's ears, both arms clamped around Caelus's neck like iron hoops.
At the same time she kicked off, riding the roll's momentum into a flawless flip from flat-on-her-back to firmly on top — the whole of her straddling Caelus in one clean pin.
"You're the idiot! The single biggest idiot in the universe!"
Stelle bared her small white teeth, fierce and childishly adorable all at once, and seized those infuriating cheeks with no mercy whatsoever, dragging them sideways as if she meant to stretch that handsome face into flatbread.
"Yes, yes, yes~" Caelus's face was deformed under her grip, yet his voice stayed every bit as punchable, and carried a note of something like relief. "You're absolutely right. 'I' really am an idiot."
"Heh."
That admission delivered no sense of victory at all. Instead a vein jumped at Stelle's temple.
She hitched up the corners of her mouth in a smile that never reached her eyes, drew a deep breath, braced herself to endure the backlash through their empathy link, and prepared to pull even harder.
BOOM——!!!
A muffled explosion, like a sledgehammer landing on a drumhead, cut the execution short.
She froze mid-pull and turned toward the sound.
Deep inside the Simulated Universe's massive mainframe, waves of heart-stuttering rumbles were rolling out. Black streams of energy and orange-red firelight leaked visibly from several cracks in the machine's casing.
The good news:
This time the hardware had not, as it had on the previous two occasions, performed its signature act of ascending on the spot and sending components on a light-year sightseeing tour.
It was merely the system computation overloading past its limit, the calculation memory and data sectors blowing out completely, causing a physical energy leak and a fire. That was all.
That sounds like bad news, but compared with the first two incidents, the hardware-level damage this time was mercifully small.
Credit for that went to Herta, who after eating dirt twice had learned her lesson and dismantled the server hardware into a dozen-odd independent modules — power sector, computing matrix sector, interface sector, and so on.
Only when the Simulated Universe system booted did those modules link up and cooperate through preset Path-energy channels. A model of modular survivalism, truly.
The real bad news:
"It's scrambled!"
"It's collapsed!"
"It's gone!"
"It's broken!"
"It's dead!"
Herta stood expressionless beside that smoking, flame-licked mainframe, her small puppet-jointed hands sliding and tapping mechanically across a holographic display that glared an angry red in front of her.
That thin, slender back radiated a desolation too bleak for words.
With every sentence she spat out, the aura of grief and despair around her thickened another degree, until it was nearly congealing into a stormcloud overhead.
"Aaaaaaah——!!!"
At last the anguish piled up to its peak and burst clean through the dam of reason.
Herta jerked as if struck hard enough to send her blood pressure straight out the top of her skull, her slight body swaying — then, with a clack, she toppled over stiff as a marionette with its strings cut.
She could not hold the cold facade together one second longer. Her wail, tearful and heart-shredding, rang through the entire space station laboratory:
"My Simulated Universe! My Simulated Universe aaaah——!!!"
Ruan Mei stood behind the collapsed Herta puppet, a flicker of hesitation crossing her eyes.
She was considering whether she ought to comfort her colleague the way Herta used to comfort her whenever an experiment failed.
"Congratulations, congratulations — failed again, did you?" Herta would lean in, radiating concern.
"I told you ages ago. Your method has holes in it." Delivered from on high.
"For your information, I've had a major breakthrough lately~" And never forgetting to gloat at the end.
Ruan Mei's fine brows shifted a fraction. In the end she chose the approach that suited her nature better:
"Herta. Whether one drowns in sentimental sorrow or binds oneself in absolute reason, the end result is the same — you become a Slave to emotion."
"True science should be born of pure fervor."
"Aaaah!" Herta shot up off the floor, furious enough to spin in place. "Easy for you to say! It wasn't your module that caved in!"
This universe-scale detonation had been destructive on a level far beyond anything before it.
It hadn't merely annihilated the world currently running inside the Simulated Universe in an instant — its rampaging energy had blown apart the underlying logic code supporting the entire virtual cosmos's architecture.
If the Simulated Universe were a magnificent skyscraper:
The first two explosions had only wrecked a few rooms inside the building and triggered a localized quake.
This time… the entire internal structure had been blasted to powder, and worse, the blast had shaken and destroyed part of the foundation itself.
The damn foundation was cracked!
Which meant Herta had to rebuild not only the ruined "rooms" but had to start from nothing — laying the foundation brick by brick, raising the framework, reconstructing the rules and the operating logic.
The sheer effort and time that demanded made Herta's vision go dark just thinking about it.
And as for Ruan Mei?
Herta's glare stabbed viciously at the unruffled developer beside her.
In the Simulated Universe project, Ruan Mei was responsible for the Aeon prototypes — beyond question the most central and most fiendishly difficult part of the whole thing.
The catch was this: those Aeons caught in the blast and struck down were bound in essence to the Paths of the real universe.
So long as the Paths endured, those Aeon alt-accounts could keep drawing power from the torrent of their Path and restore themselves.
Ruan Mei didn't have to maintain a single thing.
And here she'd had all those fascinating projects Bronita left behind, waiting to be explored, taken apart, savored.
And now?
Now she'd have to grind away like some miserable code monkey, rebuilding that cursed foundation and framework.
It felt like having a shelf packed with the long-awaited masterpiece novels you'd been dying to read — cracking one open, losing yourself in it — only for an invisible hand to rip it away, shove a shovel and a stack of bricks at you, and order you to go build a house.
Kurushii!!!
And the root cause of this whole catastrophe…
The Herta puppet's exquisite little head tilted back inch by inch with the grinding stiffness of rusted machinery, radiating lethal pressure.
It locked at last into the classic Shinbo 45-degree angle, red light glinting in her eyes like a predator that had just Locked-On to its prey.
"It wasn't me! I didn't do it!"
Swept by those two beams of pure resentment, solid as lasers, Stelle sprang off Caelus like a cat whose Tail had been stepped on.
Without a heartbeat of hesitation she pointed at the cushion beneath her, her voice ringing with the resolve of someone sacrificing kin for the greater good:
"Caelus-cub did it! It was him! All of it, him!"
"Caelus——!"
"You card-carrying member of the Blockhead Club!"
Stelle's accusation was the starting pistol. Herta's roar came with the shriek of grinding metal as she hoisted a hammer charged instantly to full four-bean power and launched Diamond Starburst - Heaven-and-Earth Deep Impact at Caelus.
He could have dodged. He didn't. He simply let the enraged puppet girl straddle his waist and hammer away at his skull with everything she had.
For one thing, he had gone pretty big this time. He had blown up the Simulated Universe, after all.
For another… his mood right now was absolutely fantastic.
In his mind, the System interface glowed a cheerful gold.
[Commission: Do You Believe in Propagation? (Complete)]
[Rating: ...??? Can't be bothered to calculate. Just maxing it out for the big man!]
[Rewards:
(1) 420 Crystals.
(2) Limit-Break Transformation Card Set — Tom and Jerry
(3) Title: Simulated Universe Terminator
]
Ding!
The deposit chime was music from heaven.
Seeing those glittering 420 Crystals, Caelus nodded in satisfaction. Setting aside the staged companion missions, this was the largest single-task payout he had ever received.
This one haul pushed his Crystal reserves past the 2,000 mark for the first time, reaching an unprecedented 2,246.
After clearing the Aether Front championship mission, his stockpile had already sat at 1,600-plus.
The reason he'd held off pulling was, first, that things had been hectic lately — he'd been spinning like a top.
And second, Jarilo-VI had finally clawed its way onto a stable track. If his bad-luck Qi flared up mid-pull and dragged in some assortment of weird ghouls and gremlins to wreck the newborn Jarilo-VI…
That would be bad.
"Holy crap!"
When he read the second reward, Caelus shuddered with excitement head to toe, and his hips bucked upward on reflex.
That buck was no small matter. It bounced the Herta puppet sitting astride him — cheeks puffed, teeth grinding out "80! 80! 80!" — straight up into the air.
"You still want to do it?! Not happening!"
"Herta's little doll doesn't have one either! Doesn't have anything at all!!"
Herta let out a twisted, berserk, thoroughly meme-worthy howl, and swung the hammer harder than ever.
And right then, without the slightest warning, the chaotic office went silent — as if someone had hit mute, every scrap of noise vanishing at once.
Stelle, Caelus, the raging Herta, Asta, Ruan Mei, Screwllum — every one of them lifted their heads toward the office ceiling in the same instant.
There was… nothing there.
Yet all of them felt it, perfectly clearly.
An invisible route, like the will of the universe itself — a waterfall boring through dimensions — came crashing down onto the Caelus who was currently being ridden by Herta.
Hummmm——!
That familiar sense of power flooded every limb and every bone in Caelus's body, and the expression on his face turned utterly magnificent.
"This is… Propagation?!"
He had stepped onto the Path of Propagation.
In the Simulated Universe, Tayzzyronth had died beneath that broken-beyond-reason skill Caelus had stacked together out of the Swarm of an entire cosmos.
In the real world, the Swarm King had likewise been absent for over a hundred thousand years.
In that long-ago Swarm Disaster, the Swarm King had been hammered to pieces by Qlipoth.
The Swarm had tried to trade away the right of reproduction in exchange for a chance at survival — an act that turned its back on the very foundation of the Path, and left the Swarm King's power withering.
Or was it the other way around: the Swarm King took a crippling blow first, [Propagation] was diluted, and only then was the Swarm forced to turn away?
The causality is no longer possible to untangle.
Either way, the Swarm King's dormancy is an indisputable fact.
Yes — dormancy. The Swarm King had never truly and completely fallen.
Once a Path has been opened, unless it is annexed by a broader Path — the way [Order] was absorbed by [Harmony] —
then even if the Aeon falls, the Path itself continues flowing through the universe. Beauty, for instance.
Living beings can still set foot on these "masterless" Paths. It's simply that no Emanator will ever again be born from them.
In theory a living being could, through the most extreme practice of a Path's ideal, press deeper and deeper until reaching Emanator-level. The odds were just a teeny-tiny bit slim.
In the Simulated Universe, Caelus hadn't merely become a Propagation Emanator — once Tayzzyronth granted him full authority, he had been promoted outright to Propagation Commander, ruler of the Swarm.
And bear in mind: the Aeons in the Simulated Universe are tightly bound to the source of the Paths in the real universe.
The moment Tayzzyronth formally invested Caelus with an Emanator's authority inside the Simulated Universe, the [Propagation] Path of the real universe should, in theory, have produced Resonance with him and thrown its doors wide open.
But with the real Swarm King dormant, plus the Simulated Universe's peculiar rate of time, plus the enormous energy turbulence generated by the subsequent brawl among the gods — layer upon layer of factors had made the real universe's Path feedback lag, like a network transmission on a bad signal, by just a little while.
Herta's expression shifted.
She could feel the power of Propagation on Caelus directly.
It was like sitting on a hard, red-hot cushion… so hot!
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