Soul of Searing Steel

Panda Novel

The cosmic body that ended all things assumed form under Joshua’s control, the unrestrainable singularity ready to go.

And just before the black hole event horizon extended to himself, Joshua briskly flung it out like a spring, shooting the black sphere that was like no other at the Evil God of Famine. However, that was the moment when two equally powerful Chaotic presences burst out: the presences which stagnated and divided all things respectively surged, as if to stop the black hole from advancing or to disintegrate the energy contained within.

Beside Famine, a warped Chaos cloud that resembled a clock and a mosaic halation appeared at once, shrouding the scenery of the universe in blurred mist around them.

It was the Evil God of Limbo and the Evil God of Divide.

However, it was too late. The Triple Curtain who had been tagging along behind Joshua suddenly burst out, the silver-blue psionic sphere having prepared itself in the moment when Joshua flung out the black hole. Its smooth form that resembled a model of the universe shifted, with countless geometrical forms protruding from its surface right next to each other, and by then, countless vortices had already manifested. Like a sandstorm, billions of psionic spawns streamed out from within, assembling into a form in space.

There was a sphere resembling an eye, a halo, a perfect hexagonal pillar, and a rotating triangle—the psionic spawns connected with each other to form a huge sprawling net, fluctuating amidst the gales. Then, after processing possibilities at 10 to the power of 120 times in a split second, it attacked.

[Elimination form: Comprehensive purge protocols activated, Reality Rewriting Terminal now online.]

Aside from divine power and Chaos malice, Psi was perhaps the most ancient power that was universal to all intelligent life. There were diverse ways to apply it in combat, but the most basic and strongest utility was using it to affect reality.

One such application was virtual reality, or indeed, creating a virtual world.

Actual heat, gravity, and spatial distortion are conducting within the emptiness of space as if a star truly exists there, surrounded by planets with life…but is there truly a star in the hollowness of vacuum?

Who cares? If a champion claims that there is, then the universe has to agree.

In the first place, the boundary between the virtual and reality is blurred—indeed, that question is simply invalid to the manipulator.

In the instant that Divide and Limbo made their move, they had been thrown inside a three light-seconds-wide virtual dimensional bubble separated from everything beyond by the Triple Curtain. In turn, the bubble darted away at 99% of lightspeed to both left and right sides, directly throwing the two Evil Gods away from the battlegrounds unreasonably and interrupting their reinforcement.

Nonetheless, the virtual dimensional bubble lasted only a brief twenty-seven seconds, although it would develop spatial distortion to prevent warping, which kept the two Evil Gods away for just over one minute.

But just little over a minute was enough.

During the first second, the black hole darted towards the Evil God of Famine, which despite its dullness, knew that it could not take the brunt of that blow. With a flap of its scarlet crystal wings, the energy equilibrium in the surrounding space was broken—absorbing energy to reach its full power, the Evil God created barrenness, emptying the seas of energy in space while anti-matter particles clashed with normal particles, destroying each other before being converted into powers that the Evil God ruthlessly absorbed.

Hiss… hiiiiss—

The most minute of particles disintegrated as everything fell to absolute zero. Energy of vacuum was drained and turned into the elegant tip of the Evil God’s body, with hundreds of bright spots shining upon its wings. By its skull, a clear and charging energy crystal structure was revealed after it opened its jaw.

In the fourth second, hundreds of red beams as wide as planets formed a single dense net of energy alongside a bright colorless surge in less than picoseconds. It covered the Void as far as the eye could see, but as the radiance rapidly stretched forward, it was naturally distorted by the event horizon of the black hole.

The luminosity was as if a supernova had erupted point-blank over a photosensitive cell, or indeed, a dense fiery sea of plasma on the outer layer of the black hole. Either way, that output diverted the trail of the black hole Joshua shot with gravity, whirling as it brushed past another corner of space. Still, as the gravitational waves of distortion that combined with heat that could vaporize all things shot past Famine’s body, a part of its elaborate wings and a chunk of its limbs were shaved off.

During the tenth second—the black hole would roam the universe at sub-lightspeed for countless years. It might have affected nothing, just as it might have affected a living planet some millions of years later or become a wonder to the universe—but now, it was the weapon and offense of great champions.

The Evil God of Famine was still preparing its counterattack despite being maimed. The scarlet light over its shell which had absorbed supernova energy was diminishing, while its bodies became crystalline, making the dark nebula at its core even more dazzling. One could feel Chaotic Malice—a power that normal intelligent beings could not comprehend at all and actually deviated from fundamental supernatural powers of the Multiverse—being driven to full capacity, eating away at Stellaris while creating impossible absolute zero in its own body.

During the seventeenth second, the early shape of so-called Famine was that of an insectoid civilization that had exhausted the resources in their desolate world, as it was located in the Void beyond the galaxy. It was not connected to any physical realms, and after having devoured everything in its world, the last individual of their race died. The remains of their world and civilization was thus reborn as Chaotic Malice, becoming the eternal despair of hunger which roamed the Void.

There was no telling how many times had passed since the first Famine assimilated countless other form of famines, molding primitive physical needs to an essence of entry and no exit.

And that was just like absolute zero, the ability to absorb almost endless external energy and yet not releasing even half an iota. Such was the present essence of the Evil God of Famine.

It would have been easy for the entity to destroy a world if it succeeded, and it was how the revered name of ‘World Eater’ came to be.

But Joshua would not have allowed it to succeed.

During the twenty-fourth second, a massive ever-enlarging ring appeared behind the warrior, just like ripples extending after a drip on of a fluid surface, shaping into a halo that covered the world. Joshua had started to arm himself right after the Evil God of Famine had pushed away his black hole by absorbing space energies to fire a burst of stellar beam—electromagnetic force, gravity, and strong nuclear force along with almost every physical force was instantly dominated by the Giant God. Hence, Joshua led the great halo and followed the trail of the dimensional rift that his black hole had created, distorting space to attack his foe beyond the speed of light.

Thus, within the twenty-fourth second as well, the seemingly-sturdy crystal body was shattered as the Four-Armed Giant God crashed into it. It broke apart into insignificant particles of energy wafting through the universe as one flickering radiance shot directly to the heart of the Dark Galaxy.

During the thirty-third second, they soon crashed into a planetary system: a sparse nebula with seven hundred stars. Joshua’s sheer mass thus caused the unstable equilibrium of the nebula to collapse, while one star after another was drawn like a school of fish towards the Giant God. At that very moment, Joshua ceased his acceleration and even deliberately twisted the dimensions to allow the out-of-control stars crash onto his body in intermittent supernova eruptions.

Amidst that greatest of blaze, Joshua held the incessantly struggling Evil God of Famine with two hands in a vice grip. Then, sensing that it was still charging its power to create the absolute zero Chaos core, he put his two other hands together—partial stellar mass and space itself was heated to over 17 billion degrees or higher, with atoms and atoms colliding and collapsing in the tremors. Quark itself was no longer bound, but flowed freely in space as if it was liquid

“Famine, I’ve once fantasized about fighting you—but I’ve never expected you to only be capable of that much.”

Joshua punched and shattered Famine’s brain to exposed the twenty-four-sided crystal core within, aimed true at the dark nebula within as he stuffed his quark gluon fireball into Famine’s body.

“Try this.”

Moreover, Joshua even handily stuffed a few pulsars orbiting himself inside—their repelling magnetic field escalated into a terrific electromagnetic decimation, with gravity catapulting and shooting them off in separate directions. Even so, Joshua pressed them together as if he was throwing two rapidly moving, indestructible, and searing rubber balls into a glass fishbowl filled with dynamite.

There could only be one outcome.

In the thirty-fourth second, the twenty-four-sided crystal exploded resoundingly, sending Joshua flying past the sporadic cluster of cosmic bodies that, in turn, erupted in a chain reaction too. There was no telling how long had past when an endlessly-extending supermassive nebula finally appeared, formed from the collision of hundreds of stars and infinite cosmic substance which had burst out, blowing away everything around them.

Meanwhile, a massive black hole was rapidly whirling at the center where the nebula had been. Blazing light surrounded its gravitational well, unleashing unusually bright radiance.

The dark nebula diminished.

At that instant, almost one-sixth of Chaos spawns in Stellaris and the behemoths that resembled crystals all vanished, breaking down into different-sized chunks and energy at the same exact moment, creating a mysterious lightspeed transcendent effect.

In fact, across the many other galaxies of the Multiverse, the civilizations who were fighting their hardest watched in shock as the rampaging Chaos spawns were reduced to dust.

[Evil God of Famine: movement—ceased.]

But now was not the time to be concerned with that.

Inside Joshua’s world, the massive tremor stirred the dimensions. The nine floating continents in which the Heroic Spirits of different civilizations no longer inhabited had crushed the obelisks at the edge of the world into pieces, while some silver fairies who had volunteered to maintain the cycles of the world and were safely kept inside shelters cried out in surprise as they watched the great calamity. Still, they knew that the destruction was limited to the surface, and as long as the shelter was still intact, their ruler was well—or at most, dazed.

The battle was far from over.

In the darkness of space, Joshua promptly turned towards the seeming emptiness while restoring his damaged parts.

His eyes were somber.

A dozen seconds ago, indescribably unusual mist was streaming out of a virtual dimensional bubble from a nearby location—that is, from a galactic perspective. It could not be viewed in normal dimensional perspective, since Evil Gods could not be bound by ordinary dimensional structures despite existing physically, and the gap between their power and the Sublimator was too profound.

In fact, the Triple Curtain already expected that the simple Reality Rewriting Terminal could not restrain the World Eaters.

[Warning: External defenses activated, reality reshuffling system activated, probability engine pressure increasing—force clearance, establishing sole observer: Triple Curtain.]

[Full Capacity: Implementing self-set virtual world coverage, arbitrary basic principles implementation ready.]

The entire Psyweb of Stellaris flickered in a profound and complex manner. Just as Limbo and Divide escaped the dimensional bubble and prepared to attack, they were once again restrained by the self-set virtual dimension created from psionic reshuffling.

In other words, it was a simulated sandbox world, the Boundary of Curtains which was maintained by Psi along with random universal constants.

The Evil Gods, considered the anomaly of the Multiverse, would now have to face everything that was distorted: the speed of light, electromagnetism, and even gravity.

A realm that was completely abnormal appeared in the appropriately broken world.