Both start in hell: but their talents are multiplied a hundredfold.

Shen Jue raised his hand and made a light sweeping motion in the air.

The torrent of comments froze on the screen for a moment, then spun and disappeared at the edge of the screen like water from a drained pool.

Billions of screens around the world went dark for less than half a second, and when they came back on, the images had completely changed.

It was no longer that sea of ​​flesh and blood churning in Tomie.

No longer those endlessly climbing, deformed type I.

It is no longer that tower of flesh and blood that keeps rising higher in the slime.

What appeared on the screen was a vast expanse of space.

The real deep space.

Humans have never seen deep space with this level of clarity.

This is not a beautiful nebula image rendered after a long exposure like those from the Hubble Telescope, nor is it a promotional photo released by NASA that has undergone color enhancement.

This is the image that is directly seen by a pair of eyes.

Visual signals, thousands of times sharper than the most advanced optical observation equipment in humankind, were converted into a format that could be displayed on the screen by Shen Jue's biomass server array and forcibly stuffed into the pixels of every screen.

The clarity was so high that it almost caused physical discomfort.

The stars shone with the sharpness of needles, and the textures of the nebula were clearly visible.

The galaxies in the background are densely packed together, each one an independent point of light, without blurring, halo, or any loss caused by atmospheric scattering.

It was as if every viewer had been suddenly pulled off the Earth's surface and thrown into the vacuum of space.

Looking directly into the depths of the universe with eyes that are not human.

The image is moving slowly.

The viewpoint is being focused in a certain direction.

At first, the viewers were unaware of what they were seeing.

The dark red crack running across the center of the image looks like the edge of some kind of nebula.

Or it could be color difference caused by lens distortion.

But as the viewpoint zoomed in and the aspect ratio was adjusted, the crack became clearer and clearer.

It is not a nebula.

It is moving.

As it moved along its path, the starlight in the background went out one by one.

It wasn't obscured, it wasn't swallowed up.

It's gone out.

As if wiped from the universe by something, the light of those stars vanished silently the moment they passed through the crack, leaving not even a last glimmer of light.

The dark red rift trailed an absolutely dark shadow, drawing a straight black line across the sea of ​​stars.

"This is live footage from three minutes ago," Shen Jue's voice-over rang out, his tone calm.

"The signal has been processed by me, so what you are seeing is an enhanced visible light image."

To put it simply...

Shen Jue paused for a second and said, "I've brightened its appearance a bit for you."

"Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to see it at all."

The camera zooms in further.

The dark red crack began to reveal its outline.

It is not a line.

It is a mouth.

A mouth so large that it renders human astronomy completely ineffective.

In the upper left corner of the image, a gas giant is slowly rotating into view.

Judging from its size and the number of satellites around it.

Astronomers could probably determine within seconds that this was a planet with a mass about three times that of Jupiter.

It belongs to an undetected dwarf star system on the outer edge of the solar system.

But these judgments are no longer meaningful.

Because Hellstar is passing through it.

Dark red cracks.

The structure that Shen Jue called the "mouth" slowly opened as it approached the gas giant planet.

The sheer width of the opening caused a momentary mental blank in all the viewers.

The orbital speed of a planet is extremely fast on a cosmic scale, but the word "fast" loses its meaning in the face of the closing mouth of Hellstar.

The speed at which that mouth closed captured the planet.

The atmosphere of a gas giant is the first thing to come into contact with the edge of its mouth.

The dense gas, mainly composed of hydrogen and helium, underwent a change that cannot be explained by physics the moment it came into contact with the dark red fissure.

They turned into light.

A flash of light, hundreds of millions of times brighter than a solar flare, exploded at the contact surface, and the planet's atmosphere rolled up layer by layer like the peel of an orange.

Each layer of gas stripped away was instantly converted into pure energy, which was then ejected in all directions with the intensity of a gamma-ray burst.

The planet's metallic core began to collapse under the pressure of its mouthparts closing.

It's not gravitational collapse, nor is it a physical process like a supernova explosion that requires reaching the Chandrasekhar limit to trigger.

It's more like some external force forcibly crushed it.

That solid core, thousands of times larger than Earth, was crushed like a hard candy by the maw of Hellstar.

The shattered structure spreads from the core outwards layer by layer, with each crack silently opening in the vacuum.

The molten metal that gushed out was absorbed the instant it came into contact with the inner wall of the mouthpiece, leaving not a trace of residue.

The entire process lasted for approximately several tens of seconds.

A gas giant planet was reduced to drifting debris in the void of space within tens of seconds.

Just as a guest leisurely heading to a banquet grabs a large piece of soft cake and stuffs it into his mouth, the Hell Star, which feeds on planets, easily devours that gas giant.

It's as if this gas giant had never existed.

The location of that planetary system is now just an absolute void, where even the cosmic microwave background radiation has disappeared.

A black hole remains on the screen, slowly being filled by the surrounding starlight.

Shen Jue had turned off the bullet comment function, but if there were bullet comments at this moment, it would probably be a blank screen.

Viewers around the world remained silent.

The video continued.

Hellstar is still moving.

Its speed is not fast on a cosmic scale, but its trajectory is too clear.

The image clearly shows it trailing an absolutely dark tail, approaching the outer region of the solar system along a near-perfect straight line.

At the very front of its path, Pluto's faint reflection was moving slowly, like a small pebble that had accidentally rolled onto a train track.

No one noticed Pluto.

Because something even more captivating appeared in the scene.

Earth.

The camera was zoomed out at some point, or perhaps Shen Jue deliberately changed the viewing angle.

What is now shown is a complete panoramic view of the inner solar system.

Mars gleamed with a rusty light on the left, Venus's clouds reflected a blinding white light, and Mercury clung to the edge of the sun like an almost invisible gray dot.

And Earth, that blue and white planet from which human civilization has never left since the first amino acid, is quietly suspended in the very center of the image.

The perspective is still zooming out.

The entire solar system begins to shrink, the outer Kuiper Belt becomes a blurry halo, and the boundary of the Oort Cloud is faintly visible at the edge of the image.

The Hellstar appears in the frame from above, its dark red rift pointing directly at the ecliptic plane of the solar system, in the direction of Earth's orbit.

At this scale, the outline of Hellstar can finally be observed in its entirety.

"I know what you're thinking," Shen Jue's voice rang out again, his tone carrying a relaxed quality that sent chills down one's spine.

"You're wondering how big it is, right? I'll give you a point of reference."

In the image, a light blue marker line appears around the edge of the solar system.

Those were the auxiliary lines that Shen Jue superimposed on the image, marking the gravitational boundaries of the solar system.

Within this area, everyone could see a dark red outline slowly approaching.

Then the camera abruptly cuts to the next scene.

Two celestial bodies appeared simultaneously in the image.

On the left is Earth, blue and white, quietly suspended against the black background of space, like a finely crafted glass ball.

The planet on the right is Hellstar.

Its diameter is 1.5 times that of the Earth.

One point five times.

This number, taken out of context, isn't alarming.

Jupiter's diameter is eleven times that of Earth, and the Sun's diameter is one hundred and nine times that of Earth.

On a cosmic scale, 1.5 times is nothing more than two roughly the same size stone spheres placed side by side, which would even look rather unremarkable.

But everyone saw what happened next.

Hellstar is not a planet; it has never been an ordinary planet.

Its surface is not rock, not gas, not any form of matter known to humankind.

The dark red substance was slowly wriggling, like a membrane covering the surface of some living thing.

Countless tiny cracks appeared on the mucous membrane, each crack slowly opening and closing, each opening and closing revealing the absolutely dark depths inside.

Those gaps are mouths.

They're all mouths.

The entire surface of Hell Star is densely covered with mouths of varying sizes.

The largest, dark red rift stretched across the entire planet, from the northernmost point determined by human orientation all the way to the southernmost point, resembling the main mouthparts of a hellish planet for feeding.

The remaining mouthparts are arranged on both sides of the dark red rift, presenting an eerie sense of disorder.

The thing looked like the segments of some kind of deep-sea worm, or the unclosed neural tube of some kind of vertebrate embryo.

And all these mouthparts, from the largest slit to the smallest gap, are opening and closing at different frequencies.

That's a rhythm.

It's not a random opening and closing, but a rhythm that follows a certain pattern, almost like breathing.

Each opening and closing of the mouthparts is coordinated with the peristalsis of the mucous membrane on the surface of the star.

Each contraction of the mucous membrane absorbs starlight from a certain direction, causing the starlight to distort into a strange halo at the edge of the hellish star.

Hellstar doesn't look like a celestial body in the universe.

It looks like an internal organ floating in a vacuum, without a fixed shape.

A living, hungry viscera, half the size of the Earth.

It's like a monster born from the most insane nightmare of all mankind.

Hellstar is approaching the solar system.