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

The camera zooms out during the live stream.

Hellstar is approaching a dwarf planet on the outer edge of the solar system.

The dwarf planet is about 900 kilometers in diameter and its surface is covered with a thick layer of ice, which gleams with a cold white light under the weak sunlight.

Hellstar didn't even slow down when it passed by.

The main rift that traverses the celestial body opened slightly, and the membrane at its edge rolled outward, revealing something that was both unexpected and perfectly logical.

Tongue.

Its slow, heavy ascent from the depths of the fissure defied the laws of vacuum physics.

There is no air, no sound, and no resistance in the universe.

But the trajectory of that tongue's movement clearly carried a huge, irresistible inertia, like something so massive that it itself needed to move carefully.

The tongue is not red.

In the vacuum of space, under direct light without any atmospheric scattering, it appears as a color between dark purple and dark brown.

Its surface is covered with dense wrinkles and grooves.

The scale of those folds is too large.

Even the smallest ravine is large enough to contain an entire Himalayas.

The deepest central groove extends from the tip of the tongue all the way to the base of the tongue. If measured on a global scale, its depth is about thirty times that of the Mariana Trench.

As for the width of the tongue.

In the live stream, Shen Jue kept a reference image of Earth in the lower right corner of the screen.

The small blue and white sphere floated there quietly, with a diameter of 12,742 kilometers.

The width of that tongue is 0.8 times the diameter of the Earth.

It is 10,000 kilometers wide.

A tongue, about 80% the diameter of the Earth, slowly emerges from a crack that runs across the celestial body.

Its length has not yet been fully revealed.

The root of the tongue remained buried in the darkness deep within the crevice, with only the tip and the front half of the tongue exposed to the starlight.

The exposed portion alone is already over 30,000 kilometers long.

If this exposed part of the tongue were straightened and placed on Earth, it could stretch from the North Pole to the South Pole and then circle back from the South Pole, with the excess part able to circle half a circle again.

The tip of the tongue is not sharp, but rather a rounded, obtuse angle.

The edges of the tongue are slightly upturned, and the wrinkles on its surface are finer than those on other parts, giving it a fingerprint-like texture under starlight.

The textures extend outwards in concentric circles, with the outermost circle having a diameter of approximately two thousand kilometers, equivalent to the east-west span of the Australian continent.

And the way this tongue moves.

It is licking.

The tip of his tongue slowly swept across the surrounding void, the movement carrying a violent languor, like a giant beast just awakened from hibernation, probing the surrounding scents with its tongue.

Each time the tip of the tongue changes direction, the grooves between the folds change, and the walls of the deepest grooves squeeze against each other, generating a force strong enough to crush any known substance.

If any planet unfortunately exists in the path swept by the tip of the tongue.

It will be directly crushed into a thin pancake by the taste papillae on the surface of the tongue, and then swallowed into the depths of the folds in the next instant.

The camera zoomed in close enough to clearly see the surface of the tongue.

It was covered with them.

The raised structures are not arranged neatly, but rather exhibit a disordered order unique to natural organs.

The smallest mastoid diameter is about 20 kilometers, which is equivalent to the area of ​​a medium-sized city.

The largest ones are found on the edge of the tongue, resembling fungiform papillae, with a diameter of over 150 kilometers, and their bases occupy an area equivalent to the entire land area of ​​Switzerland.

They are wriggling.

Each papillae were moving extremely slowly and autonomously, like a primeval forest covering the surface of the tongue.

Every "tree" is a living tactile organ.

The tip of the mastoid process splits open from time to time, revealing a dense network of smaller filamentous structures inside.

Each filament is approximately several hundred meters in diameter and can extend for several kilometers in length.

They swayed slowly in the vacuum, like the tentacles of some deep-sea creature, probing for any possible chemical signals.

The entire surface of the tongue was covered with a layer of viscous liquid.

In a vacuum, a liquid should boil and vaporize instantly.

But this layer of liquid is not.

It flowed slowly through the folds of the tongue, reflecting a wet sheen under the starlight.

The liquid is transparent, but with an extremely pale amber hue, and is so viscous that it is almost solid at the edges.

It seeps out from the gaps between the mastoids and flows down along the folds of the tongue.

When it flows to the edge of the tongue, it will be pulled back by some force field and seep back into the grooves of the tongue surface.

When the tongue is exposed to a vacuum, extremely tiny bubbles will rise from the surface of this liquid.

The moment each bubble bursts, it creates a very faint ripple of gravitational waves in the surrounding space.

The extent of those ripples, if placed on Earth, would be equivalent to the energy released by an 8-magnitude earthquake.

On Hellstar's tongue, it was just a bubble.

The main rift on Hellstar continues to open.

The base of the tongue begins to move outward from the depths of the fissure.

When the tongue is fully extended.

Humans have finally seen its full picture.

A tongue nearly 50,000 kilometers long emerged completely from a fissure in a star only 1.5 times the diameter of Earth. The tongue couldn't possibly be completely contained within the fissure, meaning it spent most of its time coiled inside the hellish star, like a snake stuffed into a box much smaller than its body.

Now it's sticking out.

It floats in the void of the universe, its 50,000-kilometer length winding against the backdrop of starlight, its tongue covered with papillae hundreds of kilometers in diameter.

The tentacles at the tips of the papillae swayed slowly in the vacuum, as if savoring the taste of the vacuum.

The Earth in the lower right corner of the screen is still quietly rotating.

Comparing that tongue to the Earth yields an intuitive conclusion: if the tip of the tongue were pointed at the Earth, the entire Earth could be seen from the very tip of the tongue.

It simply lifts up the rounded area at the very front, which is only two thousand kilometers wide.

And that dwarf planet.

The appearance and disappearance of Hellstar's tongue took less than a few seconds.

The planets of our solar system are no different from lambs to the slaughter in the face of Hell Star.

This living planet, one and a half times the diameter of Earth and covered with mouthparts, is cutting into the Yellow Solar System in an almost straight trajectory.

Its target was eerily precise; its trajectory locked onto a blue sphere.

Earth.

The camera zooms in.

Earth and Hellstar were placed side by side on the screen.

On the left is Earth: an ordinary planet composed of rocks, oceans, and an atmosphere, its surface covered with traces of life, quietly rotating in the universe for 4.6 billion years.

On the right is Hell Star: a series of living planets half the size of it, covered in mouths.

In terms of proportion, Hellstar is approximately 3.375 times the size of Earth.

This means that if you put it next to Earth, Earth looks like a big piece of snack that a child is holding in his hand.

The proportions in the image are brutally clear.

The main rift that runs across the north and south poles of Hellstar is 19,000 kilometers long.

The diameter of the Earth is 12,742 kilometers.

When the main fissure is fully open, the opening is wide enough to easily swallow the entire Earth, and the teeth on both sides won't even touch the outer edge of the atmosphere.

The Earth above that fissure looks like a glass marble placed in front of the mouth of a deep-sea anglerfish.

The fish had its mouth open, the edges of which were covered with sharp, inward-curving teeth, and deep inside was a darkness devoid of light.

The anglerfish's mouth is closed.

The marble disappeared.

This is all that human civilization will face.

This is an astronomical disaster that modern human civilization cannot explain.

Hellstar was just passing through and casually licked up a blue planet that happened to be blocking its way, like candy.

It's like a person picking a wild fruit from the roadside while walking; it won't even change its stride or speed because of it.

It means eating.

The hellish planet eating Earth is no different from a human eating a piece of candy.

After Earth is devoured by Hellstar, the sun will continue to burn, but the solar system will be nothing but ruins.

The traces of human existence will be erased in an instant.

Everything on Earth, the billions of years of life's evolutionary history, all the history, all the memories, all the love and hate, all the wars and peace, all the laughter and tears accumulated by human civilization over tens of thousands of years.

It will become a trivial chewing motion in the mouth of Hellstar the moment it closes its mouth.

The live broadcast froze on Earth for a full five seconds.

For five seconds, all the screens around the world were filled with that blue and white planet.

It was still turning, the clouds were still churning, and the ocean was still reflecting the sun's rays.

The Antarctic ice sheet was blindingly white under the sunlight, a tropical cyclone was slowly rotating at the equator, the outline of the continents in the Northern Hemisphere was clearly visible, and the lights of the city clusters flickered faintly in the night hemisphere.

Everything is still running normally.

It's as if nothing will happen.

Then the live stream switched back to the scene of the sea of ​​blood and flesh.

Shen Jue stood in front of the ever-growing tower of flesh and blood, with endless people climbing, blossoming, solidifying, and building heights behind him.

Shen Jue's expression was calm to the point of being cruel, with even a faint smile playing on his lips.

"Seventy-two hours," Shen Jue said.

"Hellstar will enter the solar system."

Shen Jue looked up at the towering flesh and blood tower that had already reached into the clouds.

The Tomie flowers on the tower are still in full bloom, their translucent, petal-like membranes trembling slightly in the wind, and the sap flowing down the tower, solidifying into new blood vessel-like textures.

The spire is almost piercing the clouds and is reaching for even greater heights.

Looking up from the ground, the entire tower resembles the spine of some kind of creature, climbing segment by segment toward the sky.

Each section is a flesh and blood structure formed by countless Tomie's body.

"About three seconds."

"The entire process, from Hellstar opening its mouth to closing it, lasts about three seconds."

"This means all resistance on Earth, all of humanity's nuclear weapons, all its armies, and all of its civilization's achievements."

"It will be completely destroyed in three seconds."

Humanity worldwide was gripped by a deathly fear, followed by prayers and supplications for Shen Jue's promise to save the world.

The emotional responses of billions of people are piling up.

Shen Jue turned to the camera.

The sun rose from behind him, its rays spreading out like a deity's cloak.

He raised his right hand, and the golden-red deity with the female silhouette raised her hand in sync, as if grasping an invisible thread of time in the void.

"Now that all the necessary elements have been gathered..."

Shen Jue flipped his palm and pulled down.

"Time is about to accelerate."