Tonight, Alice joins the hunt.

Chapter Ninety-Five: The War in Heaven - The Fall of Gods (Part 1)

The collapse of the universe was accompanied by the stagnation of timelines, but the cessation of timelines was only a minor part of the whole. When Patchouli observed this phenomenon, her physical body was still in the region of the Eighth Reality, while a small part of her will was cast into the void, monitoring the anomalies that might arise in the various worlds online.

Then, she witnessed the destruction of a remote worldline.

At the same time, multi-layered destruction covers every blind spot.

From an energy perspective, it is the heat death of the universe. The starry sky on that remote world line no longer expands, and the universe no longer expands. From a location unknown in the distance from the Milky Way, heat dissipates and vanishes at a terrifying speed even from the perspective of a true god, disappearing without a trace but undeniably vanishing from the cosmic boundary of that world line, and then rapidly spreading towards Earth, the center of the universe.

From a material perspective, it's a decay of matter itself; vast swathes of material structures truly at the edge of the universe disappear. They don't return to primordial chaos, nor do they transform into other structures. They simply return to nothingness, and even the concept of 'nothingness' itself begins to disintegrate. All structures, all records, vanish completely; no matter what attempts are made, no trace is left.

From a spatial perspective, it's a disorder of spatial structure. Except for the Milky Way region, which initially maintained some order, many star systems outside the Milky Way simultaneously experienced violent distortions. The result is that the gradually disintegrating cosmic wasteland is no different from any random galaxy next to the Milky Way. Since there is no distance between them, destruction is imminent.

—This is why Patchouli was the first to notice this change. As the ruler of the Andromeda system, she had seized the concept of the Andromeda system in this universe. She noticed this because of the disappearance of the Andromeda system on a certain remote world online, and by the time she recounted the news on the Chaldea stealth ship, the number of Andromeda systems that had vanished like dust had already reached thousands.

Finally, there's the decay on the temporal level—if time is likened to a flowing river, then the decay of time is like the simultaneous loss of one or more sections of the river, both upstream and downstream. The loss downstream means that a person or thing will skip the processes of aging, death, decay, and transformation in a minute or a few hours, jumping directly to thousands or tens of thousands of years later, or even directly to the end of all things. The loss upstream, on the other hand, means that the specified thing never existed in the first place!

To give an analogy, it's like the simultaneous generation of the phenomenon of human reason burning across the entire universe.

The simultaneous decay of time, space, matter, and energy means that this process will unfold from its inception to its end in an extremely brief interval—heat death and matter loss will occur simultaneously in various parts of the universe, and the destruction of the timeline means that it is not just 'simultaneous,' but that destruction will occur simultaneously at multiple points in time. The resulting phenomenon is that when Patchouli noticed this worldline, she simply blinked and the entire worldline vanished silently. Soon after, she observed the same kind of annihilation in many other worldlines!

How many world lines are there in a single universe? — Countless.

From the moment Patchouli discovered this information until she recounted it here, how many timelines disappeared in her narration? —Infinite.

A part of infinity, yet still infinity. Although she didn't know exactly how many Aleph-zeros there were, Patchouli knew that she had observed the annihilation of the Andromeda Galaxy alone, numbering in the thousands—now probably close to ten thousand—and not only that. As she revealed this information, she also witnessed the collapse of the cosmic frontier in the current world!

“I can’t give a specific time because the time structure is also becoming unstable. I also can’t calculate how much mass the universe has lost. After all, the size of a single universe is, in a sense, infinite,” Patchouli said calmly. “I can only give a rough estimate, which is that the time required for this universe to completely collapse, as a mortal, should not exceed three days.”

"It won't be late, but it will happen sooner. The solar system, as the core of the stage, will maintain order until everything is over, but once that line is crossed, everything will vanish in an instant." She gave a concluding statement. "The battle for the Dao among the sages is over, the battle between the reincarnators will also end, all the plans will come to a close, and the final outcome will fall into the hands of the last victor."

Her words rang clearly in the main control room, and were clearly understood by every reincarnator present: the fate of this single universe had been sealed. And the end of all things returning to nothingness was also a foregone conclusion.

There was a few seconds of silence in the main control room.

Patchouli mentally added another four digits to the number of Fairy-type characters she had lost contact with.

"It's finally coming to an end." Zheng Zha was the first to break the silence. He shook his head, revealing a slightly sentimental expression. His eyes flickered with many thoughts, and finally, everything froze on the moment when the Central Continent Team landed on a frost-covered star.

"The Wandering Earth... Ha, this world is truly long enough." He couldn't help but shake his head. "I definitely need to take a proper vacation when I get back. It's just a story world, but it feels like I've lived through at least four..."

"But it was worth it, because our growth is worthy of everything we've experienced." Zhan Lan made a calculation gesture with her fingers. From The Wandering Earth to Like a Tree Grove, from Like a Tree Grove to a Misplaced Game of Life, and finally, everything came to an end in this Moon World. Upon closer inspection, there really are four worlds in total, and if the experiences of the group from Zhongzhou were compiled into a three-million-word travelogue, this section would probably take up a third of the book.

She shook her head slightly. Advancing from the third tier to the edge of the fourth tier across four worlds wasn't exactly slow, strictly speaking. But as one of the true veterans of the Central Continent Team… she felt she might still be lacking something.

Whether it's a tiny bit or a tiny fraction, the gap between the extraordinary and the true god is indeed enormous—and just as Zhan Lan was lamenting her own lack of effort, Xiao Honglu asked a question that many people present actually wanted to know the answer to.

"Sister Patchouli, now that the battle is over..." He tried to choose his words carefully, but ultimately decided against beating around the bush. "...So who won in the end?"

“I don’t know.” It wasn’t Patchouli who answered, but Sirin. “We don’t know who won, or how they decided the outcome. We don’t know whether one of them or a mixture was left in the end—we know nothing, and we shouldn’t know anything.”

“Because the difference in levels is too great, knowing these secrets would be of no use to us except to cause harm,” Patchouli replied. “All we need to know is that the final outcome of this struggle is irrelevant to us—at least not to us now. As for whether we in the future will know about it and what our attitude will be towards it… there is no need to consider that now.”

"All we need now is to end this war... In fact, we've already won more than enough. The tide has turned, and we've already gained enough."

Patchouli glanced around. Within her sight, there were no longer any members of the Middle Continent Team who had not reached the Transcendent realm. But when her gaze shifted to the distant Fourth Reality, she saw the purple crystals that filled the earth, and the colossal shadow of a god's corpse roaring towards the sky.

Ah, it's still a little flawed from the ideal result, but it doesn't matter.

Her gaze shifted slightly, looking back over a brief period of time while the timeline itself was still functioning—she saw the fall of the demon girl who called herself Yuzuriha Inori, the bound Temple of Time, and the only crack exposed from the endless radiance.

—Everything is going according to plan. Adam, who has climbed to the position of true god by relying on the Temple of Time, is destined to reveal his flaws when the timeline becomes unstable.

Then her gaze returned.

The others also understood the will expressed in her gaze.

"In other words, we just keep fighting and don't need to worry about anything else?" Zheng Zha tilted his head and asked. "But I don't think Adam is that stupid. He's not going to just sit there and wait for us to kill him."

“It doesn’t matter,” Patchouli shook her head. “It doesn’t matter if he ran away, or if Ex and Sesshouin Kiara both ran away. Because we have already won, and the only thing left is to what extent we want to win. Even if we stop now, it will only be a normal win for all three of us. Before that ‘happy ending’ is reached, we have one last chance.”

“Margot Lloyd.” Zheng Zha nodded. His form vanished silently, and the next moment, the 'cosmic flash' phenomenon that had covered most of the Milky Way galaxy immediately converged into this tiny solar system region!

The entire solar system was then completely covered by a blazing sea of ​​light!

The war, the war has reached its final act.

During Zheng Zha's previous battle with Ex, he had already captured every ray of light that Ex's true form had scattered into the galaxy. And when he used his great magic to gather all these rays of light within the solar system, these countless rays of light transformed into countless Exes, along with countless identical punches that landed squarely on Ex's right cheek!

All of Ex's incarnations were destroyed at this moment.

Her corrupted avatars then collapsed, turning the entire solar system into a boundless, radiant world!

Everything is light, everything is order. The ocean of light stabilizes the timeline within the solar system, and from this pure 'order of light' extends a pristine white hand that blots out the heavens!

The hand has five fingers, each fingernail corresponding to one of Ex's five gems. The abyss that Zheng Zha cleaved through the vast starry sky with a single strike was easily crushed by it, and the shattered Earth was less than one-fifth the size of its little fingernail compared to this arm!

Its essence is the light of order, and it will use its order to subdue Zheng Zha—

—Tear apart and shatter the imaginary ocean barrier surrounding Zheng Zha!

Chapter Ninety-Six: The War in Heaven - The Fall of Gods (Part 2)

The void shattered. From that moment on, no otherworldly realms existed in any sense within the solar system. The gods and their kingdoms, born from Earth's civilization, crumbled in an instant. Countless pale hands, overflowing from the ocean of imaginary numbers, emerged from the bodies of every kingdom and every deity—

—Then it was shattered into pieces amidst a dense, storm-like tide of slicing!

Light, light and cracks.

The existence of light widens the rift, drawing immense amounts of energy from the fissures of the sea of ​​imaginary numbers and transforming it into its own power. The even larger rift further increases its size. It expands, it tears, and its contents are thus revealed to the world!

It was a Bodhisattva with a thousand hands and a thousand eyes, existing not in any scripture, not recorded in any document. The moment it manifested, it clenched its thousand fists, and then—

—At the same instant, all the fist imprints slammed into the Temple of Time, which was still entangled with Zheng Zha's avatar in the split region of Earth!

No, it wasn't just the Bodhisattva's fist imprint. At this moment, even Ex's Hand of Order, Zheng Zha's Blade of Destruction and Opening, and even the shadow streams and blade tides that were almost invisible in the ocean of imaginary numbers just a moment ago, all changed direction and pointed towards the side where the Temple of Time was located!

The hand of order tore apart the order outside the temple. The blades of creation and destruction ripped apart the connections between the various parts of the temple.

A thousand fist imprints tore apart the pillars of many units of the temple, and then shadows and storms rushed in, crashing straight into the main hall where the core area of ​​the temple was located!

In an instant, the Temple of Time was torn to pieces. Its controller attempted to make the temple glow to escape the tragic situation of being besieged. However, the next moment, the glowing parts were covered by countless thin, writhing shadows, forcing it back into the physical world from its glowing state!

Zhao Zhuikong's form then emerged from inside the Temple of Time, and he thrust a dagger at Adam, who had lost most of his control over the Temple of Time in the core area of ​​the temple!

Then, Adam and the core area of ​​the Temple of Time vanished abruptly before Zhao Zhuikong's dagger touched his chest.

—A timeline jump—Adam finally used this power belonging to the true god before the collapse of the main world timeline of this pan-human history. And as he did so, Sirin and Patchouli exchanged a glance inside the Chaldea stealth ship.

Celine closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, it was billions of years into the future. The collapse of the universe had not yet reached this place; what appeared before her was the end of the solar system after countless ages—the moment when the sun, old and decaying, after going through the stages of main sequence star and red giant, would finally become a dwarf star. In this era, the expanding sun had already engulfed the boundary between Earth and Mars.

The sun in her eyes seemed to twitch as if it were alive—she knew what that meant—and then she reached out and lightly touched the edge of the aged sun.

And so, the last straw broke the camel's back.

The red giant collapsed, collapsing inward at a speed exceeding any calculation formula for celestial bodies. This phenomenon ultimately resulted in the Sun, which would have silently crumbled into a dwarf star, receiving the highest honor as a star, for its funeral would be a massive, devastating destruction that would engulf the entire galaxy!

Phototransformation!

A supernova explodes!

The sun, which should have been 250 times heavier to even have a chance of witnessing this astronomical phenomenon, collapsed into a tiny dot at an unimaginable speed in Sirin's understanding. It was a final destruction that transcended even the existence of matter itself, a destruction that transcended the interaction of four dimensions. From that tiny dot, light was born.

Pure light, expanding at a speed that did not exceed the speed limit of light, filled the original boundaries of the entire solar system.

Pure light signifies pure order, thus establishing a causal link between the future billions of years from now and the distant past.

Thus, Ex's form emerged from this pure sea of ​​ordered light. She pretended not to see Sirin, and Sirin pretended not to see her. And the instant the Temple of Time's leap reached this region, destruction manifested simultaneously, along with the will of the two true gods!

In an instant, the Temple of Time transformed into a Time God Cookie. The two true gods, anchored at the end of the timeline, then used this timeline coordinate to rewind time—their rewinding was accompanied by the timeline rewinding of the event 'the solar system turning into a hypernova explosion,' using this as their weapon and their home ground, they locked down all routes the Temple of Time could take to escape into the future.

At another point in time, Patchouli arrived at the primordial world—no, even before that, in the distant past, when the Milky Way was still a chaotic nebula. And at that point in time, the Andromeda Galaxy was also just an unformed nebula.

She arrived in the Andromeda Galaxy, and then she whispered to the nascent nebula with her own power.

“Go, go crash into the Milky Way. Let the two separate galaxies merge into one in the future,” she whispered, and then the Andromeda Galaxy, which was still a nebula, slightly shifted its expansion direction—it would grow towards the Milky Way, and then, before a star in the Milky Way's third spiral arm takes shape, crash into the Milky Way.

The Andromeda Galaxy was destined to collide with the Milky Way; it was an inevitable event in the future. Patchouli accelerated this process by billions of years. Then she set off for that realm of destruction.

And so, she arrived at the moment of the sun's birth. Then, the primordial purgatory appeared before her—two intersecting galaxies had formed a larger structure. And within this complex constellation, the sun was the only point of true contact where it had 'collided with something.'

Thus, the galaxy became a purgatory, and the tide of destruction flowed from the past to the present—something that should have been impossible, since other true gods could also travel through time and could have easily reversed everything before she orchestrated the collision of the two galaxies. However, at least for this moment, there was no true god in this universe who could stand in her way.

She blinked, patiently awaiting the visitor's arrival within this stellar inferno—the moment Adam's Temple of Time appeared, this world had become her domain. And in that instant of its manifestation, she orchestrated the collision of another star from the Andromeda Galaxy with the very point where the temple had appeared!

Everything collapsed from that moment on, and Adam, who had jumped from the timeline, was smashed into a cookie the moment he appeared—of course, he wouldn't be killed by Patchouli. A true god, even one with an incomplete foundation, could not be killed by another true god—only his incarnation was destroyed, and when his incarnation disintegrated, he had already arrived in another time.

However, Patchouli's pursuit followed immediately.

There is no need to worry about another kind of human annihilation caused by the disruption of time. Because the 'now' has already been covered by the power of the digital god. Changes in the past and future have no effect on the 'reality' that has already been severed. And no matter where Adam and his Temple of Time escape to, he is followed by the destruction caused by Patchouli and the Andromeda Galaxy colliding with the galaxy.

A true god with a shallow foundation ultimately has its flaws. Its flaw lies in the fact that its power to jump through time is confined to the limits of Solomon—this powerful life form, dependent on the birth of Earth, cannot, and does not understand, transcend the constraints of Earth's timeline. Just as the Demon King can at most return to the beginning of creation, it has no way, nor does it know, how to transcend the two time points of 'Earth's birth within the solar nebula' and 'Earth's destruction with the collapse of the sun'!

For this reason, he became the most vulnerable and obvious true god in the battlefield of true gods. Purgatory and destruction pursued him simultaneously from the past and the future, forcing him back to the 'present' point in time!

His time loop has been broken.

And the moment he was forced back to 'reality', Zhao Zhuikong's dagger was still pressed against Adam's chest!

Zhao Zhuikong's dagger was not hindered, and this unhindered blade pierced through a beating heart!

This time, Adam had no way to escape. In the next instant, the entire temple shattered—most of the structure collapsed, while smaller parts and the core of the Temple of Time plummeted to the distant earth in the explosion—Adam remained alive, though he had lost his power over time, falling from the status of a true god to that of an ordinary being. However, his vitality and survival skills remained. Countless wondrous artifacts shattered around him, allowing him to survive the time Zhao Zhuikong was about to assassinate him!

He fell from the heavens, and the war between the true gods reignited. The true gods, who had previously cooperated seamlessly, simultaneously reverted to hostility. A moment later, Adam and the remains of his Temple of Time crashed into the fourth singularity, which became a continent.

The incident has come to an end...

On the land of the Fourth Singularity, a pink-haired girl and her three enemies gaze up at the sky.

"—Someone who can kill me will come," she said softly.

The next moment, she transformed into a purple crystal sword, pointing directly at the magnificent temple in the sky!

Everything unfolded exactly as Patchouli had foreseen. Or rather, it was precisely because of Patchouli's voyeurism that that future transformed from a possibility into reality.

The purple sword then crashed into the ruined Temple of Time.

The Abyss of Death - Its End

Flora had a dream, a chain of complex dreams.

She dreamt that she was walking through an empty, mechanical maze, surrounded by nothing but silence and cold. An indescribable loneliness filled her mind and body, making her feel suffocated and wanting to escape from the city as quickly as possible.

She felt like she was escaping, but her movements were strangely concise and light—she saw herself methodically navigating through narrow, intricately connected pipes, donning the heavy but surprisingly practical protective suit. Then, she boarded the elevator to the surface.

An elevator, an elevator going up—so this city was underground. She exhaled slightly, her gaze naturally falling as the iron coffin rose. Through the transparent isolation window beneath her feet, the motionless mechanical maze in the darkness appeared to her like a dead corpse.

She felt as if there were many people around her, but in the end, she only saw a lonely version of herself. When the elevator doors opened, she quickly stepped out, only to be greeted by a vast expanse of light blue earth.