Tonight, Alice joins the hunt.

She saw the collaboration between Ex and Sesshouin Kiara, their plan, and her actions during the raid on the Knowledge Realm. Sesshouin Kiara's targeting of the other low-powered members of the Central Continent Team—she had warned them in the past, and Zhao Zhuikong and Zhao Yingkong received the information at the very beginning of the final battle and prepared an ambush in the right place.

She saw Axe's battles in the cycle of reincarnation, whether it was the one in the Moon World or the one in the Star River World—the Supreme God had already loosened his protection of her, but she didn't really want to attack Axe at those times.

She wanted to move forward, to keep moving forward.

Heading further ahead, to more distant places.

She saw the scene when Ex first joined the cycle of reincarnation.

She witnessed the moment when Ex was abandoned by the times and utterly despaired.

She witnessed Ex ruling the galaxy and becoming the destined overlord.

She witnessed Ex's struggles and tribulations across the starry sky, rising from a lowly battle slave to a pirate captain.

Then, she arrived at the very beginning. The moment when Ex was thrown into the junkyard as a discarded, failed experiment. The moment when she was about to restart her functions with her last bit of physiological energy, and before she completely died, she found the battery that would sustain her life.

She arrived there.

Among the countless electronic waste, hazardous waste, and industrial debris, she saw the mutilated female body, missing an arm and a leg, with many electronic components exposed—she was right at her feet, her functions stopped, no longer operating, but beneath her tightly closed eyes, the constructed eyeballs were still trembling slightly.

She is about to restart, but it hasn't started yet.

At this point in time, even the slightest unexpected event could plunge her into an even deeper, permanent death, making her the last remnant of a failed script.

So, should we kill her here and now?

Patchouli's fingers drooped slightly, lightly pressing against a spot just one millimeter away from Ex's current position—with just a little pressure, the machine would never restart. And Ex, who would attempt to assassinate her in the future, would also be reduced to nothingness by the correction of time.

Should we do that?

Why not do it this way?

Patchouli gazed at the broken girl before her, who was powerless to resist, and a faint smile suddenly appeared on her lips.

"In this multiverse, some things are accidental, things that can be changed. Others are inevitable, things that, even if changed, will be realized in another way. In this battle, in this cycle of reincarnation, what is inevitable?"

What is it?

Is it inevitable that Ex will become a reincarnator?

No.

If Exus never existed in the first place, and died as an unknown waste before she even received the name Exus, then the main god would naturally not have chosen her.

The Supreme God won't choose her, but it will certainly choose one of its own kind. Someone like Ex, like Sirin, like Sesshouin Kiara—someone like her—will replace this failed Ex in the Supreme God's Space and join the Morizu team. And that is inevitable.

That's the inevitable thing that Patchouli couldn't cancel even if she erased Ex from this place.

Ex can't die here.

Even if she dies, another captain from the Morizu team will take her place. And a completely new life form, lacking data and information, might be a more complex and difficult challenge for Ex, who is currently powerless to fight back.

and so--

Patchouli lowered her gaze and took a step or two further along Ex's original timeline. She arrived at the point in time when Ex was produced as a commodity. Then, she took the place of the human reviewer who had rendered her obsolete.

Then, she said to Ex, who was still an artificial embryo—

"Absolute order does not exist."

She let time continue to flow.

When Ex awakens in the junkyard as a piece of waste, a broken radio plays a fragmented audio message not far from the newly awakened girl.

"The order... is wrong."

As Exx, as a combat slave, secured her first crucial victory in a space opera-style boarding battle, a dying alien soldier's faint groan echoed.

"This world... is chaotic."

As Ex fought her way through countless obstacles and underdogs to acquire her first starship, blood seeped from the corpse of the former pirate captain at her feet, blurring the words woven into the carpet: 'I am order.' Immediately, sycophantic defectors saw this and shouted—

"The old order is dead!"

And when Exus became the overlord, the Empress of the Starfield, the losers beneath her throne cried out to her before their execution—

"Your order will not last forever!"

Finally, as Ex reached the end of her destiny, and discovered that her era had come to a close, and her rule and achievements had all turned to dust, she caught a glimpse of a banner bearing the symbol of 'order' lying in the mud, crushed and trampled.

She fell into despair, just like in the original history.

Just like in the original history, they entered the main god space.

Just like in the original history, he became the captain of the Morizu team, gathering the light of the soul.

Just like in the original history, it appeared on the battlefield at the end of the war.

She was exactly the same as before. The only difference was that deep within her heart, at the very bottom of what should have been a perfect and flawless inner light, there was a tiny crack etched there.

Time has returned to the beginning.

The pages of the great library turned to the next page.

The restraints on Exusiai have been lifted.

But when she met Patchouli's pale purple eyes, her own golden eyes, which had been burning with fierce fighting spirit, suddenly trembled.

"Do you still believe your order is eternal, Miss Synthetic?" Patchouli looked at her and asked gently.

And those golden eyes instantly filled with shock and anger.

"You—" She opened her mouth slightly, but the words were on the tip of her tongue, and only a sigh remained under her complicated expression.

"So... that person back then was you."

Ex lowered her head... In that instant, she understood everything, but she also knew it was too late—she ignored Patchouli and sheathed her lightsaber. Then she straightened her clothes and looked into the distance.

"Just one move short..." she sighed softly.

The next moment, her form disintegrated, crumbled, and turned to dust. Then the dust continued to disintegrate, until finally nothing remained and she vanished.

Her path and ideals collapsed.

Meanwhile, Patchouli heard the good news from Zhao Zhuikong and Zhao Yingkong.

Is the outcome already decided...?

Chapter Thirty: The Second Turn of Events

The outcome is decided.

The established overall situation is not the situation Patchouli is in.

When the Senzhou and Yinzhou teams abandoned their covert advantage and actively engaged in the war, attempting to seize the initiative through a surprise attack—or rather, making a desperate gamble—another long-running war, largely ignored by others, was drawing to a close in another world.

—Another war.

The wars of the past, the wars of Luoye.

She and the uninvited intruder, Nyarlathotep, the messenger of chaos, fought and slaughtered each other on the main stage three billion years ago, their battles seemingly evenly matched. However, their war came to an end at this point in time.

—Three billion years ago.

Earth was still a barren planet, in the Mesoproterozoic Era, when the atmosphere, water bodies, and even rock strata were not yet fully formed. The sky—it couldn't yet be called the sky; at that time, the Earth's surface was merely a murky cloud mass inhabited by endless thunder and wildfire, and the earliest life forms had only just begun to appear in this primordial water.

Everything was primitive. Everything was pure.

At this point in time, the war between the Ancient Saints and the Star Gods is on the verge of erupting, with friction occurring between the two sides. Meanwhile, the races that will be created in the future lack the necessary elements for their existence.

Loya created the ancient saints, and Nyarlathotep created the star gods.

Both she and it adopted a laissez-faire attitude towards their creations—because these creations were unimportant. Even if they created spacetime barriers, even if they could gaze outwards into the universe, even if their very existence was the cornerstone of the future—they were unimportant.

At best, they are merely two supreme divine powers, two transcendent beings confined to this finite multiverse. And by that alone, they are not even qualified to add a counterweight to the struggle of the creators—their role is simply to create a barrier, a barrier to prevent others from getting involved in this war. And this is their only role, which they have accomplished thoroughly and cleanly.

They cannot participate in the war between creators.

At most, they merely observe, like watching a child on fire across a riverbank, observing this battle that has been unfolding since the beginning of the universe. They watch as the source of the universe—endless new concepts—surged forth from the primordial chaos in the clash between the two creators. They watch as order was established, as rules were solidified, as the creators battled.

How many times did Luo Ye die? — We don't know, but all her corpses are the source of 'unchanging' reality. And each of her remains brings a fixed physical or mathematical rule to this universe. For example, one plus one equals two, or energy spontaneously shifts from high energy to low energy. Each of her deaths brings a rule to this universe, something that will never change. Something—the cornerstone of all things.

And how many times did Nyarlathotep die? — Again, we don't know. But this messenger of the Outer Gods is essentially chaos, disorder, and unfathomable. Its death doesn't even leave behind a 'corpse,' a remnant with a defined nature. Instead, it simply becomes a variable, an intellect, an inspiration, an enduring poem that echoes in the minds of every poet in the future.

A poem, composed spontaneously by a poet billions of years in the future, has become an unquestionable truth in this universe. Because it is the heavens, the origin of all spirituality.

Determinism and chaos, regularity and intellect.

Conceptually, the two are completely equal. All concepts originate from them, and this battle was originally intended to continue forever.

This war should not have been decided in the first place—because the two sides were evenly matched, and the stalemate should have continued until the very last moment.

However, now, three billion years ago, on this pristine Earth, this war, which shouldn't have ended so quickly, has prematurely come to a close.

The victor was Luo Ye.

To win without fighting, to achieve victory without winning.

When a certain historical juncture arrived, Nyarlathotep, who had once been her equal, began a massive decline. One avatar after another vanished, and her power and concepts plummeted like a green stock line. This process had already reached its end at the very beginning, and when everything stabilized and everything settled, the powerful opponent before her was on the verge of elimination.

Nyarlathotep is about to die.

Nyarlathotep is dying.

The cause of its death was finally revealed to Luo Ye after he acted at the last moment, forcibly capturing and sealing one of its nearly annihilated avatars.

"Because my original self died. It died so completely that the power injected wasn't enough to regenerate. Even this version of me won't live much longer." — The final avatar was a silver-haired girl with a long, thin ahoge (cowlick) on her head, and appeared full of energy. She called herself Nyaruko, a name roughly similar to a character from a well-known anime.

Luo Ye raised an eyebrow, recalling the anime series while simultaneously searching for its content. Then, she was slightly surprised to find that many characters in the series who should have been similar to Nyaruko had become a chaotic mess—they still had their forms and traces, but their names and powers had all vanished without a trace.

"You guessed right, it's exactly what you thought." Before she could even look up to ask, Nyaruko held up a finger—she was slumped on the long table that Luo Ye had casually made, her ahoge (cowlick) hanging listlessly in front of her. She looked like she was about to ascend to heaven, but at least she was still alive.

“Everyone is dead… Hmm, maybe it’s strange of me to use the word ‘people’.” She shook her head, and the limp ahoge (cowlick) on her head swayed as well. “My peers, my juniors, my superiors, and even myself, all of them just died completely. Although being reborn by the Holy Emperor isn’t exactly shameful, death is death, and we are ultimately the losers here.”

Luo Ye made herself a chair and sat down. As she sat down, she roughly reviewed the history and mythology in her mind.

"So that's how it is"—she instantly understood. The horrific state of the war on the outer perimeter flashed before her eyes, and she realized that, apart from the Digital Holy Emperor, there were probably no other living saints left outside.

Some surprises.

But it didn't exceed expectations by much.

The war on the outside was inevitable, but what was unexpected was that it would escalate to this extent.

—All the saints are dead; only the Holy Emperor remains.

—If all the saints have died, then perhaps all the Holy Emperors will also die in the time to come.