Chapter 19: Spontaneous Emergence
[It was not powerful at the start, but it could consume various resources and energy to undergo mutations and evolve.
An individual, no matter how much it evolved, was actually quite weak. Even if it mutated into an exceptionally powerful specimen, that was not a long-term strategy for the population itself. Hence, they always gathered in groups.
Nor did they rely solely on their own strength. They were adept at using the flesh and blood of their hosts, everything about their hosts, to contribute to their own survival.
Silently and unnoticed, one host was destroyed, and they moved on to the next host, repeating the cycle over and over again.]
Regarding the Plague Evil God, Eagle's thoughts were not unusual.
After all, having experienced the crises of the Decay Evil God and the Death Evil God, and having obtained a vast amount of information related to fighting evil gods and about them from the Unified Grand Database and the Knowledge Seizer, the Mycroft Civilization of today no longer harbored the inexplicable fear of evil gods that it once did.
The greatest fear in the world is the unknown.
And after dispelling the fog brought by the unknown, even evil gods were merely extremely powerful Chaos enemies, not invincible totems—let alone the fact that the Plague Evil God's past performances were never considered 'strong'; at most, it was on par with the Decay Evil God.
As for the Decay Evil God's strength, if it were at the level it had just awakened, the current Mycroft Joint Expeditionary Fleet could eliminate it directly. It wasn't just Eagle; even the Nature Mentor believed that if he were well-prepared, he could fight it to a standstill. If it were the complete form recorded as requiring nine Radiant Legends to join forces against, it would simply mean a few more Legends fighting together, which wouldn't take much effort.
Therefore, regarding a Plague Evil God whose strength might not necessarily surpass the Decay Evil God, it was perfectly normal for Eagle not to believe it had such power.
"Actually, not necessarily."
In response to Eagle's rather confident answer, Baniel, who was beside him, shook his head. He wasn't refuting the old Pope's statement but rather giving an example: "It might not be a Chaos Evil God... Spacetime information disturbance—this ability is not exclusive to evil gods—look."
As he spoke, Baniel raised his hand. This legendary mage, who specialized in runes, excelled at creating elemental life, and had transformed his own physical body into a condensed runic fortress, had six mainstream elements and a certain concentration of arcane power, Aether light mist, appear in his palm. One could also see a certain amount of life energy and soul mixed in, along with various oxygen, nitrogen... many elements converged into one, forming a mass of condensed transcendent power... or rather, forming a mass of utterly ordinary, standard 'air'.
The atmosphere composed of transcendent power and ordinary elements in most living worlds—this was the utterly ordinary thing Baniel had created.
"I simulated the concentration of various transcendent powers inside many worlds within the current void, also theoretically the most stable state of these powers, where they wouldn't cause conflict or change. But look."
As he spoke, Baniel's palm moved slightly, and an almost imperceptible energy ripple swept across, affecting this mass of standard air.
Then, an astonishing thing happened—as this energy fluctuation, difficult even for legendary experts to detect, affected a minuscule amount of elements in the air, a marvelous chain reaction began: first, various different elements started to converge and condense, forming the most basic 'self-replicating elemental condensate' of elemental life. Then, larger elemental particles, elemental crystals, and elemental crystal clusters were produced... and finally, the most basic, mist-like, simplest elemental life was born.
"Ee~yah~"
After being born, this mist-like elemental life instinctively let out a cheer, then began chasing its own tail in circles on Baniel's fingertip. Witnessing this, most of the legendary experts frowned, seemingly understanding something.
"A chain reaction—as everyone knows, I am quite skilled at creating elemental life. My research on elemental life might be deeper than the fairies' research on themselves." (The Fairy Empresses booed at this point.) "Sometimes, environments that seem stable are actually not very stable. The influence of a powerful being can genuinely transform the entire world."
"Let me see, Joshua isn't here, right?" After saying this, Baniel warily scanned his surroundings. Confirming that the warrior had indeed left no avatar behind, he relaxed and continued, "Alright then, I'll use the absent Marshal Radcliffe as an example—Steel Elements and Silver Fairies are Marshal Radcliffe's children and vassals." (The Fairy Empresses shouted that they were their new compatriots.) "The latter is more typical, first appearing in the Carlis World he influenced, and multiplying extensively within the worlds inside his body. If his power were not suppressed, it would transform everything around him into some special form of life."
As he spoke, the elemental life in Baniel's hand changed slightly. Its internal elemental structure began to complexify, leaping from a 'simple elemental life' comparable to a multicellular organism, evolving instantly into a 'mid-level elemental life' comparable to complex organisms like dinosaurs and mammoths, only one step away from high-level elemental life comparable to intelligent beings like humans.
"You see, I only exerted a negligible influence. This influence is very similar to the way the Extreme Virus appears—I don't need to actively create an elemental life myself. I only need to emit a trace of power, negligible to me, to make the world itself spawn what I want for me. Of course, the results might be somewhat different, but the principle is the same."
This viewpoint immediately sparked thought and discussion among the legends, but Baniel was not surprised and continued: "Nature Mentor, can't you also activate the plants around you, granting them temporary intelligence? Pope, can't your Holy Light also purify all evil inadvertently? Nostradamus, haven't you noticed that your teleportation spells are much faster than ours? All of us who have reached the legendary realm have similar properties—the ability to influence the essence of the world. However, individuals who can create life solely by relying on their essence are relatively rare."
Baniel spoke eloquently. It was clear that as an old mage who often created armies of elemental life from nothing and used every means to outnumber his opponents, he was very familiar with this concept. The reason for the Extreme Virus's spontaneous generation might be somewhat strange to others, but to him, it was at most an advanced technique.
Therefore, he concluded: "This phenomenon of the virus spontaneously emerging might not be the work of an evil god. After all, we haven't sensed any Chaos-related aura. It could come from an extremely powerful transcendent being... However, such a transcendent being who recklessly spreads plagues is no different from an evil god. And to guard against this virus, relying on martial law is useless. What we need is to interfere with the 'fluctuation' that induces the virus's appearance."
"Of course, before that, recall all exploration teams fully—the Multiverse Star River is no longer safe. This might be one of the omens of the 'Evil God Invasion'."
Meanwhile, on the other side of spacetime.
—Starry World.
Joshua, who was engaged in low-level information exchange with the Triple Veil, sharing their experiences and data on using various transcendent powers, suddenly paused this exchange along with the Triple Veil. He looked up towards the dark vacuum between the stars.
"Something... I sense it. Outside the world, there is an existence exerting influence on this world!"
In the dark void, the silver world rapidly deformed. Joshua unfolded his combat form, his expression serious as he stared into the distance of the void. Even he couldn't accurately sense the subtle fluctuation sweeping across the star river—it was like the spontaneous surge of fundamental particles in a vacuum, a part of natural phenomena. If his perception weren't limited to a single world, even he might not have noticed it.
But the thickness of the Starry World's world barrier was truly billions of times greater than that of ordinary worlds. Even Joshua could only vaguely perceive that the outside seemed very quiet, with no major changes.
"Triple Veil, do you know what the situation is like outside the Starry World?" Joshua turned to the Triple Veil, who was also on alert, and asked with caution: "Is it possible that an evil god has already infiltrated the Starry World without you noticing?"
The massive psychic mechanical aggregate shone with light.
[Answer: We do not know. The world barrier of the Starry World is indestructible when the interior does not actively communicate with the outside. The Starry World was originally built as the Founder's final fortress. Even an evil god could never infiltrate the interior without our knowledge.]
[Distress: Psychic energy is a power that can communicate with all things. Psychic civilizations can naturally respond to special individuals in the distant beyond. We failed to prevent the first psychic civilization from summoning an evil god's minions into this world, leading to immense consequences... We are powerless to stop civilizations... from seeking their own destruction.]
Since the Triple Veil confirmed that no evil god had infiltrated, Joshua didn't say much. He trusted them. However, this meant he had to think about the source of the new enemy.
But Joshua wasn't without clues. The moment he began to think, the warrior, through his crisis management systems scattered across the Starry World, across the Mycroft Civilization, across the civilizations of the Multiverse Star River, and even the Bloody Star River, granted to Ke Lei Le and Ai Er Ma, became aware of the strangeness and chaos behind this.
"The Extreme Virus—if it were the work of the Plague Evil God... is it that strong?"
The first thought that appeared in Joshua's mind was the same as the old Pope Eagle's: the Plague Evil God they knew didn't seem to possess such power.
However, unlike Eagle, Joshua knew that behind the Plague Mother Beast of the Starry World was a special super-lifeform called the 'Ultimate Sublimation Aggregate', which was the existence recognized by the Starry World as the Plague Evil God. If it were that entity, creating the Extreme Virus wouldn't be strange; it would even be expected.
"Furthermore, there are plagues appearing in the Starry World as well... Over a dozen star domains have already fallen!"
By exchanging information with the 'Four God Rings', which were closely linked to the psychic network and connected to most psychics in the Starry World, Joshua quickly discovered this.
Because the Extreme Virus's transmissibility and lethality were so high, whenever an entire planet or colony went silent on a large scale without souls returning to the psychic network, it could basically be confirmed as caused by the Extreme Virus. And because there were almost no survivors, it created the illusion that the situation wasn't that serious!
Faced with this, even Joshua was powerless. The Extreme Virus burned flesh and soul, and his resurrection methods couldn't restore them from nothing.
Strictly speaking, it wasn't entirely impossible.
With Joshua's current strength, he could, by tracing the material changes within a region, create a phenomenon similar to time reversal, thereby resurrecting people who had been burned into nothingness—roughly equivalent to a small-scale version of Fatlervi's time reversal. As long as the Triple Veil could provide the information, he could certainly do it.
But the cost would be too great. Although it sounded cold-blooded, when facing the threat of evil gods and an unknown plague source, such an action would be counterproductive.
The living were more important.
In their previous low-level information exchange, Joshua and the Triple Veil had already finalized the details of the upcoming 'Great Counteroffensive Campaign', setting the tone for the next war. This way, once the Galactic Guardian Alliance gained an advantage through the 'Four God Rings' and the newly emerged emotional ability users, Joshua could take the experimental data on emotional power back to the Multiverse Star River, preparing to deal with the evil god invasion in about a decade, and also preparing to advance to the Sage realm.
But now, due to the sudden appearance of the Extreme Virus, not only did the counteroffensive plan have to be postponed, but Joshua and the Triple Veil also had to allocate extra power to stop the spread of the plague. Furthermore, the recent actions of the Chaos vassals were also strange, seemingly preparing for some major move. The previously favorable situation was now somewhat reversed.
"Forget it, no use thinking about it."
Instead of complaining, it was better to try and solve the problem.
Joshua abandoned thinking about meaningless things. He calmed his mind and began to quietly sense all information in the vacuum, trying to find the root of the plague.
The four-armed giant spread its four arms, as if embracing the vacuum. Layers upon layers of silver ripples emanated from the giant's body, cascading and spreading into the vacuum.
The starry void where the Triple Veil resided had no excess stellar energy to interfere, nor any traces of civilization activity to affect perception.
In this environment, when an ultimate transcendent being began to listen to the world, all seemingly tight connections were dissected and broken down.
He could hear the flickering of fundamental particles, perceive electrons orbiting atoms. He could see, in the most basic existence of matter, the support of all transcendent powers. Gravity danced with Aether, governing the motion of all matter. Arcane power was independent of electromagnetism, able to condense matter that didn't conform to the conventional, creating phenomena that shouldn't exist... Joshua could perceive that life energy was a force existing in all things in the universe. It wasn't an energy unique to life, but an energy that only life could follow its own will to use to transform other things, other life.
All beings, even the formless, seemingly void things, were exposed before Joshua.
And so, he heard it—heard the faint signal lurking in the surging sea of particles within the vacuum, echoing like a ghost.
—In the universe, among the stars, the seemingly empty vacuum was actually a surging sea of particle energy. It was only because, relative to the macroscopic world, it was too calm that it appeared rippleless.
But around stars, on planets, the surge of energy and changes in matter were very intense.
The churning corona, the blowing solar wind, the movement of magnetic fields, volcanic eruptions and heat flows from geological changes... In every matter-rich region of the universe, billions upon billions of possibilities emerged at every moment.
Among them, a portion would happen to have energy changes and material changes that created 'coincidences'—for example, inorganic matter becoming organic, the condensation of energy crystals producing errors, things without life suddenly becoming something that could self-replicate and reproduce.
That is, primitive cells, or even the beginning of life.
And this was the origin of the Extreme Virus.
Joshua listened to the entire Starry World. Using the Restorative Pillar, using the psychic network he could influence with emotional power, he listened to the sounds of material changes across the Starry World. An incalculable amount of information was rapidly processed by the warrior's world-scale thinking units. So Joshua could hear, beneath those seemingly normal coincidences of life's birth, a discordant sound.
The fluctuation emitted by a powerful existence affected all opportunities 'where life might be born', turning possibilities that might have become primitive cells, primitive life, entirely into the prototypes of the Extreme Virus!
In other words, after being affected by that extremely subtle fluctuation sweeping across the Starry World, on those affected planets, any phenomenon that could give rise to life, or structures similar to viruses, would all actually produce the original form of the Extreme Virus!
That is to say, the Extreme Virus truly didn't need to be transmitted at all—because it emerged spontaneously from various phenomena in the world!
Primordial soup around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, high-concentration elemental environments struck by lightning, crystalline regions where arcane power converged—these areas where life could potentially be born could all spontaneously give rise to the Extreme Virus! Not to mention the mutations of bacteria and fungi from material mildew in certain civilizations' biological laboratories. The denser the life, the more likely the Extreme Virus was to appear!
"Is it possibility interference?"
Opening his eyes, Joshua's expression was grave. This reminded him of a powerful enemy he had encountered long ago, the strongest being of the Siberia World, the Time Pusher 'Fatlervi'!
His special technique was to manipulate possibilities within the Siberia World, creating any future he desired. In their battle back then, not to mention controlling the possibility of a virus's birth, Fatlervi could even achieve quantum avoidance, dodging any of his attacks unscathed by influencing possibilities!
But although similar, it wasn't exactly the same... If Fatlervi was 'dominating possibilities', then the appearance of the Extreme Virus was at most 'inducing'. The spontaneously emerging Extreme Virus might not be complete, its lifespan was definitely not as short as the complete form, and its lethality wasn't even that high. So, some worlds might even have individuals who didn't die in the Great Extreme Plague.
"Indeed, it's more like a primitive, incomplete memeticization..." Muttering to himself, Joshua couldn't help but fall into deep thought.
The situation was becoming increasingly troublesome. Although he had found the source of the plague's birth, a bigger problem emerged: where did the fluctuation that spawned the Extreme Virus originate?
Even Joshua couldn't confirm this. He could only guess that the source of this fluctuation might come from outside the Starry World.
"Triple Veil."
After thinking for a while, Joshua finally made up his mind. The giant turned to look at the psychic machine orbiting the black hole. His voice was calm: "Do you have a way to temporarily send me—no, send my avatar—outside the Starry World to see what's going on?"