Chapter 35: Famine Defeated
The ultimate star of all endings took shape under Joshua's control, the uncontrollable singularity eager to act.
Just before the event horizon of the black hole could spread to himself, Joshua decisively launched it, flinging this unprecedented 'black sphere' toward the Famine Evil God like a slingshot. At that very moment, two equally powerful chaotic auras erupted, bringing a force that stagnated everything and differentiated everything, seemingly attempting to halt the black hole's advance or decompose the power it contained.
One could see, on either side of the Famine Evil God, a twisted chaotic cloud resembling a clock and an incredibly complex mosaic of light and mist simultaneously manifested. Clear cosmic images surrounded them, shrouded in blurry fog.
- Evil God Stagnation -
- Evil God Differentiation -
But it was all too late. The Triple Veil, which had been following Joshua all along, suddenly erupted at this moment. The silver-blue psionic sphere had already been prepared by the time Joshua moved to throw the black hole. Its smooth, uniform shape, like a cosmic model, began to shift. Countless dense, perfectly regular geometric forms bulged and emerged from its smooth surface. Innumerable vortices had already formed, and billions upon billions of psionic derivatives burst forth like a sandstorm, assembling into form in the vacuum of space.
They were spheres like eyeballs, rings of light like halos, perfectly hexagonal prisms, and constantly rotating triangular bodies. These psionic derivatives interconnected, forming a massive web that clawed and thrashed in the vacuum, a forest of waves undulating in a gale. In that instant, it performed ten to the power of one hundred and twenty calculations, then launched its assault.
[Purge Mode: Full activation of purification protocol, 'Reality Rewrite Port' online]
Psionic power, perhaps alongside divine power and malevolent chaos, was one of the oldest and most widely accepted supernatural forces among intelligent beings today. Its methods of combat were diverse and endless, but the most basic and most powerful was 'influencing reality with the mind'.
Among these, there was a usage called 'virtual reality', or 'virtual world'.
In a void of nothingness came real heat, real gravity, real spatial distortion, as if a real star existed there, even nurturing life on a planet... So, was there actually a star in that void?
Who cares? As long as the strong said there was, the universe had to agree.
The boundary between the virtual and the real was already blurred, especially for those being affected. Such a question simply didn't exist.
The moment the Stagnation Evil God and the Differentiation Evil God made their move, they were enveloped by the fully charged Triple Veil into a 'virtual space bubble' with a diameter of three hundred light-seconds, completely isolated from the outside world. Then, this space bubble began to race left and right at ninety-nine percent the speed of light, using a completely unreasonable method to temporarily send these two evil gods out of the battlefield, interrupting their reinforcement.
The virtual space bubble wouldn't last long, a total of twenty-seven seconds. However, after its collapse, it would create forty-five seconds of spatial turbulence, blocking the possibility of teleportation. In total, for just over a minute, the two evil gods would be temporarily removed from the battlefield.
A minute or so was more than enough.
[First Second]
The black hole hurtled towards the Famine Evil God. Even an unintelligent, mindless evil god knew this thing could not be 'taken head-on'. As the crimson crystal demon shook its wings, the energy balance of the surrounding cosmic space was broken. Under the 'desolation' created by the evil god's full-power energy absorption, the endless sea of energy in the vacuum plummeted to a trough. Constantly appearing positive and negative virtual particles directly annihilated each other, converting into energy, which was then unreasonably drained.
Hiss... Hiss...
Particle annihilation, occurring only at the most microscopic level, dropped to absolute zero. The energy of the vacuum was drained and converted to the tips of the evil god's magnificent body. Hundreds of extremely bright points of light could be seen glowing on its wings, and at its head, as its mouthparts opened up and down, an obvious energy-focusing crystal structure was exposed inside.
[Fourth Second]
In a time frame too short to even measure in picoseconds, hundreds of red beams, each as thick as a planet, along with a colorless torrent so bright it had no discernible color, merged into a dense energy web, covering all the void before it. As these beams extended rapidly forward, they were naturally twisted by the black hole's gravity and converged into its event horizon.
The brightness was like a supernova exploding directly against photoreceptor cells. It ignited the black hole—or rather, created a dense layer of ionic fire on its outer shell. The black hole, launched by Joshua's gravitational slingshot, was deflected by this output, spinning and grazing the side of spacetime. The twisted gravitational waves, carrying the extreme heat that vaporized everything, scraped past the Famine Evil God's body, instantly tearing off a wing and part of its limbs from the exquisite crystal form.
[Tenth Second]
This black hole would wander through the universe at near-light speed for countless years. Perhaps it would affect nothing, perhaps it would affect a life-bearing planet millions of years later, perhaps it would become a marvel admired by the universe. But for now, it was merely a weapon and attack method for transcendent powerhouses.
Despite suffering such severe damage, the Famine Evil God was still planning a counterattack. One could see that on the crystal shell formed by absorbing supernova energy, the red flame light was beginning to fade. Its body became crystalline and transparent, making the dark nebula at its core appear even more brilliant. It could be felt that 'Malevolent Chaos', a supernatural force completely incomprehensible to normal intelligent life and utterly different from the current basic laws of the multiverse, was operating at full speed. It was eroding the Starry World, creating a true absolute zero within its own body, something that should be impossible.
[Seventeenth Second]
The so-called Famine, in its original form, was an insect civilization that perished due to resource depletion within an isolated world. Their world was located in the void outside the World Star River, not connected to any material sphere. After devouring everything within their world, the last individual of that civilization died in the void. Under the influence of Malevolent Chaos, the remains of that world and civilization awakened, transforming into an eternal hunger of despair, wandering the void.
An immeasurably long time passed. The first Famine assimilated countless other Famines. Its primal instinct for material craving evolved into an essence of 'only taking in, never giving out'.
Just like absolute zero, its ability to absorb energy from the outside world tended towards positive infinity, but it would never release even a single bit of energy to the outside world—this was the current essence of 'Evil God Famine'.
If it succeeded, destroying an ordinary world would be effortless. And any evil god possessed a similar level of essence. This was the source of the awe-inspiring title 'World Devourer'.
But Joshua wouldn't let it succeed.
[Twenty-Fourth Second]
A massive ring appeared behind him, continuously expanding, like a drop of water hitting the surface, spreading ripples that formed a halo obscuring the sky. As the black hole was pushed away by the supernova light beam created by the Famine Evil God's vacuum energy absorption, Joshua had already begun to deploy his armaments. Electromagnetic force, gravity, and the strong nuclear force were dominated by the Giant God in that instant. Nearly all matter was under his control. Carrying the massive ring, Joshua followed the long spacetime trough created by the black hole's passage, warping space, and struck the enemy at speeds exceeding light.
[Twenty-Fourth Second]
The seemingly solid crystal body shattered under the impact of the four-armed Giant God's charge, breaking into a tattered insect-like mesh, scattering into worthless energy light mist in the cosmos. A flashing stream of light could be seen hurtling directly towards the center of the dark galaxy.
Soon, they crashed into a multi-star system, a loose star cluster with seven hundred stars. Joshua's mass caused the already unstable star cluster's balance to collapse. One by one, stars were pulled, following the Giant God's direction like a school of fish. At this very moment, Joshua stopped accelerating. He even deliberately warped spacetime, causing uncontrollable stars to fall upon him one after another in the subsequent time, creating a chain of supernova explosions.
In this extreme heat, Joshua used two arms to firmly suppress the struggling Famine Evil God beneath him, feeling it still gathering power, creating a chaotic core of true absolute zero. His other two hands clasped together. A portion of stellar mass matter and spacetime was heated to over seventeen billion degrees and beyond. Atomic nuclei collided and shattered in this violent tremor. Quarks were no longer constrained, flowing freely like liquid in spacetime.
[Thirty-Third Second]
"Famine, I once fantasized about fighting you, but I also expected you to be nothing more than this."
Joshua punched through the Famine Evil God's head, exposing the twenty-four-faced crystal core behind it. He aimed at the dark nebula inside and roughly stuffed the quark-gluon plasma fireball he held into it.
"Taste this."
That wasn't all. He casually grabbed one or two of the pulsars orbiting him and shoved them in as well. Their mutually repulsive pulsar magnetic fields created terrifying electromagnetic destruction, and the gravitational slingshot caused them to fling each other in opposite directions—but Joshua forcibly pressed them together, like cramming two extremely fast, indestructible, superheated bouncing balls into a glass fishbowl filled with explosives.
There could only be one result.
[Thirty-Fourth Second]
The twenty-four-faced crystal exploded in a massive blast, sending Joshua flying, blasting him out of the cascading collapse zone of the loose star cluster. Who knows how long later, due to hundreds of stars colliding with each other, endless stellar material erupted, blowing away everything around, forming an ever-expanding supergiant nebula layer.
At the center of the original star cluster, a massive black hole was spinning rapidly. Intense streams of light circled the edge of the gravitational well, emitting an abnormally bright glow.
The dark nebula dissipated.
In that instant, nearly one-sixth of the chaotic minions in the Starry World—the massive crystal monsters—all dissipated simultaneously, shattering into pieces of matter and energy streams of varying sizes. Their self-destruction time was perfectly synchronized, exhibiting an eerie faster-than-light effect.
In other locations across the multiverse, in other worlds and Multiverse Star Rivers, the rampaging evil god minions also turned into broken flying ash, watched in shock by other civilizations fighting desperately.
[Evil God Famine - Activity Terminated]
But now was not the time to care about that.
Inside Joshua's World, the massive tremors even caused spacetime to ripple. The nine floating continents, no longer inhabited by the spirits of civilization, fell one after another, smashing the crystal obelisks at the world's edge into pieces. In several safe sanctuaries, some silver fairies who had voluntarily stayed behind to maintain the world's operation screamed in terror, watching this great catastrophe. However, they also knew that this destruction was only superficial. The sanctuary was still functioning normally, meaning their master's condition was still good, at most a bit dizzy.
But the battle was far from over.
In the dark universe, Joshua, who was repairing his damaged structure, suddenly turned his head, staring at the seemingly empty vacuum.
His gaze was heavy.
Not far away, from a galactic perspective, just over ten seconds earlier, within the virtual spacetime bubble, an indescribable strange mist overflowed. Evil gods, which could not be viewed with normal spacetime or material perspectives, could not be imprisoned by ordinary 'spacetime structures'. Being subject to the 'Ultimate Sublimation Aggregate' was simply due to a sheer disparity in power.
As the Triple Veil had long predicted, this simple application of the 'Reality Rewrite Port' could not trap these World Devourers.
[Alert: Activating external defense mechanisms. Activating reality reset system. Possibility engine beginning boost. Forced authorization. Setting sole observer: Triple Veil.]
[Full Power: Initiating 'Custom Virtual World Overlay'. Initiating random setting of 'Basic Laws'.]
The entire psionic network of the Starry World flashed simultaneously, taking on a massive and complex form. At the same time, the Stagnation and Differentiation Evil Gods, having broken free from the spacetime bubble and preparing to launch their attack, were once again enveloped in a 'custom spacetime' completely reorganized by psionic power.
This time, they faced abnormal light, abnormal electromagnetism, abnormal gravity, and the abnormality of everything.
A completely abnormal virtual spacetime appeared within the symmetry-broken world.