Chapter Summaries

The Sweeper divine envoys debated whether to rescue the Bas Empire and instead agreed to rapidly expand their Black Hole Gate network. Lin Fan watched the expansion, intending to exploit it, while the Tianshu Church’s refusal to build more gates remained unexplained; by Federation Year 6580, the Federation had become a formidable sixth-order power.

• Jiang Hai explained that only an eighth-order civilization could break free of Hawk Metal and stop fearing the Hawk Bomb, so the Sweeper envoys agreed to destroy anything emerging from a Black Hole Gate.
• Lyons raised whether the Sweepers should rescue the Bas Empire, but all except one envoys opposed the risky operation and agreed to expand their Black Hole Gate network instead.
• Over the following century, the Sweepers increased their gates from eighteen to more than two hundred, while the Tianshu Church kept its single gate.
• Lin Fan recognized that the other six Sweepers’ expansion would let the Federation destroy their gates and watched them build, while wondering why the Tianshu Church acted differently.
• By Federation Year 6580, the Federation had reached peak sixth-order civilization, fielded fleets rivaling seventh-order powers, and possessed overwhelming numbers of Black Hole Lifeforms.

Lin Fan launched a vast alliance campaign against six Cleaners, using Luo Li’s infiltration of their Black Hole Gate network to strike their territories with guerrilla attacks. After decades of devastating raids left the Cleaners unable to protect their outlying realms, their Divine Envoys asked Jiang Hai for help, but he refused their request for mental sharing.

• Lin Fan organized 450,000 legions into ten armies and began a two-stage operation against six Cleaners.
• In Federation Year 6602, the ten armies simultaneously attacked lightly defended Black Hole Cavity Realms, wiped out their defenders, and escaped through the Cleaners’ Black Hole Gates.
• Over the following decades, the alliance completely purged more than a hundred Cleaners’ realms while the Cleaners remained unable to locate or intercept its fleets.
• The Divine Envoys realized that continued raids would deprive the six civilizations of recruits and warship production, leaving them unable to sustain the war.
• The six Divine Envoys asked Jiang Hai of the Tianshu Church for help countering the Iris System, but Jiang Hai refused their mental-sharing requests.

Lin Fan launched simultaneous assaults on the six Cleansers’ Capital Realms, despite the Alliance Fleet suffering devastating losses. The Black and White Church battlefield became a near-suicidal fight, and the chapter revealed that the first assault echelon had volunteered as the Dare-to-Die Squad.

• After the Cleansers dismantled their Black Hole Gates, Lin Fan ordered the Federation fleets to return to the Kunsa Realm and begin refitting.
• The six Cleansers gathered their main fleets in their Capital Realms while the Alliance Fleet rested for ten years.
• Lin Fan sent six Alliance armies to attack the Cleansers’ Capital Realms simultaneously, confusing the divine envoys with the scale and purpose of the assault.
• The Alliance Fleet suffered severe casualties across all six battlefields, losing more than 6,000 legions in the first half hour.
• On the Black and White Church battlefield, the Alliance Fleet lost around seventy percent of its forces but kept fighting in orderly formations.
• The Alliance soldiers’ resolve was revealed to come from their volunteering for the first assault echelon, called the Dare-to-Die Squad.

The Alliance used a strategic Hawk Bomb to disable the Cleansers’ fleets, then rescued its Dare-to-Die Squads and began a one-sided slaughter. The other Cleansers’ Capital Realms were falling, but the Black and White Church remained a final obstacle because of its Chaos Lifeforms.

• The first attack echelon’s Dare-to-Die Squads held the frontline until the strategic Hawk Bomb arrived and was activated, disabling the warships’ main systems and stopping the enemy’s attacks.
• The Alliance’s main army arrived, rescued the Dare-to-Die Squads, and then slaughtered the immobilized Cleansers’ fleets.
• The Alliance repeated the operation against the other Cleansers’ Capital Realms, using the bridgehead and Hawk Bomb to limit its own losses.
• The Alliance recognized that fleet attacks might not be enough to take the Black and White Church, which had two Chaos Lifeforms.
• Lin Fan joined Luo Li and three other Great Xia Federation members in the second attack echelon, with the four Chaos Lifeforms assigned to fight Lyons and Lin Fan there to support them.

Lin Fan’s forces subdued Lyons, but the Alliance’s home base, the Kunsa Realm, was devastated by a surprise raid from the Tianshu Church’s advanced fleet. After learning that the enemy might be an eighth-tier Black Hole Civilization exploiting flaws in the Black Hole Gate network, Lin Fan ordered the Alliance to dismantle its gates.

• Luo Li, Jiang Xinlan, and Bai Zhi fought Lyons for five days while Wang Feng shielded the Alliance Fleet from the battle’s shockwaves, and they finally subdued him.
• Lin Fan learned that the battle had destroyed more than ninety percent of the Black and White Church’s capital realm and that a surprise attack had wiped out the Alliance’s 5,000 legions in the Kunsa Realm.
• Lin Fan discovered that the Kunsa Realm had lost twenty percent of its population and that Liang Xingchen’s fate was unknown, although Black Hole Lifeforms had defeated the invading fleet.
• Jiang Xinlan identified the Tianshu Church’s warships as eighth-tier vessels comparable to those of the former Great Xia Federation, while Luo Li explained how they had evaded her surveillance.
• Lin Fan ordered the Kunsa, Norea, and Dasaluosi Black Hole Gates dismantled and directed expeditionary fleets to return using the Realm Folding System.

Lin Fan ordered the Federation to destroy a ring of Black Hole Cavity Realms, sealing Alliance territory off from the Tianshu Church while the Federation developed in isolation. Years later, Jiang Yuntian’s expedition discovered that the realms along every route to Heretics territory were gone, leaving the Church fleet unable to advance.

• Lin Fan ordered Black Hole Gates dismantled and planned an isolation zone by destroying Black Hole Cavity Realms around Alliance territory.
• By Federation Year 6780, the six expeditionary armies had eliminated the six major Sweepers, and they returned using the Realm Folding System after their gates were dismantled.
• In Federation Year 6825, Lin Fan launched the Isolation Zone Plan, assigning fleets to destroy 38,798 Black Hole Cavity Realms.
• By Federation Year 6898, the Alliance had destroyed the final realm in the isolation zone, cutting off 1,375,688 Black Hole Cavity Realms and allowing the Federation to develop in silence.
• In Federation Year 6925, Jiang Yuntian’s Tianshu Church fleet found the Kali Realm missing and had to detour.
• By Federation Year 6937, Jiang Yuntian’s fleet had found every realm along its routes to Heretics territory gone and could not proceed.

After ten thousand years of isolation and development, Lin Fan prepared the Alliance to venture out again, but revealed that the Tianshu Church had expanded far beyond expectations. The chapter left the Alliance’s leaders stunned by the Church’s ability to convert entire realms into loyal followers and its rapid growth into a major power.

• The Tianshu Church gave up searching for a route to the Alliance after discovering that the Federation had destroyed every Black Hole Cavity Realm along the way, while Jiang Hai regretted that his plans had failed.
• Over ten thousand years, Lin Fan’s Alliance developed within its isolation zone and introduced regular assessments that could strip stagnant civilizations of their membership.
• By Federation Year 17085, the Alliance had grown to thirty-six Black Hole Civilizations, and Lin Fan announced that it was time to venture out again.
• Alliance leaders urged Lin Fan to attack the Tianshu Church, but he warned them that the Church had also grown stronger and shared intelligence gathered by reconnaissance ships and monitoring devices.
• The leaders learned that the Tianshu Church controlled more than five hundred thousand Black Hole Cavity Realms, commanded twenty million legions, and rapidly turned the inhabitants of occupied realms into loyal followers.

The Federation Alliance chose to fight the Tianshu Church before it could become a Chaos Civilization. After the Church prepared for an attack along the isolation zone, the war began in its undefended rear instead.

• Lin Fan argued that the Alliance could not delay its attack, and the civilization leaders agreed to fight while both sides remained Eighth Order civilizations.
• Jiang Yuntian told Jiang Hai that the Church had found evidence the Heretics' scouts came from inside the isolation zone and that their unmanned vessels likely came from an Eighth Order civilization.
• Jiang Hai ordered believer fleets to deploy along the isolation zone and directed the Church to run its cloning lines at full capacity to produce Third Tier Black Hole Lifeforms.
• The Church moved its believer fleets toward the isolation zone and put its Crusader Army on the highest level of war alert.
• In Federation Year 17115, the war began with simultaneous attacks on more than a thousand Black Hole Cavity Realms deep in Church territory, where the transferred believer forces had left no alert fleets.

Jiang Hai recalled how he survived the fall of the Sovereign Civilization and came to lead the Tianshu Church as a Cleaner, intending to eliminate the Heretics and rule the Black Hole Cavity Realm. After the Alliance struck deep into Church territory, he ordered his forces to assemble for a broad net-casting advance.

• Jiang Hai reviewed reports that the Heretics had seized more than a thousand Black Hole Cavity Realms while the Church's main forces were away.
• Jiang Hai remembered fleeing the Sovereign Civilization's doomed capital with his race's genetic samples and rebuilding his civilization far from the battlefield.
• After the Tianshu Church rose to eighth rank, Jiang Hai became a Cleaner and planned to eliminate the other Cleaners, destroy the Heretics, and rule the Black Hole Cavity Realm.
• In Federation Year 17116, the Church mobilized its believer fleets to join the Crusader Army while Jiang Hai waited for mass production of Third Tier lifeforms.
• Jiang Hai ordered a net-casting advance, dividing the Church's 120 million legions to cover many Black Hole Cavity Realms and exploit the Church's home-territory production capacity.

After twenty years of costly victories against the Tianshu Church’s believer armies, Lin Fan recognized that the enemy was expanding faster than the Alliance could wear it down. He halted the positional campaign and sent the Alliance’s remaining forces in thousands of small fleets to strike behind enemy lines and cripple the Church’s recruitment, production, and mobility.

• Lin Fan explained that the Tianshu Church’s net-casting strategy had erased the Alliance’s local force advantage, while the Church and its believer civilizations rapidly expanded their fleets.
• Montero urged Lin Fan to abandon positional assaults, and Lin Fan proposed cutting off the enemy’s military expansion while trying to lure out its 22 million Crusader Army forces.
• After a year of recovery, Lin Fan divided the Alliance’s remaining 4.8 million forces into 10,000 small fleets and sent them throughout Tianshu Church territory.
• Lin Fan ordered each fleet to eliminate potential recruits, destroy warship factories, and demolish every Black Hole Gate it encountered.

The Alliance used its mobility advantage to scatter its fleets and devastate Tianshu Church production hubs, forcing Jiang Hai to choose between defending the hubs and the Church headquarters. After years of raids and a shifting frontline, Jiang Hai received intelligence that revealed the Alliance’s real objective: more than a hundred nodes inside its encirclement had come under simultaneous attack.

• Jiang Yuntian persuaded Jiang Hai to send more than ninety million legions through the Black Hole Gate network to reinforce the Church’s warship production hubs.
• The Alliance fleets destroyed more than 1,200 production bases and nearly fifty thousand Black Hole Cavity Realms over fourteen years, while destroying gates to disrupt Church reinforcements.
• The Alliance ravaged the region within 1,500 Black Hole Cavity Realms of Tianshu Church headquarters, while Church fleets gathered beyond that boundary and skirmished with Alliance forces.
• Jiang Hai received intelligence that more than a hundred nodes inside the Alliance’s encirclement had been attacked simultaneously by fleets numbering tens of thousands of legions each.

Lin Fan used the Alliance’s superior mobility and local numbers to devastate the Tianshu Church’s scattered fleets, forcing Jiang Hai to deploy Chaos Lifeforms. The chapter ended with Lin Fan committing all twenty-one of the Federation’s Chaos Lifeforms to destroy the Church’s deployed contingent.

• Lin Fan reorganized the Alliance’s scattered fleets into larger forces and sent them outward, destroying Church fleets across more than a hundred Black Hole Cavity Realms.
• Jiang Hai gathered Church fleets to counter the Alliance’s local numerical advantage, but Lin Fan merged his forces again and continued attacking with overwhelming strength.
• Jiang Hai, unable to find another solution, prepared to deploy some of the Tianshu Church’s Chaos Lifeforms onto the battlefield.
• Lin Fan revealed that the Federation possessed twenty-one Chaos Lifeforms, 1,788 Ninth Level Black Hole Lifeforms, and tens of millions of Eighth Level Black Hole Lifeforms.
• Lin Fan committed all the Federation’s strength to wipe out the Chaos Lifeforms the Church sent to the battlefield.

Lin Fan’s forces lured Tianshu Church’s Chaos Lifeforms into battles where the Federation outnumbered and defeated them. Jiang Hai suspected the Heretics were the supposedly destroyed Great Xia Federation, but remained focused on his ambition to rule the Black Hole Cavity Realms.

• An Alliance Fleet destroyed warship factories in Fulan Realm until a Tianshu Church Chaos Lifeform emerged and annihilated several Alliance legions.
• Two Federation Chaos Lifeforms arrived and attacked the Church’s warrior, while Alliance Fleets withdrew from Fulan Realm.
• Lin Fan’s deployment gave each of the Church’s ten Chaos Lifeforms at least two opponents, with Lin Fan, Lin Yu, and Wang Hai joining forces against one.
• Lin Fan, Lin Yu, and Wang Hai defeated their opponent after several days, then supported the other battles; ten months later, the Federation had killed all ten Church Chaos Lifeforms.
• Jiang Hai could not send reinforcements across the great distance and worried that the Heretics resembled the Great Xia Federation, but still regarded them as obstacles to his rule.

The Federation activated Luo Li’s device to sever the Black Hole Cavity Consciousness, turning the Tianshu Church’s armies against their will and allowing the Alliance to overrun its territory. After the Federation defeated Jiang Hai and won the Second Holy War, the Black Hole Cavity Consciousness remained, and Luo Li’s message stopped Lin Fan from killing Jiang Hai.

• After the Alliance cleared the regions outside the Tianshu Church’s core territory, Lin Fan halted the planned assault when Luo Li reported that the Federation had developed a device to isolate the Black Hole Cavity Consciousness.
• Jiang Hai launched a massive offensive, and Lin Fan retreated until Luo Li’s device arrived; Lin Fan activated it and sent Wang Hai to test its effect at Lankai Realm.
• Wang Hai found that the believer legions at Lankai Realm offered to surrender, so Lin Fan ordered a counterattack that routed the church armies and drove them from the core region.
• The Alliance advanced into the church’s core territory, and Lin Fan ordered the fleeing Crusader Army destroyed; ten years later, the Alliance had taken every realm except the church headquarters.
• Jiang Hai led the remaining Chaos Lifeforms into battle, but Lin Fan and four others overwhelmed him; Luo Li sent Lin Fan a message that prevented him from delivering the final blow.
• In Federation Year 17396, the Federation won the Second Holy War, but the Black Hole Cavity Consciousness still remained.

After unknown particles began spreading through the Black Hole Cavity Space, Luo Li urged Lin Fan to launch a new transcendence plan, and most Federation citizens chose to remain behind. Lin Fan and his family entered the transcendence device, and he awoke to hear a voice describe the Black Hole Cavity as a patient receiving injections.

• Luo Li discovered that unknown particles from outside the Black Hole Cavity Space were spreading and would destroy the Federation within three million years.
• Luo Li explained that the Black Hole Cavity was alive, and that both the particles and the Azure Dragon Consciousness threatened its survival; she proposed transcendence as the only remaining path.
• Lin Fan announced the transcendence plan, but fewer than twenty percent of Federation citizens chose to participate.
• Luo Li built a new transcendence device, and Lin Fan, Liang Xue, Luo Li, Lin Yu, Lin Kexin, and the other participants entered it.
• Lin Fan awoke aboard the warship, sensed a vast object beyond it, and heard a voice asking a doctor why three injections had not cured a cold.