Dispatching a Vanguard Team to Explore the World

"Damn it, it was instantaneous! This time, it was instantaneous! Is this the power of a god?"

Emperor of Atabia took a deep breath. This time, the other side's world-ending attack had no casting delay whatsoever, completely different from the conclusions repeatedly analyzed by their King's Council. They had thought they would have enough time to retreat.

Very soon.

"More than three seconds of exposure, and the body will start to fail." Under the cover of his guards, Emperor of Atabia swiftly entered the Giant Serpent Ark and fled into the distance at top speed.

But the citizens who had not made it into the Ark of Refuge in time, after being exposed for merely seconds, cried out in agony. As though suffering nuclear radiation, their entire bodies burned with excruciating pain, and they began melting rapidly like wax figures.

The bewitching purple haze shrouded the land, killing without form or trace.

"What an evil Outer God!"

Emperor of Atabia hid within the shelter, watching the heavens outside through the Ark's internal sensors, filled with boundless fury.

A giant god!

An evil giant god!

One sage after another stared at the giant beyond the world, cloaked in clouds and mist. A profound sense of helplessness wound around their hearts. They could only watch helplessly as their people once again fell into the apocalyptic turmoil of extinction.

At that moment.

A minister behind him consoled him:

"His Majesty, there is no need to worry. Before we came to see the Evil God, we had already evacuated our people. Most had been waiting in the shelters ahead of time. By now, I fear the majority have already entered them."

And that was indeed the case.

A great many citizens had entered the shelters long prepared for them.

Across the entire world, fish could now be seen drifting through the seawater, subjected to intense ultraviolet radiation.

Yet when the terrifying Purple Firmament Divine Lightning shone upon the fish, their cells slowly peeled away and festered.

Some engineers with mediocre skills had built shelters with inadequate technology. In an instant, their hulls began to collapse, the fish disintegrated into pools of rotten fish meat, and the brain cells controlling the fish's body went to ruin alongside them.

Glug glug glug!~~

Like a fishpond starved of oxygen, great numbers of fish floated belly-up on the surface, rapidly rotting, decomposing, and dying.

The highly skilled engineers, however, were still struggling.

They became frenzied menders, patching up their fish, evolving madly, forcibly multiplying huge numbers of cells to repair the decaying parts of the hulls. But they likely would not endure much longer.

"Damn it!"

Emperor of Atabia had long anticipated a situation like this and immediately acted:

"Let us begin! Our Era of All Fish in Atabia is already collapsing. We must evolve into the next biological form of civilization and resist the radiance of this Evil God!"

Within the Fish King—the National Engineering Department—they raced against time.

The faster this king fish of the ruling race evolved, developed the ability to resist the death Light Ray, and distributed it among all the fish, the more it could reduce the decline of their people!

The schools of fish struggled, rapidly adapting to their environment.

As Emperor of Atabia analyzed Ultraviolet Radiation's corrosive effects and attempted new genetic editing, his heart grew ever more turbulent:

"This kind of Light Ray is simply a realm beyond our comprehension... The worlds beyond the Crystal Wall, the vast Evil Gods one after another—their civilizations and mighty power are truly something to yearn for!"

What magnificent and dazzling power it was.

What an immense, invincible, and bloated body it possessed.

Mysterious, majestic, towering—the divine art that contained endless mighty power had destroyed their kingdom in an instant, filling him with deep terror.

As he researched, he watched fish wander through the waters, watched the fish around the sea die in agony, watched citizens after citizens collapse into despair amid their wails.

Yet he could only watch, utterly unable to do anything.

"Your Majesty, pull yourself together!" the ministers said.

Emperor of Atabia said in silence:

"No, it is not the departure of our suffering people once more, nor the destruction of our civilization once again, that pains me. I grieve because, after witnessing it time and again, all our civilization's efforts still cannot find the answers."

"Once we possess wisdom, we gain a thirst for knowledge beneath these heavens and this earth."

"What shape does the world truly have?"

"Is the world outside also a world like ours?"

"Our world is round above and square below. Does the universe exist as room after room of multiversal worlds? What is truth? How were we born? How many forms can life take? Is genetic expression the root of everything?"

"Before the Evil God attacks again, I hope I can lead our civilization to shatter the world's limits, break through the destruction wrought by the Outer Gods beyond the Crystal Wall, and live long enough to truly understand the truth of this world."

This great extinction of life once again made him question the truth.

It was getting a little overheated.

Li Qing had been shining it for five or six minutes. This big thing was getting too hot, and with it shining onto the glass, he felt some of the reflection hitting him as well. His skin was starting to sting.

Ultraviolet Radiation at high intensity was carcinogenic.

He had no desire to get cancer.

So, feeling that the time was about right, he shut it off.

Many people did not know that this kind of equipment was so high-powered that it was like an ultra-powerful flashlight. If left on too long, it would overheat and burn out, so it needed time to cool down. He had secretly borrowed such expensive equipment from the laboratory for himself; if he broke it playing around, both he and Doraemon would be finished. The Asian buff was still stacking, after all.

Today's world-ending event ended here.

Splash!

He slowly opened his Microscopic Eye.

The ground was littered with floating fish corpses the size of mites. The results were remarkable.

"I caught them when they had never seen Ultraviolet Radiation before. Still, Ultraviolet Radiation obviously cannot inflict too much damage on multicellular organisms. Ultraviolet Radiation sterilizes; more often than not, it merely kills bacteria."

Li Qing sighed, but he was not overly alarmed.

"I need to immediately start preparing the next method of extermination."

"They are developing too quickly. After all, at our first meeting, they were cells with four flagella forcibly pretending to be humans."

"At our second meeting, they were eerie humanoid wax figures made of eighteen cells."

"It would not be strange for them to be human-shaped next time."

Though they were still within the bounds of multicellular organisms, this was not a superpower movie. At present, no creature on Earth could have bones and chunks of flesh harder than steel, capable of breaking through the laboratory's walls of copper and iron.

At present.

The only possibility was that they might produce powerful acid to corrode that pane of glass.

But something of that level was absolutely not something they could develop in the short term.

Still, Li Qing would not lower his guard because of this. Strategically, he despised the enemy; tactically, he took the enemy seriously.

He recalled Ning Guochang's words: "Humans are merely monkeys who know how to use tools. To measure other unknown civilizations through the lens of our own arrogant understanding is far too ridiculous."

Who knew whether something beyond his understanding might suddenly emerge?

So after the ultraviolet radiation, Li Qing did not leave. Instead, he took out the bottle hanging from his neck and said to the children inside:

"Next, while this world is undergoing a great extinction and has no time to spare for you, hide among their people. As the Vanguard Exploration Team, go and destroy their Kingdom of Atabia."