Time seemed to have been set to slow motion the moment Nuwa extended her finger.
The pale torrent of energy, enough to vaporize an entire galaxy, stretched into a long, frozen band of light across everyone's retinas. Its power was so terrifying that the chaotic space in its path underwent irreversible collapse, turning into the most primordial void.
This was pure, unreasonable, ultimate destruction on a physical level.
It was the Gestalt civilization's standard procedure for dealing with all organic lifeforms.
According to their calculations, no Level 3.7 civilization could withstand this blow. All matter in the target world would be completely broken down into fundamental particles within 0.001 standard cosmic units of time.
However, there was an error in the calculations.
Nuwa's finger touched the very front of the energy torrent.
There was no earth-shattering explosion.
No violent collision between laws and energy.
There was not even any observable phenomenon.
That world-destroying torrent of energy simply... vanished.
Yes, vanished.
It had not been blocked, annihilated, or redirected.
It was as though it had never existed, utterly erased from this spacetime and from everyone's perception.
As if someone had taken an eraser to a piece of footage and wiped away its most glaring frame.
The entire battlefield fell into an eerie silence.
On the Civilization, the Three Sovereigns and every human general stood with their mouths agape, their eyes practically popping out of their sockets. Their brains were completely unable to process what they had just witnessed.
"W-what just happened?"
"The attack? That beam of light, so thick and so bright?"
"Did... did Holy Mother Empress... eat it?"
A young general instinctively asked a stupid question, but no one laughed at him. Everyone's understanding of reality had been completely overturned.
They knew Saints were powerful, but their understanding of "power" remained at the level of destroying heaven and earth, moving mountains, and filling seas.
But what had just happened went beyond the scope of "power."
What was that?
Was it Word of Law? Creation from nothing? Or had she... directly altered reality?
They did not understand.
But they were deeply shaken.
And even more shaken than they were was the black diamond-shaped warship.
Or rather, the Gestalt collective consciousness within it.
[Warning.] [Warning.] [Main cannon "Causality Erasure Beam," attack ineffective.] [Target... sustained no damage.] [Energy reaction... zero.] [Law disturbance... zero.] [Spatial curvature variation... zero.]
A string of zeroes flooded Gestalt's central processing core as red garbled text.
This was impossible!
The Causality Erasure Beam was their fleet's highest-grade standard armament. Its principle was not an energy impact, but the use of ultra-high-dimensional calculations to forcibly sever the target's Karma along the timeline, erasing the very concept of its "existence" from both past and present.
This was a Dimensional Strike involving the concepts of time and existence.
They had used this move to format countless civilizations that had resisted them.
It had never failed.
Yet today, their most advanced and prized technology was like a clay ox sinking into the sea, unable to even stir up a ripple.
[Reassessing target.] [Scanning target lifeform... analysis failed.] [Scanning target energy composition... analysis failed.] [Scanning target law permissions... analysis failed.] [Conclusion: target is an unresolvable "unknown existence." Threat level upgraded from 3.7 to... undefined.]
For the first time, Gestalt's collective consciousness experienced an emotional fluctuation akin to "confusion." Its logic database had no contingency plan for this situation.
An individual that could not be scanned, analyzed, or defined had effortlessly erased their Karma attack.
This was no longer science.
What... was this thing?
"Did you see that?"
Chen Ran's will rang out within Nuwa's Nascent Soul, carrying a trace of amusement.
"To those tin cans, you are the most unreasonable kind of 'bug.' Every attack they make is based on the universal laws they can understand. But Saints themselves are unreasonable, walking humanoid Heavenly Dao."
Nuwa did not respond.
She merely gazed quietly at that diamond-shaped warship, a flicker of curiosity passing through her cool eyes.
What had she just done?
Even she could not truly explain it.
When that attack came at her, she instinctively sensed that its essence was a denial of "existence."
So she had used her own authority as well.
As a Heavenly Dao Saint, she possessed extremely high permissions within the Primordial World's "server."
Since the enemy wanted to "deny" the existence of the human fleet,
then she would "deny" the existence of their "attack."
Simple, direct, and overbearing.
That was how Saints fought.
It was not a contest of energy, but a direct alteration of the world's rules.
Gestalt's silence lasted only a few seconds.
Their immense computational power quickly produced a new solution.
Since a single conceptual attack was ineffective,
then they would use the most primitive, purest, and most impossible-to-erase physical attack.
Bzzzzz—
Countless armor plates slid apart across the diamond-shaped warship's surface.
Dense launch ports, resembling a honeycomb, were revealed.
From every launch port extended spindle-shaped objects gleaming with cold metallic light.
[Initiating "Mass Storm" strike protocol.] [Launch units: 3,600,000.] [Warheads: ultra-dense neutron star core matter.] [Launch velocity: sublight speed.] [Objective: blanket saturation attack.] [Logical assessment: no entity existing within three-dimensional space can physically annihilate three million solid warheads containing neutron-star mass while they approach at sublight speed.] [Execute.]
The next moment,
three million meteors of death, trailing long tails, tore through the chaos.
They possessed no dazzling visual effects, nor did they emit terrifying energy fluctuations.
All they had was the purest, most overwhelming "mass."
This was the brutal aesthetic of physics, enough to smash an entire starfield into a chaotic wasteland.
Faced with this storm of steel, Nuwa's expression finally changed.
It was a faint look of... distaste, tinged with helplessness.
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