Boom————!!
In the next instant, a pulse wave that defied any precise description of color—nearly transparent—erupted from the frozen point of light at the ring's center and blasted outward in all directions except along the ring's own plane!
This pulse was not a simple energy beam. It was more like an "information" or "state" propagating faster than light and rewriting physical rules.
Its speed was so great that, before it truly burst, a paradox of causality occurred—a "portent" or "pre-echo."
On Proxima b, the temperate, Earth-like planet in the "habitable zone," if observers existed they would have been horrified to see the sky's star and the background stars suddenly flicker in unison without warning and flare unnaturally bright, as if the entire universe had been hit by an invisible flash.
Mountains, ground, cloud decks—even their own bodies—took on a strange, nearly transparent quality for a heartbeat, as though reality itself had been briefly "negated" or "overlaid."
The anomaly vanished in a blink, fast enough to make one doubt it wasn't a hallucination.
It was the "pre-echo" effect generated by the imminent faster-than-light pulse wave—a massive disturbance to the continuity of spacetime.
It inverted ordinary causality, making the "result"—the "afterimage" of the pulse's sweep—arrive ahead of the "cause," the pulse's emission reaching the target.
Right behind it, the true pulse proper swept in with unstoppable force.
As it passed Proxima b, there was no blast, no shock. The planet remained intact.
But any lifeform on the surface, within, or in orbit whose biosignals matched the preset "Marker–blood moon" feature spectrum was silently "erased" in an instant.
Their nervous systems were dismantled at the microscopic level; consciousness fell to nothing, leaving only cold shells.
It was an ultimate purification aimed at a specific form of life.
That "transparent" death pulse, at a speed beyond physical limits, had already traversed the 4.25 light-years almost as the "portent" faded, surging toward the Dead Space solar system—toward Earth.
On Earth—
Over the daylight hemisphere, countless people watched in fear as the sun's light became blindingly bright for a split second. The sky seemed brushed with a strange, shifting sheen. Edges blurred, and shadows warped and doubled into odd shapes.
Across the night hemisphere, the stars lost their luster. The moon turned ghostly pale, and the entire sky was shrouded in an ineffable, omnipresent glow, as if the universe itself were whispering.
This too was "portent/pre-echo," spacetime's own wail and warning before destruction arrived.
The phenomenon—far beyond comprehension—stoked a primal fear and awe in every witness, from civilians just beginning a new life to Imperial Auxiliary troops on duty.
They didn't know what had happened—only that a force beyond imagining, touching the nature of the universe, had been set in motion.
Then, at the very peak of the visual and psychic shock of that "portent"—
the truly invisible purification pulse swept silently across the entire Earth and every inch of space in the solar system.
No sound, no explosion, no shockwave.
Only a fleeting, ineffable sense—like a supreme being lightly "touching" your soul—gone in an instant.
Then the sky returned to normal. The stars took their places. The sunlight no longer stung.
As if nothing had happened.
But all who knew understood that a star-system-scale judgment and purification—targeted at specific existences—had been carried out.
The Human Empire's Grand Device had, for the first time, bared to the multiverse its "divine" majesty and power.
As for the young woman eager to join the Diwuzu Legion—
she sat cross-legged on a comfy sofa. On the holoscreen before her, the replay of Grand Device 01 short-jumping from the star sea was frozen at a breathtaking frame, while the comment field below exploded with awe and speculation.
She was reading through the whirlwind of ideas, trying to piece together where the ring could have gone and why.
Just then—
an utterly strange sensation seized her without warning.
It wasn't from the senses. It rose from the depths of her awareness.
Time seemed to stretch and twist.
The screen before her, the layout of her room, the city lights outside—
everything around her was utterly "familiar" and yet tinged with a hair-raising sense that something was "wrong."
It was impossible to put into words—like being absolutely certain you'd seen an identical instant before, in the same posture, and had read an about-to-appear comment on the screen about "the ring probably going to Proxima"—even able to "pre-read" a tiny change in your own breathing in the next moment.
It was a powerful, irrational déjà vu—so intense and clear it felt like her mind had slipped into a seam in time and glimpsed a single frame of the future.
She even half-raised a hand to tap the "about-to-appear" comment before startling to realize it hadn't actually refreshed yet.
That split-second misalignment between cognition and reality left her a little dizzy—and oddly frightened.
But the weird feeling ebbed as quickly as it came, like a receding tide.
At the very instant her mind dropped back into the "normal" flow of time—
Vmmm————!
Not through the air, but a more fundamental vibration—acting directly on her bones, her nerves, the depths of her soul.
At the same time, the darkness outside the window and the city lights were overwhelmed by an indescribable, source-less, colorless, utterly dazzling "light."
It didn't shine for long—more like the universe blinked. A single flash.
So fast the retina barely had time to hold an afterimage. Only the instant burned into the mind—a brilliance that seemed to pass through walls and flesh—and the low, soul-quaking "hum" that lingered in her ears, or perhaps inside her skull.
She clapped her hands over her ears, though she knew the sound wasn't external.
Breath ragged, heart pounding, she sat stunned—the bizarre "premonition" and the transcendent flash that followed had wiped her thoughts clean.
Then the comment feed on her screen—already boiling—went fully "nuclear."
"What was that just now?! Did you see it?! The sky flashed!!"
"Not lightning! Definitely not! The whole sky—no, my entire field of view lit up!"
"Damn! My screen glitched for a sec too! Not my imagination!"
"It's the ring! Has to be that giant Imperial ring-thing!"
"Not just light! I had this weird feeling—I knew what was going to happen in the next second—and then it did! Creepy as hell!"
"+1 above! I felt it too! Like time hiccupped!"
"Physics grad student here—timidly adding: given that global (maybe system-wide?) synchronized moment and the eerie 'foreknowledge,' it's likely some effect outran light. This is causality-level stuff! What class of weapon did the Empire just fire?!"
"FTL? In realspace?! How?! Current FTL tech all uses spacetime warps as a 'hack.' Even when the old Federation wrapped ships in a warp bubble that was the limit—energy cost was insane! That flash looked like a non-discriminating, whole-region radiative sweep! How much energy is that?!"
"One star's worth? Doubt it—ten? A hundred?! My God, what even is the Empire's tech tree?!"
"By the Emperor… I believe it now—we really are under the Emperor's protection."
The discussion pivoted fast from shock, to terrifying guesses about the phenomenon's principles, to awe and reverence at the Empire's bottomless technological might.
Comment after comment streaked by, peeling back the moment's reality-shattering force to a degree that made scalps prickle.
"."
The young woman stared blankly at the streaming comments. She didn't fully understand the jargon about FTL, causality, and energy scales.
But she remembered clearly the strange "premonition" from the depths of her mind and that one flash of brilliance that felt like it could pass through anything.
She knew only this: her sense of the vast entity called the "Human Empire" had deepened—to something closer to its essence—
a power that could touch time, "toy" with physical rules, and burn stars for fuel—a power in the realm of gods.
Shengdun 7 Orbital Station.
In the quarters allocated to the Ishimura survivors and former personnel, Isaac Clarke sat by a lounge window with his wife, Nicole. They too had seen the flash that flooded the view and felt the brief but profound cognitive dislocation brought by the "portent/pre-echo."
They traded a glance, seeing shock—and a sliver of understanding—in each other's eyes.
Having endured the Marker's psychic corruption, Nicole had a keener sensitivity and caution toward phenomena beyond ordinary perception.
Elsewhere on the station, in a senior office, Tychus Findlay had his heavy-booted feet up on a desk, a cigar in his teeth, lazily flipping through a report on recent station consumables.
Suddenly, that bizarre "premonition" hit—he felt like he already knew some dumb number on the next page—and then the station lights flickered in a way so subtle it was almost undetectable.
Outside, the black cosmic backdrop seemed lit and snuffed by an invisible giant lamp in a heartbeat.
"Mother of—!"
The shock of the incomprehensible moment made Tychus jolt so hard he almost toppled from his chair. The cigar dropped onto his chest, and he yelped as he slapped it away.
Wide-eyed, he scanned the room to make sure nothing was actually wrong, then rubbed his head and groused at the air:
"What now?! Every time it's a bigger scare than the last. My heart can't take this!"
If anyone had seen the tough guy rattled, they would've cracked up.
Lastly—
the "camera" cut to the Proxima system, its "calm" restored.
Grand Device 01's majestic ring still rested in the void at the system's edge.
The blinding "miniature sun" at the center was gone, and the energy streams racing along the outer tracery had fallen quiet—as if the spacetime-wrenching, light-year-spanning purgation had never been.
The ring itself was pristine. The breeze over its inner grasslands was still gentle. Birds still sang. The settlement lights still glowed warm.
Only the ring's lattice of fine sensors kept silently recording firing telemetry and confirming that every "Marker–blood moon" life-signal locked in the system had gone fully silent as the pulse swept past.
This starfield had undergone a silent, top-tier surgery. The lesion was precisely excised. The healthy tissue hardly knew the scalpel had passed.
Only the boundless stars, eternal witnesses, watched the first "whisper" of the Human Empire's ultimate weapon—and its awe-inspiring silence.
In the control center, you could hear a pin drop—only systems humming softly.
The giant main screen rendered, in jaw-dropping visualization, the propagation of the supermass neutrino pulse.
An ever-expanding, nearly transparent spherical wavefront spread from the Proxima system—Grand Device 01's anchor—racing in all directions at a speed that dwarfed light.
The star map filled fast. The pulse's leading sphere—like ripples from a stone tossed into still water—bloomed so quickly it covered the Orion Arm's expanse in the blink of an eye.
Data scrolled furiously to the side, showing the pulse radiating to depths about 25,000 light-years from the origin in an extremely short time.
It advanced so fast that distance itself seemed to lose meaning before it.
Then, as if reaching a preset boundary or the limit of its unique propagation mechanism, the wavefront's expansion visibly slowed on the display, its brightness and energy markers decaying in lockstep.
At last, around 30,000 light-years from Grand Device 01, the sphere that marked the purgation front faded entirely into the starfield, as if it had never been.
But the brief quiet held unimaginable destructive power.
The auto-generated assessment to the side declared the result in cold text—
Centered on the ring, within a spherical region of 30,000 light-years radius, all fleshly existences whose life-signatures matched the preset "Marker–blood moon–corpse-mutant" biosignature spectrum were annihilated at the instant of the pulse—"burned"—erased permanently at both physical and conscious levels.
At the console, Halsey and Cortana's projection showed little emotion at the grand vision of destruction.
They were fully absorbed in the cluster of hovering holos before them—cascading feedback from the firing, energy distribution charts, spacetime disturbance coefficients, and preliminary assessments of impacts on non-target lifeforms.
Their fingers flew—filtering, tagging, analyzing—like the finest instruments, focused on translating the unprecedented torrent of data from this first activation into knowledge and technical parameters the Empire could wield in the future.
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