In the control center, time seemed to flow slowly under the wash of datastreams.
Halsey and Cortana had already entered a state of total absorption.
On the hard-light screens before them, the vast datastream returned from the many monitoring nodes spread across Grand Device 01's ring and from dedicated monitoring stations throughout the ring was being processed and cross-compared.
"Pulse waveform matches preset model at 99.992%. Energy decay curve conforms to theoretical prediction. No anomalous leakage detected."
Cortana reported in a cool tone. Her projected fingers swept quickly across a complex set of energy distribution charts, magnifying three tiny anomalous fluctuations.
"Detected 0.008% deviation. Analysis attributes it to nonuniform dark matter density in neighboring systems, within acceptable error range."
Halsey inclined her head slightly, eyes passing over another data group: "Spacetime curvature disturbance peaked at 3.7 seconds after firing, reaching 1.47 times normal spacetime curvature at maximum, then rapidly settled below baseline within 0.3 seconds.
No chain damage to spatial structure triggered. Neighboring gravitational fields stable… Good. Stability is five percent better than simulation."
She pulled up a dynamic star map of a spherical region thirty thousand light-years across. The crimson points that had been scattered across it to represent "Marker–blood moon" life signals were now entirely extinguished, replaced by the cold gray that meant "purified."
Each extinguished point represented the complete annihilation of at least one blood moon entity.
"Proceeding to final confirmation scans." Cortana's voice came again. "Initiating deep-space resonance detection. Frequency covers entire band. Scan progress 87%… 95%… 100%.
Confirmation result: All locked biosignals within preset purgation radius have gone to zero.
Repeating: All locked biosignals have gone to zero. No surviving individuals or active residual tissues detected."
At that, Halsey finally lifted her head from the screens and let out a long breath. A smile, blending fatigue and massive accomplishment, touched her face.
She rubbed her temples. The continuous high-intensity analysis had left her a little tired, but the excitement in her eyes had not dimmed.
"One-click sweep. Clean and neat."
Her voice was soft, tinged with the restraint and satisfaction peculiar to a scientist. "Looks like our 'scalpel' did astonishingly well on its first draw. All preset targets cleared simultaneously, not a single one slipped the net."
Standing nearby, Sui Meng took it all in.
Though he had already learned from records of the Grand Device's terrifying might, when this star-system-scale destruction presented itself so directly and so absolutely, a shock beyond words still churned within him.
In a span so brief as to be nearly negligible, an ultimate purgation had been completed across a radius of thirty thousand light-years.
Thirty thousand light-years—
within the breadth that number represented, all threats in the "Marker–blood moon" lineage—latent or manifest, no matter how twisted their forms or uncanny their strength, whether a fresh infection newly sprouted or a massive blood moon host that had consumed entire systems—had just been erased from the level of existence itself in that fleeting flash.
This was not war. It was cleansing, a reset—a complete "formatting" of a corner of the universe.
Before such an ultimate weapon, what does the pinnacle of personal might amount to?
He, Sui Meng—the genetic Primarch—could topple mountains and shake peaks, take a warlord's head in the midst of a million, even briefly become a ten-thousand-meter colossus to fight among the stars. Such power could turn the tide in conventional war and be deemed a walking cataclysm.
He had thought this was the extreme of power.
Yet compared to this might that purged a thirty-thousand-light-year starfield in an instant, individual valor seemed so small—like a firefly before the sun, a drop before the sea.
It left him with a deeper understanding of why his father had spared no effort to support Halsey's team in developing such ultimate weapons.
On the scale of the multiverse, some threats can only be met with destruction of the same order.
Individual strength has limits. Properly guided, the might of technology is nearly boundless.
His thoughts drifted.
In those "heretical" religious texts, divine destruction of disobedient races came as judgment in an instant.
Wrath of the gods, world-drowning floods; brimstone and fire raining down to obliterate cities of sin.
Wasn't the Device's activation precisely a reflection of that myth in reality?
Only here, it was not immaterial gods rendering "divine punishment," but human wisdom, courage, and strength.
It was the hand of humanity that gripped the scepter to reshape the star-sea.
He thought then of his father, Emperor Samuel Young.
That figure loomed ever more towering and profound in his mind.
He had a faint sense that even the Grand Device, mighty as it was, might not be the Empire's ultimate trump.
His father—
the Emperor who sat the Golden Throne, whose mind crossed universes uncounted, whose gaze spanned past and future—his true strength likely exceeded the realm of conventional weapons long ago.
Sui Meng had been given no explicit statement, but he could faintly feel that, as the Empire's frontiers expanded madly through the multiverse and as the faith of quintillions grew more devout and deep-rooted, a force beyond words was gathering and surging at the Empire's foundations.
His father's power seemed—no, surely—to be climbing in a manner beyond linear growth, as if every world newly sworn and every devout belief poured new strength into him.
Perhaps one day, his father alone—without any external aid—could do what the Grand Device had done, a star-system-scale purgation; one thought dimming the rivers of stars, one will shaking the universe, even…
one man leveling an entire universe?
The thought sent a thrill through him and further steeled his resolve to walk in his father's path.
Of course, for now, Sui Meng himself could in no way reach the Grand Device's effect—reshaping the star-sea with a gesture.
He still had far to go.
"Child."
Halsey's voice broke his reverie. She turned, still wearing excitement—and a weight that came with uncovering historical truth. "The preliminary tallies are in. They're… staggering, even a bit unexpected."
She pointed to a freshly generated summary report on the main screen stamped "Classified."
Beside the report, an auto-generated 3D star map model marked, in striking red, the positions of 143 annihilation-signal sources.
"Based on the annihilation-source strengths, spectral features, and spatial distribution returned by the full-power scan, then back-calculated with confidence assessment, the pulse just now eradicated at least one hundred and forty-three blood moon entities of varying scale.
Of these, one hundred and seventeen reached terrestrial-planet scale, twenty-one reached gas-giant scale, and five had masses comparable to a small star."
That number—especially the five star-class blood moons—tightened Sui Meng's gaze a notch.
He pictured five massive fleshly bodies like small stars turning to "particles" in the instant the pulse swept by—what a terrifying sight that would be.
Halsey went on, her tone carrying the feel of an archaeologist lifting the veil on a lost civilization:
"The number and their distribution pattern across the galaxy show traces of alignment with ancient interstellar routes. It suggests that, in the Galaxy of this universe, in the distant past there should have been many brilliant sapient civilizations—a glorious era of stars shining, ten thousand kinds contending—whose prosperity far exceeded our earlier estimates.
Yet, without exception, they were corroded and taken, one by one, by the Marker and the blood-moon mechanism—built, it seems, precisely to reap civilizations—leaving behind these blood moons like tombstones, drifting in dead systems."
She zoomed the map and focused on the Orion Arm.
"What you faced on Universe 20 (Dead Space) Earth was only the relatively 'young' and active fraction of the blood moons within the Orion Arm—drawn by the Primordial Marker on Earth.
Like sharks stirred by the scent of blood, they were woken from slumber.
To the humans of Universe 20, whose activity range and time scale are a mere mote against the Galaxy's vastness and deep history, it was natural they would never perceive that, farther out in the darker deeps, the star-sea had long been seeded with these 'graves' that stood for death and endings—records of one forgotten civilization's elegy after another."
She paused, eyes moving over those now-gray sources on the display, then summed up:
"In other words, our activation just now not only solved the threat at hand. It amounted to a belated, thorough 'great cleaning' of this universe's Galaxy—clearing away an ultimate plague that had lurked here for who knows how many tens or hundreds of millions of years, devouring civilizations without number.
From today on, this Galaxy may, for nascent sapient life, enter a new, relatively safe epoch."
The control room fell briefly silent, with only the soft hum of systems and Halsey's words echoing.
Her words revealed not only a truth of the starry past—buried and tragic—but also made stark the Empire's might and the heavy responsibility that came with power strong enough to rewrite cosmic history.
Sui Meng stared at the gray markers, as if he could see the ghosts of countless dead civilizations sighing in the star-sea, and the Empire's power becoming the new arbiter of the region.
Receiving this revelation of the Galaxy's past tragedy and the Empire's vast might, Sui Meng recovered from his brief shock and nodded solemnly.
He acknowledged the outcome. It had undeniably cleared a great obstacle from the Diwuzu Legion's complete consolidation of this universe.
At the same time, Halsey seemed to have caught the faint, hard-to-catch gravity that had flashed in Sui Meng's eyes when he looked at the map—
not fear of power, but a weighing of the responsibility and the risks that power carried.
She put away her overly open excitement and spoke in a steadier tone that carried reassurance and explanation:
"Rest easy, child."
She intentionally chose the closer form of address. "As the Human Empire's ultimate deterrent at this stage, the Grand Device had multiple layered and redundant—and mutually independent—safety interlocks built in from the start.
Its firing authority is locked at the highest level. Only with His Majesty the Emperor's personal approval and with on-site supervision and authorization confirmation by at least one genetic Primarch can the pulse sequence be unlocked and initiated.
This operation followed that top safety protocol to the letter.
We received a direct order from His Majesty, and only under your personal 'observation' and assent did we complete this historic first activation."
She paused, then added, "The ring's control core is physically isolated from the Imperial main net. Its final firing command needs three independent password verifications. Any one missing forces a system self-lock.
In addition, we set more than twenty 'breakpoints' at critical nodes in the ring. If any unexpected energy fluctuation or command conflict is detected, it will sever energy supply instantly and smother the reaction at inception.
Its very existence is to guard humanity and to deter xenos and heresies hostile to human civilization. Its point will never—and can never—turn toward the Empire itself."
Perhaps to ease the air—and from absolute confidence in her creation and a certain understanding of the Emperor and the Primarchs' nature—Halsey added in a tone that was half jest yet held hidden weight:
"And even setting aside the lack of experimental data—since we could never test on a Primarch, and never will—my theoretical models suggest that the specific energy field produced by the cross-phase pulse should not harm you or your brothers, or the Emperor, in the least."
She looked to Sui Meng, eyes probing toward a higher order of life:
"Your essence has long since transcended the category of ordinary life. The Emperor is a god walking among men. His existence is the embodiment of law itself.
And you, as His sons, carry divinity in your blood. Your souls are bound tightly to the Empire's fate, sheltered on the level of concept.
The Device's purgation is targeted at specific 'life signals,' while you… may be closer to an 'extension of law'?"
Her words carried a hypothesis, but the conviction brooked no doubt.
To this, Sui Meng remained calm. Halsey's conjecture stirred little ripple in him.
He shook his head slightly and spoke steadily, "Doctor, my concern is not about control of the Device. Since my father approved its construction and use, I believe you and your team have absolute ability to control it and prevent any accident."
His trust in Imperial science and discipline ran deep.
He shifted tone. His eyes returned to the map of the starfield just purged. They sharpened:
"What truly concerns me is another strategic objective.
We fired the Grand Device and purged the blood moons not only to remove the threat, but also to serve as a powerful shock—to 'knock on the mountain and shake the tiger,' or to 'cast a stone to test the road.'"
He stepped forward and pointed to the vast star map. "A clearance on this scale—erasing over a hundred blood moons in an instant—amounts to tearing out most of the 'feelers' and 'ears' that the unknown force behind the Markers had set in this star system.
They cannot possibly remain unaware—and cannot possibly fail to react.
I want to know whether Grand Device 01—or its associated monitoring network—detected any abnormal spacetime disturbances, any unconventional energy spillover after the pulse—perhaps… any 'gaze' from beyond the Galaxy, or from the interstices of dimensions.
Can we use this opportunity to catch traces of those 'things'?"
That was the core of Sui Meng's attention.
Destroying the enemy before one's eyes was important. But pinning down the hand behind the scenes and preventing future threats was the key to the Empire's lasting peace.
This activation of the Grand Device was both a destruction—and a reconnaissance.
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