While Lei Ting quietly slipped into his target along the heavy metal struts connecting the space elevator to the starship, various events were unfolding simultaneously across the starry expanse.
On the front lines, several legions exchanged "pleasantries" with the enemy using explosive shells the size of buildings. Meanwhile, the armies not yet engaged in battle maintained order and hunted down monsters as they always did.
On habitable planets outside the war zones, the atmosphere was slightly tense and oppressive, yet the people still lived and worked in relative peace. In the capital star system, members of the Parliament discussed new agendas with expressionless faces.
And far away, near the junction where the Milky Way met the Large Magellanic Cloud, a massive shadow drifted in the starry sky, writhing like a living planet.
Densely packed heads of various biological entities surrounded it, forming a wide planetary ring constructed of death. This entity, along with the tens of millions of eyes that occasionally blinked in chaotic unison upon its planet-like shadow, served as the source of light for the surrounding area.
Furthermore, silver-white light—seemingly subtle when viewed individually, but forming a vortex or waterfall in its entirety—flowed out from that planetary ring of death. Wisps of literal light-mist drifted into those tens of millions of eyes.
Countless black-red tentacles sprouted from the gaps between those eyes. They grew endlessly, only to meet an infinite, withered death upon reaching a certain length.
Thus, a cycle established between life and death was achieved. It was used to purify the power sent to it by the dense cluster of heads on that planetary ring of death—the psychic energy that began to decay after death was fully accepted, useless superpowers were discarded, and interesting abilities were transformed into colored spheres of light to be integrated into one of its eyes. Alternatively, they would enter a patch of eyeless, glowing outer skin, writhing beneath the surface for a moment before flowing with the pitch-black blood to open as a new eye.
Within the planetary ring, inside the long-dilapidated buildings of an artificial small ring built around this massive form, a scene of endless gore, slaughter, and profanity was playing out.
A group of creatures whose appearances perfectly matched the worldly definition of "demons" were efficiently butchering and processing dull-eyed sapient beings. Blood of various colors stained the floor, and headless corpses or severed spines and internal organs of common races were discarded haphazardly in every direction.
The once-magnificent walls, formerly adorned with gold and silver, were now covered in mottled rust. A crimson, writhing carpet of flesh had eroded the entire floor, with networks of veins or vine-like growths clinging to the walls. Black-red abominations, sated from their feast, crawled everywhere upon the flesh-carpet. In the corners, piles of various still-living creatures had their flesh melted into a single mass, thoroughly rooted into the horrific black-red giant carpet, their faces dull and numb, their gazes empty.
At the end of their hollow stares, a group of demons surrounded a small coliseum on the flesh-carpet, where two demons were locked in a death match.
When one tore open its opponent's throat, a burst of ghostly, screeching cheers erupted from the surroundings.
A heavy, bloody stench permeated the air. Should anything that could not blend in enter through the gates of this former temple, it would be stared down abruptly and greedily by everything mentioned above.
When Lei Wenbo entered, this was the scene he beheld.
His expression couldn't help but twist for a moment.
Then, amidst the screams and hissing laughter of the demon horde, he followed a path cleared through the three-to-four-meter-thick flesh-carpet—a "clean" path... well, relatively clean, as it was still slick with blood—toward the filthy yet still lofty pulpit at the far end.
"This batch of goods is alright, but the life support wasn't handled well. A few died." Atop the pulpit, a humanoid monster, spindly enough to resemble a spider leg, was recording something on a data pad. "How did this happen? With your job classification, you shouldn't be making such low-level mistakes."
Though this creature was not human and did nothing humane, its voice when speaking was soft and gentle, perfectly matching the vocal aesthetics of most orderly sapient beings—this was not its true voice, of course, but merely one of the lures it usually displayed.
"Something happened when I left. I was chased by the Human Federation's First Military Academy for two or three years," Lei Wenbo said irritably. "They really are a pack of dogs, able to track a scent across thousands of light-years..."
"I see. Very well." The spindly demon sighed gracefully. "You've worked hard. Go and pray. 'Devourer' says He will grant you the blessing required for your revenge."
Lei Wenbo froze for a moment, then revealed a proper but somewhat hurried smile. "Good, good!"
Then, Lei Wenbo turned and ascended the pulpit.
As the two spoke, behind the pulpit next to the demon, in front of a stained-glass window encrusted with flesh, stood a statue of a goddess. It was patchily covered by the flesh network, its robes obscured by hanging tentacles. Within the hollowed-out face of the statue, a massive eyeball with a pitch-black base and a scarlet iris stared fixedly at the man and the demon.
The black blood flowing from the "living planet" occasionally splashed down from above, drenching the mutated goddess statue and turning into pitch-black mist.
Whenever this happened, the eyeball would move briefly, allowing the black mist to soak into its scarlet iris, making the rest of the eyeball even darker.
Lei Wenbo knelt on the pulpit, bowing his head in prayer. As he prayed, all sound within the filthy temple vanished. Every creature watched him from near and far, their gazes either cold or burning.
The eyeball watched him for a while, then suddenly began to vibrate and shake. A piercing scream erupted from within as it tried to break free, only to be pulled back by the dense network of blood vessels that pierced through its body within the goddess's head. It only managed to let oil-like black blood drip from the ruptured vessels on its surface onto the head of the kneeling supplicant.
The blessed supplicant let out a shrill scream as the black blood burned through his flesh and seeped into his skull. He pitched forward and collapsed onto the ground.
Before long, a wisp of black mist drifted out from the back of his head and merged back into the eyeball.
The demon horde let out dissatisfied cries.
"Oh dear... it seems the lineage of Carbon-Based Type I truly cannot be modified this way." The spindly demon sighed with extreme human-like affectation. "If it were a remnant of the Empire, they would have obtained even greater power by now...
"But it doesn't matter. This one's purpose is to seek revenge against the Human Federation anyway. Once we destroy the Federation, the result will be the same."
"But the Empire's remnants won't come here," said an eyeball ornament hanging from its waist. "Those fellows may have betrayed the Emperor... that man, but they inherited his will."
Hearing this, the spindly demon, who had maintained a composed and elegant demeanor, suddenly let out a cold sneer. "The descendants of the treacherous ministers who betrayed him dare to claim they have inherited anything?"
"Don't say that; they are, after all, the descendants of your old friends." The eyeball ornament's voice was giggling. "Speaking of which, what feedback have the chess pieces you scattered to the Federation's borders given you?"
"It doesn't matter. As long as those two trash races draw the Federation's attention, their mission is complete," the spindly demon said nonchalantly. "Just fools who chose to defect the moment the Empire had problems—even the Orion Human Federation is better than them. At least the Federation doesn't lack a sense of honor and shame; even though they also distanced themselves from the Empire, they didn't actively participate in the war to split it."
"Ah... it seems you still can't forget that majestic dictator—indeed, who could forget him after living through those years?" the eyeball ornament lamented softly. "The Great Demons of the Ethereal Space say that a young new powerhouse has emerged in the Human Federation. He is stronger than that man was in his twenties, and also more..."
"More fragile than him," the spindly demon sneered. "I've already seen that fellow. Although I didn't touch his mental body, he seems so full of humanity that he is unworthy of such power."
"Aha, isn't it a good thing that he's more likely to be softened by us than that man was?"
"Perhaps." As the spindly demon spoke, it looked down and opened the old data pad in its hand. "I must get to work. If the Devourer wakes up hungry, we're all finished."
The eyeball ornament swayed at its waist, its voice carrying an unmistakable smile. "Very well, I understand. However, I still have one tiny question—
"—If you truly hate betrayal so much... then why were you the first betrayer to serve under him? Your Highness, the Prince?
"Could it be that you were merely using the opportunity of tempting your brothers into the Ethereal Space to seize the position of Crown Prince, only to accidentally mess everything up?"
No emotional fluctuation could be seen on the spindly demon's delicate, blurred face, but at that moment, its movements stopped.
Inside the filthy temple, it was as silent as ice.
Then, it suddenly lowered its hand and crushed the eyeball in a single squeeze.
...
*Snap!*
A spark erupted as a power circuit burned out. Under the protection of safety mechanisms, the line quickly disconnected from the main power system.
The lights in a small area went dark. Lei Ting retracted the metal that had caused this minor safety incident into his collar—it wasn't that he didn't want to cut the line directly, but the visual manifestation of a cut versus a burnout was different, after all.
Then, as two repairmen came to reconnect the wires while grumbling, he took them out without a word. He took the keycard they held in their four-fingered hands and examined it, carefully sensing the metal circuits inside, which differed slightly from Federation technology.
After a moment, without damaging the outer plastic shell of the data card, he tried to adjust those circuits. At the cost of burning out one test subject, he successfully rewrote a... rather aggressive internal circuit into it.
As for higher authorization or something similar, it wasn't that he hadn't thought of it. But there was simply no way to fool the enemy's regional master control AI.
And he'd better not trigger any alarms randomly. Firstly, because for this mission, the Federation's high command required him to "kill as many high-ranking enemy logistics and staff officers as possible," "paralyze the enemy's internal network and supply capabilities," and "ideally obtain some classified technology or related results." Secondly, because...
...Because those twenty-five teammates hadn't triggered a single alarm yet. As the strongest among them, how could he afford to lose face like that?
