419: Chapter 419 Mathematical models are difficult to understand, but physical rules are much easier.

Silence spread through the Chaotic Star Sea.

The Truth Realm warships that had been swept by the ripples of Absolute Mass were like cold, steel floating corpses, strewn haphazardly within the turbulent currents of the Void Realm. Their silver-gray geometric armor, stripped of energy reinforcement, quickly became coated in a layer of grayish-white frost.

Zhou Wannian walked with his hands behind his back, his faded green cotton robe drifting through the gaps in the wreckage. He did not look back at the dead scrap metal; his green cloth shoes stepped onto invisible void stairs as he walked steadily, step by step, toward the churning gray mist at the edge of the Taiwu Ancestral Court.

Just as he took his twelfth step.

From deep within the steel graveyard behind him, a piercing sound of tearing metal suddenly erupted.

The sound came without warning, like someone using a dull saw to forcibly cut through a heavy piece of pig iron. A vacuum environment should have stripped away all sound transmission, but this noise ignored physical mediums, transforming directly into a frantic high-frequency data stream that scraped against the edges of Zhou Wannian's Divine Soul with a tooth-aching screech.

Zhou Wannian stopped and turned his head slightly.

His gaze pierced through the tumbling warship wreckage, landing on the massive super-mothership at the center of the formation.

That Geometric mothership, which should have been completely dark and in a state of shutdown, was currently undergoing spasms that defied common sense. The diamond and conical armor plates on its exterior, used for maintaining balance, were being forcibly pushed open and snapped by a brute force erupting from within.

"Bang! Bang bang!"

Accompanied by a series of dull internal explosions, the massive glowing sphere at the mothership's core lit up once more.

Only this time, the light that flared up was no longer that grayish-white cold light representing absolute logic and icy rigidity.

Instead, it was a thick, viscous crimson, as if it were dripping with fresh blood.

The red light pierced through the shattered hull of the mothership, illuminating the vast surrounding void like an Asura battlefield. An incredibly pungent smell of burning spread along the spatial fluctuations—the scent of hundreds of millions of logic processing chips inside the mothership operating under overload, or even melting on the spot.

This Mainframe, carrying the highest authority of the Truth Realm, was not entirely dead.

After its conventional physical engines and weapon Systems were destroyed by Zhou Wannian's mass ripples, the Mainframe triggered a last-resort counterattack protocol hidden at its lowest level. It abandoned control of the fleet, burned out all redundant modules used for communication and navigation, and channeled the final traces of energy from this massive warship into the Truth Realm's most prized conceptual weapon.

"Locking onto variable. Conventional physical erasure failed."

"Initiating ultimate contingency. Loading Local Dimensional Constant Tampering Protocol."

The Mainframe's synthesized mechanical voice was no longer steady; it was laced with heavy static and the hissing of electrical leaks. Red light flashed frantically on the sphere's surface, like a cornered, one-eyed beast staring fixedly at Zhou Wannian's back.

Zhou Wannian turned around, facing the mothership that looked as if it were weeping blood.

He did not take any defensive posture; his hands remained leisurely clasped behind his back, and a faint glimmer of interest even surfaced in his deep eyes.

"Risking a burnt-out brain just to struggle a bit more," Zhou Wannian said as he looked at the crimson sphere, his voice rippling calmly through the void. "Let me see if the hidden trump card of you bean-counters can give me a bit of a wake-up call."

The Mainframe did not answer.

Through its actions, it demonstrated to this unanalyzable variable the absolute control a high-dimensional mechanical civilization held over the rules of the Universe.

"Gravitational constant modification: Negative repulsion."

"Strong and weak nuclear force reset: Parameter inversion."

"Light speed barrier removal: Local light closed-loop."

Crimson data commands followed the red light emitted by the Mainframe, injecting directly into the sector of space where Zhou Wannian stood.

In that instant, the surrounding world collapsed.

This was not a bombardment of Spells, nor was it the slashing of blades; it was the very 'skeleton' that constituted this world being forcibly dismantled and reorganized.

Zhou Wannian felt the void beneath his feet suddenly lose its sense of solid support. Gravity, which should have pulled downward, was instantly modified into an outward-repelling tension. The surrounding floating warship wreckage shot out frantically in all directions like ignited firecrackers, moving so fast they pulled stinging afterimages through the darkness.

Immediately following that, the fundamental forces constituting matter fell into total chaos.

On a microscopic level, atomic nuclei could no longer bind electrons. Fragments of high-dimensional alloy that were once indestructible melted like snow in mid-air, turning into spheres of boiling plasma.

This chaotic storm of rules turned the space hundreds of miles around Zhou Wannian into a 'sea of fire' that could not be understood by common sense.

This fire had no temperature.

It did not burn wood, nor did it consume oxygen; it burned the 'physical rules' themselves. Any matter following the old laws of physics would be instantly evaporated into a string of meaningless garbled code upon falling into this sea of fire.

Light here was also twisted into bizarre shapes.

Photons that should have traveled in straight lines became spiral curves connected end-to-end after the constants were tampered with. Crimson light swirled around Zhou Wannian like glowing balls of yarn, wrapping him in layer upon layer at the center.

Erratic gravity, collapsing atoms, and closed-loop light.

The Truth Realm Mainframe used its last ounce of computing power to create a rule-based purgatory in this dead star sector, designed to 'evaporate' variables.

Zhou Wannian stood at the very center of this purgatory.

His green robe seemed somewhat thin amidst the darting crimson light.

Those temperature-less fires, formed from the collapse of rules, lunged at his face with bared fangs and claws, attempting to forcibly dismantle the atoms that made up his flesh-and-blood body.

However.

When these rule-fires, capable of evaporating stars, licked against the three-foot invisible Domain around Zhou Wannian, a tooth-aching sense of stagnation occurred.

There was no world-shaking collision.

The Absolute Mass tempered by the Great Perfection Space Law took firm root within that small three-foot space.

Even though the external gravity had been modified into a negative value, the void beneath Zhou Wannian's feet remained as heavy as a mountain, without the slightest wobble. No matter how the plasma sea of fire washed over him, the moment those chaotic strong and weak nuclear forces touched the edge of the Domain, they were forcibly suppressed back into their original, mundane state by an even more overbearing and irrational mass.

The Rule-Tampering Weapon was like a paintbrush in an artist's hand, able to smear colors onto a canvas at will.

But the three-foot Domain around Zhou Wannian was not a canvas at all.

It was a solid iron anvil so heavy that even the Universe itself could not bear it. When the paintbrush poked the anvil, it could leave no mark, only break its tip.

The crimson light swirled futilely around the edge of the Domain like a swarm of headless flies unable to find a crack.

Zhou Wannian stood quietly in the center of the sea of fire.

He watched those bizarre physical phenomena and listened to the piercing screeches of rules snapping in the void.

At first, his deep eyes held a hint of inquisitive interest, wanting to see what tricks this method of modifying world parameters from the bottom up could pull off.

But after watching for a moment.

That bit of interest in the depths of Zhou Wannian's eyes gradually went out, like a flickering candle blown by an autumn wind.

"Inverting gravity, bending light."

Zhou Wannian shook his head, his tone carrying a deep sense of boredom.

"And here I thought it was some impressive method. In the end, it's just hiding behind the scenes clicking abacus beads and changing numbers in a ledger. All bark and no bite; it looks fancy, but there's no strength in it at all."

He lowered his hands from behind his back.

The turbulent rule-currents around him, which were enough to erase any Soul Transformation Stage powerhouse, didn't even have the right to stir the hair at his temples.

Standing at the center of the rule collapse, Zhou Wannian slowly raised his right hand.

The back of his hand hovered before his lips.

His chest rose slightly as he inhaled a breath of cold air purified by high-voltage arcs. A faint moisture appeared at the corners of his eyes from sheer boredom.

Then, right in front of the Truth Realm mothership that was trying its hardest to evaporate him.

Zhou Wannian opened his mouth and gave a long, thorough, and utterly bored yawn.

"Ah—"

After the yawn, he casually flicked his wrist, his knuckles letting out two crisp cracks. That listless, unenthusiastic appearance was like a spectator who had spent an afternoon watching a dull play in a theater and couldn't wait to find a couch to sleep on.

The Truth Realm's most prized Rule-Tampering Weapon, a desperate strike that exhausted all the computing power of a super-mothership.

In exchange, it received only a drowsy yawn from this scholar in a green robe.

At the exact moment Zhou Wannian let out that yawn.

Tens of thousands of feet away, inside the crimson sphere of the mothership's core, a super-tsunami on a cognitive level was occurring.

The Mainframe's logic core did not feel anger at Zhou Wannian's disregard; mechanical life had no such redundant emotions. It was simply fulfilling its instinct as an observer and calculator to the best of its ability, frantically collecting data fed back from the rule-fire to find the reason for the weapon's failure.

Probe frequencies permeated the sea of fire, clinging tightly to the edge of Zhou Wannian's three-foot Domain.

Vast amounts of data flashed through the Mainframe's chips like a waterfall.

"Gravity correction failed... No change in spatial curvature in the target area..."

"Particle deconstruction failed... Target matter structure cannot be defined..."

The Mainframe continuously increased its computing power, trying to calculate what the source power maintaining that unbreakable three-foot Domain was. It attempted to assign a concrete mathematical model to the mass that could resist rule tampering.

Ten million tons?

A billion solar masses?

The data climbed frantically. The Mainframe's coolant was already boiling, shooting out as green steam from the cracks in the warship's wreckage.

At that moment, the Mainframe's probe frequency captured the small movement of Zhou Wannian yawning.

In the ten-thousandth of a breath during which Zhou Wannian's chest rose and his eyes lowered as a feeling of 'utter boredom' arose in his heart.

The mass data being fed back suddenly underwent a cliff-like jump.

Originally, the Mainframe was still trying to frame Zhou Wannian's mass with a number so large it was difficult to write.

But in that instant.

The last digits of that number were casually flicked by an invisible hand, jumping directly beyond the upper limit of the universal mathematical model the Truth Realm had spent countless eons building.

The Mainframe's logic circuits instantly locked up.

It discovered with horror a terrifying fact that completely violated the Truth Realm's 'Conservation of Matter' and 'Constant Theorems'.

The mass of this man in the green robe was not a constant value at all!

When he stood quietly, that mass was enough to crush a black monolith.

And when he felt bored and let out a yawn, causing a faint ripple in his state of mind, that mass actually surged out of thin air without any external energy supplement, reaching a point where the computing System directly overflowed.

The magnitude of mass did not depend on the density of matter, nor did it depend on the stacking of energy.

It depended entirely on this person's 'interest'.

If he felt interested and wanted to kill, then this mass could crush the entire heavens.

If he felt bored and wanted to sleep, then this mass would similarly expand infinitely until it crushed all surrounding noise and eyesore rules into silent nothingness, just to clear a quiet bed for him.

No upper limit.

At his whim.

This was not a lifeform that could be evaporated by modifying physical rules.

This was a walking natural disaster that stood above all rules and trampled the physical constants of the Universe like mud beneath his feet.

"Error... Logical paradox..."

"Variable mass increases exponentially and randomly with subjective consciousness..."

"Unable to establish mathematical model... Truth deduction failed..."

The crimson sphere at the mothership's core emitted a few final, shrill synthesized error reports.

Discovering this secret, which exceeded the cognitive baseline of a high-dimensional civilization, caused the Mainframe's mind—composed of cold code—to fall into total collapse.

In its attempt to calculate an 'infinite expansion of infinity due to boredom,' its massive computing matrix was directly blown apart from the inside, like a snake trying to swallow an elephant.

"Boom!"

This explosion was no longer the dull sound of being crushed by mass.

Because the logic circuits were completely incinerated, it triggered a chain explosion of the remaining internal energy. The massive crimson sphere jerked inward for a moment, then exploded like a supernova into a brilliant display of blood-colored fireworks.

The shockwave, laced with countless molten metal droplets, swept out in all directions, completely incinerating the warship wreckage that had been struggling in the sea of fire into ash.

Without the Mainframe to maintain them.

The plasma sea of fire created by rule tampering, the inverted gravity field, and the closed-loop spiral light flickered a few times like a 3D hologram losing power, then vanished instantly without a trace.

The collapsed space returned to the silence and cold unique to the Chaotic Star Sea.

Deep darkness once again took control of this star sector.

Zhou Wannian stood where he was.

He watched the blood-colored fireworks ahead slowly dimming, and watched the last traces of this Truth Realm fleet being swallowed up by the turbulent void currents.

The noisy smell of ozone finally dissipated completely.

Zhou Wannian lowered his hand, his long fingers casually brushing over the belt at his waist.

"Insisting on calculating an uncalculable account—isn't that just seeking death?"

He didn't care what the Mainframe had discovered before its death. The other party's pathetic computing power couldn't even touch the edges of the ninety-thousand-plus chains in his Divine Soul; at most, it had seen a speck of dust on the part of the iceberg floating above the water.

The road ahead was finally completely quiet.

Zhou Wannian turned around.

His gaze pierced through the gradually calming void turbulence and looked straight ahead at the grayish mist that seemed capable of swallowing all color and life.

Taiwu Ancestral Court.

That old place where he had casually placed a Seal back then, but which was now meticulously set with a death trap, lay quietly dormant at the end of the darkness like an ancient beast with its mouth wide open, waiting for its prey.

Zhou Wannian leisurely clasped his hands behind his back, the hem of his green robe swaying gently in the cold wind.

He set off, his spotless green cloth shoes stepping out steadily.

With one step, his figure was already hundreds of feet away.

On that handsome face was a casualness as if he were heading to a dinner party with an old friend.