Volume One, Chapter 56: When the Dream Ends, Nothing Remains

The three elders of the Gu family each wore expressions of resolute finality. They ignited their divine spirits and life force, ready to make one last stand. Even if it meant protecting just a single soul a little longer, it was worth it.

At the very moment despair descended and destruction was about to erupt—

In the very center of the three Devourer fleets, that void suddenly… shifted.

No, it was not a rupture.

It was an indentation.

As if an invisible giant hand, from another dimension, had pressed down hard.

Then, a small sphere, no larger than a marble, entirely black and utterly unremarkable, silently appeared there.

It emitted no energy fluctuations, no cataclysmic phenomena.

It simply… existed.

But the instant it appeared, everything around it changed.

Light was swallowed.

Space twisted.

Time froze.

The tens of thousands of main cannons, fully charged and ready to fire, dimmed instantly, like fireflies strangled at their throats.

The colossal Devourer fleet, a steel torrent vast enough to eclipse an entire great world, seemed to be paused in that moment.

Then, centered on that black marble, an indescribable, ultimate “gravity”—or rather, an ultimate force of “returning to nothingness”—erupted with thunderous intensity!

It was not an explosion.

It was… a collapse.

The three immense Devourer fleets, along with the entire space they occupied, and all the Devourers within, were instantly pulled toward that tiny marble, crushed and compressed by that terrifying power.

“No—what is that thing?!” the fleet commander cried out, his final expression filled with horror and bewilderment.

Then, his will, his warship, his very existence, were compressed into particles billions of times smaller than dust, utterly “devoured” by that black marble.

The entire process took less than a second.

On the world of Tianxuan, everyone stared at the sky, dumbfounded.

One moment, the sky was dark with oppressive black clouds, and doom seemed inevitable.

The next moment, the sky was clear blue, without a single cloud.

Those three vast fleets, once so despairingly immense, were simply… gone.

Vanished without a trace, as if they had never existed.

Only that black marble, having completed its “mission,” gently shifted, then disappeared back into the void, its whereabouts unknown.

The three Gu family elders, who had been prepared to fight to the death, exchanged glances filled with utter shock and profound… bewilderment.

What just happened?

Are we… saved?

And by… whom?

---

In the Gu family courtyard.

Gu Changsheng yawned, then picked out a crystal-clear, beautiful “glass marble” from a box and placed it on the ground.

“Hm, this one is flawless. Perfect,” he nodded with satisfaction, ready to begin his game.

At that moment, the long-awaited system notification sounded in his mind.

[Ding! Detected host casually cleaning up trash, unintentionally resolving a family crisis, greatly intimidating those petty villains, perfectly embodying the supreme realm of ‘lying flat and still being invincible’!]

[System reward: Acquired item [Ancestor’s Marble Box] (contains the embryonic forms of all realms, allowing free play), Lying Flat Points +1,000,000!]

“Hm?” Gu Changsheng blinked.

A marble box? Isn’t that already in my hand?

And just cleaning up trash earned this many points?

He shook his head, too lazy to ponder such complicated matters.

“Finally, a decent toy,” he muttered, refocusing on the game before him.

Beneath the sunlight, a young man happily played with marbles.

---

Within the core hall of the Devourer civilization’s mobile fortress—

The marker representing the “Causality Probe” was erased from existence in the blink of an eye, right under the commanders’ noses.

No energy dispersed, no laws collapsed, not a single warning sign.

One moment it was there; the next, the space, time, causality, and very concept it occupied became pure “nothingness.”

This was far more terrifying than seeing it blasted to dust by a cataclysmic beam.

The latter was a battle of power, a crushing of laws—still within comprehension.

The former was a higher-dimensional “definition” overwriting, as if the Creator deity was editing its draft, completely erasing an unsatisfactory stroke.

“Master Sovereign, we…” a commander struggled to speak, his voice dry and filled with unprecedented fear.

He wanted to say, “We may have misjudged,” but dared not utter it before the supreme Sovereign.

“Silence.”

The shadow on the throne flickered with an unstable ripple for the first time.

His anger did not stem from fear but from a deeper… humiliation.

He, the Sovereign of the Devourer civilization, who fed on devouring gods and demons and unraveling all laws, priding himself as the universe’s ultimate predator, had just declared, “The Gu family is like a baby cradling a divine weapon.”

Yet, the next moment, the fleets he dispatched—an iron flood capable of leveling a great world and trembling immortal empires—vanished in a manner even stranger and more complete than the disappearance of the probe.

No distress signal, no battle damage report, not even a flicker of resistance from the soul imprint of the flagship’s commander linked to his will—all returned to nothingness.

As if his three colossal fleets were but a boring dream. Upon waking, nothing remained.

“Interesting, truly interesting…” the Sovereign’s will echoed through the hall, calm in tone yet suffused with oppressive, sky-burning rage that every commander felt, “The trigger condition for that ‘protection mechanism’ is broader than I imagined, and its power greater than I expected.”

He stubbornly attributed everything to some sort of “mechanism.”

Because he could neither accept nor believe it was the handiwork of some “person” from the Gu family.

If there truly were someone capable of casually erasing his three fleets, then this war he launched was a joke from the start.

“Master Sovereign, the Tianxuan World—”

“Tianxuan World is unharmed,” the Sovereign coldly interrupted.

“Based on the latest cosmic background radiation data received, Tianxuan World remains intact.

Our fleets disappeared before even launching their attack.”

This conclusion plunged all commanders into silence once more.

It meant the “protection mechanism’s” strike range was not limited to the Gu family’s ancestral lands but covered all territories they regarded as their “property.”

“Can it guard against physical attacks, but also against attacks on the ‘conceptual’ level?” The Sovereign’s will revealed a frantic obsession.

Conventional warfare had clearly failed.

Cornered, he resolved to use his most reluctant yet proud trump card.

“Transmit my order,” his voice grew solemn, suffused with sacrificial resolve.

“Activate… the ‘Anchor of Nothingness.’”

“What?!”

At these words, every commander in the hall trembled violently.

Their bodies, composed of energy, even showed signs of instability.

The Anchor of Nothingness!