In the Sixth Star Ring, an Imperial fleet was hiding behind the Miluo Star, trembling in fear.
“Report, we’ve lost contact with the main force!”
Dead silence filled the communication channel.
Deep despair showed in the eyes of the Imperial soldiers.
Someone whispered a suggestion: “Should we go back to the Miluo Star?”
The idea was quickly shot down: “Go back for what? To keep fighting those madmen?!”
“Then we can’t just sit here and die, either!”
As the argument went on, a piercing alarm sounded on the ship, and red warning lights flashed repeatedly.
Everyone stared in horror at the massive display screen.
There, low-frequency vibrations kept emanating from inside the giant grave, causing gravitational distortions in the surrounding planets.
Each vibration carried an intense, suffocating pressure.
Everyone who witnessed this felt their hearts pound violently, a dark cloud of unease swallowing them whole.
Suddenly, a hexagonal passage split open at the front of the giant grave.
Void Devourers poured out in force. Each one was over a kilometer long, their bodies covered in non-reflective black chitin. Rings of blue stardust rippled out from beneath them, spreading outward in all directions.
With the Void Devourers at the core, massive teams of black-armored beetles stood atop the rippling blue stardust rings, forming a defensive system in organized formations.
Between the black-armored beetles and the Void Devourers was a line of plump, white, pudgy bugs.
These bug teams, emerging from the giant grave, set off toward the Federation and the Empire respectively.
Whenever they passed a planet, one Void Devourer team would stay behind.
The Void Devourer would stop at the planet’s space station or spaceport. Under its enormous pincers, humanity’s proudest industrial achievements were as fragile as thin crackers, becoming nothing more than its nutrients.
The black-armored beetles and the plump white bugs landed on the planet’s surface. Like the most efficient cleanup crew, they first eliminated all life forms on the planet, then cleared away all human structures.
Throughout the entire process, there was no communication, no wasted energy—just absolute efficiency and absolute destruction.
Unlike the earlier tentative probes through the wormholes, this full-scale bug offensive was cold and merciless.
What was even more different was this: once a planet was completely cleansed by the bugs, the giant grave would launch a biological bomb at the planet’s surface.
When the bomb hit the ground, it released engineered microorganisms.
These microorganisms spread across the continents at a rate of three kilometers per minute.
All carbon-based matter was broken down and reassembled forming a planet-wide purple legion.
Mountains were enzymatically dissolved into nutrients; oceans boiled and evaporated. The remaining salt crystallized into sodium-chloride mountain ranges.
The Imperial soldiers who had hidden themselves away felt as if they had fallen into an ice cave, shivering from the tips of their hair down to their toes.
What did it mean to occupy a planet? This was true occupation!
Completely transforming a planet into a bug-habitable world. Even if humanity somehow recaptured the planet later, they wouldn’t be able to survive on it anymore.
Every human who witnessed the bugs’ full method of attack was utterly without hope!
The Federation was finished!
Humanity was finished!
This was an uneven war! The bugs’ methods of attack were completely beyond human understanding.
This was a clash between two different evolutionary systems.
Judging by the results so far, humanity had been completely defeated.
“Commander! Let’s voluntarily fuse with bug genes.”
“Bugs are the species best suited for survival in space! Our fragile human bodies are the lowest form of life in the starry sky.”
They couldn’t match the Giant Sound Whales in mental strength, nor could they match the bugs’ physical power!
Tens of thousands of years of technological development, in the face of these spacefaring species, seemed like nothing more than toys—utterly without any deterrent power.
The Imperial soldiers pulled out a tube of red reagent from their uniform pockets. This was a top-grade bug-fusion solution developed by the Imperial Research Institute.
The red reagent gave off an ominous, cold gleam.
The success rate for fusion with the reagent was less than one in ten thousand. The Imperial soldiers hesitated.
But then, a Void Devourer team, spinning like a flying disc, came rushing toward the Miluo Star.
With trembling hands, the Imperial soldiers snapped open the reagent vials, exposing sharp needles.
Their hearts full of desolation, they stared at the display screen with hopeless greed.
Goodbye… to this damn world!
Clatter!
The reagents fell to the ground, rolling around in circles.
But their owners were frozen in place, their mouths wide open, their eyes nearly bulging out of their sockets, as if they were witnessing something utterly unbelievable.
“What is that?”
The same question also arose in the hearts of the survivors in the Sixth Star Ring.
Ever since the wormholes on their planets had disappeared, the survivors on the planets of the Sixth Star Ring had been able to see the giant grave using space observation instruments.
They couldn’t help it—the energy radiating from the giant grave was so strong that it was like a forceful announcement of its arrival to all of humanity.
On the observation screens, the giant grave, as dazzling as a star, was no longer alone. A slightly dimmer energy point had appeared—seemingly out of nowhere—within the observation range of the Sixth Star Ring.
As this energy point drew closer and closer, everyone was finally able to detect clearly what it actually was!
To be precise, it wasn’t one energy point, but a cluster of energy points! Countless tiny, bright spots surrounded a central, brilliant energy cluster, all advancing at full speed.
“It’s Lin Xiaohe!”
“And the Giant Sound Whales!”
Dozens of stardust Giant Sound Whales were swimming around an ark, leaving behind rings of blue stardust specks as they passed—romantic and beautiful.
That ark was enormous, with five stories in total. Rather than an ark, it looked more like a house built on top of a boat.
The outer shell of the ark was made of fiery red crayfish shells glued together, and the joints were sealed with brown corn syrup.
The torrents of stardust left in space by the Void Devourers slid across the ark’s surface like raindrops falling on an oil-paper umbrella, leaving no trace behind.
At the front of the ark stood a single person.
That person was wearing a red biological battle suit and holding two long black whips, like a general commanding thousands of troops, standing at the prow leading their soldiers to ride the winds and waves!
“Ying!” The songs of the Giant Sound Whales created ripples of gravitational waves.
They formed a propulsion matrix, circling around the ark.
Sensing the threat, the giant grave dispatched a Deep Space Devourer team to intercept.
Lin Xiaohe made a hand gesture: “Target the Wasteland Star, full speed ahead! I’ll handle the rest.”
She leaped off the ark and charged toward the enemy. With a flick of her hands, her whips split a Void Devourer clean in two!
But with the giant grave nearby, the Void Devourer’s regeneration ability skyrocketed. The two halves of its body, as if possessed by a will of their own, began to fuse back together.
In the blink of an eye, fist-sized tomatoes seemed to sprout from the black whips—pop, pop, pop—exploding from inside the Void Devourer!
In an instant, the enormous bug body, over a kilometer long, was reduced to a pile of meat paste.
Without the stardust clouds provided by the Void Devourer, the black-armored beetles were helpless, unable to move in the void.
Wesley’s eyes lit up: “Party Leader, let us have a go!”
Lin Xiaohe stopped and watched as Wesley and the others, riding the Giant Sound Whales and wielding long spears, poked and jabbed at the black-armored beetles!
The spears were made from crayfish pincers. The beetles’ hard shells couldn’t withstand more than a few pokes.
They roared and shrieked in fury, but eventually, they fell, unwilling to the end.
The survivors on the Wasteland Star couldn’t hold back their tears of emotion.
At a time when humanity was being beaten without any ability to fight back, there were still people who could penetrate deep into bug territory as if it were empty land—how incredibly heartening!
They watched this scene with fascination, murmuring softly, “We’re not dreaming, are we? They can actually walk in space…”
And there was another guess, one they kept deep in their hearts, too afraid to say out loud.
Had Lin Xiaohe come to save them?
