"Was it a real sacrifice or just a fake one..."
Upon learning about the deeds of the Dimensional Holy God, Rosen's first reaction was to doubt.
He wasn't questioning for no reason—he simply knew more than the World Tree did.
As far as was currently known, there were two microcosms within the universe.
The first was the Holy Temple Microcosm, the collective masterpiece of hundreds of eternal beings.
The second was the Blue Star Microcosm, which existed within Blue Star itself.
The Holy Temple Microcosm was located directly within the Sea of Cosmic Origin, constantly drawing upon its power to grow.
The Blue Star Microcosm, meanwhile, used the Seeds of Time and Space to extract origin power from the Sea of Cosmic Origin.
Although the Seeds of Time and Space were incredibly powerful, their efficiency in drawing cosmic origin power had its limits.
Compared to the carefully calculated capabilities of the Holy Temple Microcosm, it seemed highly unlikely that the Blue Star Microcosm could have formed.
Unless, aside from the Seeds of Time and Space, Blue Star had another unique channel for absorbing cosmic origin power.
Rosen suspected that this channel might very well be the Dimensional Forbidden Zone.
After all, the Dimensional Forbidden Zone was rooted in the Sea of Cosmic Origin. It had the potential to supply cosmic origin power to the Blue Star Microcosm. Moreover, the World Tree itself suspected that Blue Star had been handed over to the ancient gods by the Dimensional Holy God. This added more weight to Rosen's suspicions.
Aside from this, Rosen had one final reason for doubting.
Suppose Blue Star had nothing to do with the Dimensional Holy God, and that the Holy God truly had a heart full of love, sacrificing Themself to delay the universe's destruction.
Even in that case, given the Dimensional Holy God's strength, They could have done far more.
The Dimensional Holy God could've slain the Sky Holy God and the Heaven and Earth Holy God, and then combined the power of all three space-type origin seeds. That would certainly have been a far more effective way to delay the universe's demise. Surely the Dimensional Holy God wasn't so kind that They couldn't even bring Themselves to kill two unrelated eternal beings?
So Rosen had good reason to believe that the Dimensional Holy God's so-called sacrifice wasn't that simple.
Because sacrifice and suicide aren't the same—if the Dimensional Holy God had truly wanted to sacrifice Themselves to save the universe, They should've been entirely capable of leaving behind Their eternal will to reincarnate and be reborn. There was no reason to utterly wipe out even Their own eternal will so cleanly.
This made it highly likely that the Dimensional Holy God didn't actually die—They were merely hiding deep within the Dimensional Forbidden Zone.
There might even be some unknown connection between the Dimensional Holy God and the ancient gods.
If all of his assessments were correct, then venturing into the Dimensional Forbidden Zone would be nothing short of walking straight to his death.
But aside from the Dimensional Forbidden Zone, where else could he go to break the Heaven and Earth Holy God's seal?
"Wait… no…"
A new possibility suddenly occurred to Rosen.
His series of judgments regarding the Dimensional Holy God were all based on the information provided by the World Tree.
But was the information from the World Tree truly accurate and reliable?
What if the World Tree was lying?
What if its intent was to make him misunderstand and become too afraid to enter the Dimensional Forbidden Zone?
Looks like to verify the truth, he still needed confirmation from other sources.
With that thought, Rosen shifted his consciousness and arrived at a kingdom-island in the True Realm of the Ancient Gods—the Undying Kingdom.
By this point, the True Realm of the Ancient Gods held more than just the Glorious Empire.
Under the Glorious Empire, tens of thousands of kingdoms had emerged, each ruled by the most powerful figures of various extraordinary sequences. The Undying Kingdom was the holy land of the Doctor Sequence, gathering over half of all Doctor Sequence powerhouses in the True Realm.
The king of the Undying Kingdom was the only true god in the Ancient Gods' True Realm who had advanced to the divine level in the Doctor Sequence.
In the palace study, King Sillin Cohen, who had been handling state affairs, immediately stood up respectfully upon seeing Rosen appear and offered his seat.
"No need for that. Just bring me what I need," Rosen urged.
"At once."
Cohen didn't dare delay and personally went to the kingdom's treasury to fetch all the extraordinary essence the Undying Kingdom had accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years.
The entire Undying Kingdom was under a thousandfold time acceleration.
As long as one met certain criteria, they could obtain rare resources such as the Fountain of Wisdom.
While alive, they enjoyed all kinds of privileges—but after death, all extraordinary essence was forbidden from being privately hoarded.
By now, the treasury had stored the accumulated extraordinary essence of countless Doctor Sequence powerhouses.
Rosen had initially ordered each kingdom to collect extraordinary essence from various sequences with the goal of forging sequence-specific Sequence Trees, which would facilitate job changes and sustainable development across all sequences. However, he later realized that establishing fixed frameworks for each sequence had both advantages and drawbacks.
Take the World Government's Sequence Trees, for instance—while they did help in accelerating sequence development, the two epochs (20,000 years) that followed saw less progress across the nine major sequences than the era before the World Government was formed.
Studying within a fixed framework may allow for faster knowledge acquisition, but it also limits innovation to some extent.
Sequence Trees benefited ordinary talents, but for top-tier geniuses, they were a kind of restraint.
So in the end, the plan to establish Sequence Trees for each sequence in the Ancient Gods' True Realm was abandoned after careful consideration.
However, the collection of extraordinary essence had never ceased, as it could still be used to forge Extraordinary Artifacts.
After obtaining the Extraordinary characteristics of the entire Doctor pathway, Rosen immediately began crafting the miraculous artifact of the Doctor pathway.
With the help of the Miracle Star Sea, he decomposed the Extraordinary characteristics, assimilated and fused them, and finally sublimated them. Then, by planting the Root Worm Mother into the sublimated characteristics, it absorbed nutrients, took root, sprouted, and ultimately blossomed and bore fruit—directly growing into the miraculous artifact of the Doctor pathway.
[Miracle Medical Pod: Miracle Artifact]
[Grade: Immortal God-Demon]
[Miracle Attribute: Can autonomously perform all immortal-level medical surgeries]
[Miracle Attribute: Miracle Hospital]
The entire Miracle Medical Pod could shrink to the size of a cell or expand as large as the planet Blue Star.
Beneath its semi-transparent azure-blue lid was a medical bed capable of changing shape, along with countless surgical instruments within the pod, capable of performing genetic modifications, bloodline enhancements, and all manner of surgeries related to both the life and soul domains.
Aside from being unable to directly modify divinity at its core, the Miracle Medical Pod could alter just about anything.
Moreover, the pod had a miracle trait in the form of a building: the Miracle Hospital—a special supernatural construct that existed in the spiritual realm. It could fuse with the Doctor pathway's Extraordinary characteristics, extracting lingering spirituality within them, and allow dead doctors to be revived within the Miracle Hospital.
These doctors would continue medical research in spiritual form within the hospital.
Once a doctor reached Sequence 0, they could even assist the Medical Pod in performing surgeries.
Although the Miracle Hospital existed in the spiritual realm, its interior space could manifest physically, allowing patients needing long-term treatment to be admitted into its wards and enjoy the finest medical care.
After thoroughly understanding the Miracle Hospital, Rosen immediately bound the Miracle Medical Pod to the Main God Network.
Now, any user of the Main God Network across all countries in the Ancient God True World could be transported to the Miracle Hospital through the network whenever they faced difficult or rare illnesses, thereby supplying the hospital's doctors with a constant stream of patients to hone their medical skills.
Once the medical infrastructure was in place, Rosen took out a lump of brain tissue, suspended in a paste-like stasis.
This was brain tissue from the Old Fisherman, who had self-destructed his brain when he was dissected alive.
Along with the self-destruction, most of the divine-origin memory stored in his divinity had also been destroyed.
Rosen found no information related to the Dimensional Holy God in the remaining memories.
He could now only hope that some relevant information still resided in the Old Fisherman's brain tissue.
When the Old Fisherman self-destructed his brain, Rosen had already tried using Time-Space Reversal to restore the brain.
But he failed. Inside the brain tissue, he discovered a peculiar type of powder.
This powder could neutralize supernatural powers.
Upon investigation, he found it originated from the Nightshade Parasitic Flower he had encountered in the past.
The powder formed by the withered Nightshade Parasitic Flower Rosen previously obtained could, at best, degrade a true god's powers to those of a lower deity.
However, the powder found in the Old Fisherman's brain tissue was potent enough to affect powers at the Immortal level.
Rosen placed the brain tissue into the Miracle Medical Pod, which automatically initiated surgery. At the genetic level, it painstakingly stripped away all traces of Nightshade Parasitic Flower powder. The surgery, under a time acceleration of a thousandfold, took several real-world days to complete.
With the interference of the Nightshade Parasitic Flower removed, Time-Space Reversal successfully restored the paste-like brain tissue to its original form.
Utilizing enhanced memory replication through memory seeds, Rosen successfully extracted all memories from the Old Fisherman's brain.
The Main God Computer spent half a month organizing these memories, finally sorting out those of significant value to Rosen.
The first major revelation was about the Dimensional Holy God. The god's suicide had been real—it was confirmed that the Dimensional Holy God had truly died back then. However, whether they reincarnated or had any connection to the Ancient Gods remained unknown. What could be confirmed, however, was that the World Tree had indeed concealed something—
That in the deepest part of the Dimensional Forbidden Zone, all eternal beings who entered had disappeared without a trace.
So long as one didn't venture into the deepest region, no one had ever died in the Dimensional Forbidden Zone. At most, some became lost in its maze-like multidimensional spaces and were trapped until death. All the dimensional spaces within the forbidden zone were otherwise extremely stable.
In addition to these memories, Rosen also uncovered a deeply hidden part of the Old Fisherman's memories.
Upon closer inspection, he discovered they were related to the Nightshade Parasitic Flower.
Neither the World Tree nor the Will of the World had ever truly regarded the Old Fisherman or the Immortal Particle as allies.
Conversely, the Old Fisherman and the Immortal Particle didn't see them as allies either.
The two of them actually belonged to a secret organization: the Twilight Society.
This clandestine society was extremely mysterious. Even after being a member for many years, the Old Fisherman had no idea of the society's true background. He and the Immortal Particle had met through the Twilight Society. All he knew was that its members seemed to all be eternal beings who had reincarnated.
The Mysterious Nightfall Societywasn't something one could apply to—it operated via an extremely special invitation system.
After the Old Fisherman was reincarnated and ascended to the limits of the Immortal God-Demon level, he one day woke from sleep to find an Immortal-grade Nightshade Parasitic Flower growing beside him. Upon picking it, his eternal will was pulled into a mysterious underground hall.
According to the Old Fisherman's judgment, the space in which this underground hall existed was a Primordial-level world fragment, surpassing even eternity.
The space was quite small—far inferior to the primordial fragments controlled by the Holy Temples.
However, the underground hall had unique properties: it could pull in eternal wills from across the universe, assist them in forming avatars within, protect those avatars from destruction, and enable them to trade materials universally through the connection between avatar and original body.
The Mysterious Nightfall Societyhad very few members—fewer than one hundred.
All members treated the space merely as a venue for trading, communication, and as a last resort for survival.
Inside the underground hall were fan-shaped seats, with each member having a fixed one. The stronger the member, the closer their seat was to the front. At the foremost point, facing all the seats, was an ancient divine throne that no member could approach.
Engraved on the table in front of that ancient throne were all the taboos and rules of the Twilight Society.
First, the Mysterious Nightfall Society must never be revealed. All members were required to grind their Nightshade Parasitic Flower into powder. If the original body ever perished, this powder must be used to destroy all memories related to the Twilight Society. The society must never be exposed to the outside world.
Failure to do so—allowing the society to be exposed—would result in the destruction of the avatar left behind in the Twilight Society.
Secondly, members of the Mysterious Nightfall Society are forbidden from killing each other—whether directly or indirectly.
Finally, all members of the Mysterious Nightfall Society share a common doctrine: whoever possesses the Source Seed of the Dark Sun will automatically become the leader of the Mysterious Nightfall Society.
The true hidden intent of the Old Fisherman and the Immortal Particle was to obtain the Source Seed of the Dark Sun through an avatar of the ancient god.
Rosen had possession of the Source Seed of the Dark Sun, which fulfilled the condition for becoming the leader of the Mysterious Nightfall Society.
However, the Mysterious Nightfall Society never offered him the Twilight Parasitic Flower, meaning he wasn't a member of the Order at all and couldn't enter it. Naturally, he couldn't become its leader just by holding the Source Seed.
Rosen began to suspect that the Mysterious Nightfall Society was actually a hostile force to the Dark Sun.
If they shared the same origin, then since he possessed the Source Seed, the Mysterious Nightfall Society should have directly brought him into the fold and elevated him. That they didn't do so likely meant they couldn't—and the reason they couldn't might very well be that the Source Seed of the Dark Sun was incompatible with the Mysterious Nightfall Society.
It was possible that the very purpose of the Mysterious Nightfall Society was to collect, seal, or destroy the Source Seed of the Dark Sun.
The Dimensional Forbidden Zone is still a complete mystery, and now another inexplicable group pops up—the Mysterious Nightfall Society?
Rosen furrowed his brow slightly. He had a very bad feeling about this Mysterious Nightfall Society.
After mastering the power of the primordial spirit, all his sensory abilities had been significantly enhanced.
That's why his instincts were rarely wrong.
Even the Omniscient Bookworm, when consulting the Book of Fate and Fortune in the Destiny Study, couldn't find any trace of the Mysterious Nightfall Society.
Not even the Twilight Parasitic Flower yielded the slightest clue.
Rosen decided to meet with the Immortal Particle and, at the same time, had his Bronze Dragon avatar reach out to the World Tree to see if it knew anything about the Mysterious Nightfall Society. Although the World Tree's intel could be tricky, it was still better than having no leads at all.
A reply came quickly from the World Tree—it knew absolutely nothing about the Mysterious Nightfall Society.
Instead, it wanted to learn about the Order from him.
Rosen didn't hold anything back—an extra channel of investigation would only help him.
He even considered informing the Holy Temple about the existence of the Mysterious Nightfall Society and getting them to look into it as well. After finishing all that, he set off for the Immortal Particle's stronghold in the cosmos, located in the Eryth Cluster of the Twelfth Stellar Ring.
Passing through the spacetime boundary gate, he entered a region of void without the slightest trace of starlight.
What he found was a supercluster filled with countless extraordinary particles. These particles formed countless unique microcosmic worlds, and together they assembled into vast numbers of arrays. From this alone, it was clear that the Immortal Particle's greatest strength was in formations.
Rosen didn't conceal his presence, and the moment he stepped into the particle supercluster, he was detected.
The Immortal Particle hesitated but eventually decided to meet with Rosen face-to-face.
The power Rosen had displayed far exceeded the Immortal Particle's expectations. Though it had fallen from eternity and was no longer recognized by the Holy Temple, it still had a few old friends from its time as an Eternal Being and was aware of the recent major events within the Holy Temple.
No matter what kind of external force Rosen might have used, the fact that the Holy God of Heaven and Earth had yet to show signs of life said it all.
And now that Rosen was standing here, the fate of the Holy God of Heaven and Earth was clearly grim.
However, since Rosen had shown up openly instead of ambushing from the shadows, it implied that he didn't come with hostile intent. Still, the Immortal Particle's true body wouldn't risk appearing before Rosen—it would only use an avatar to probe his purpose.
Countless particles rearranged themselves in the void, forming a garden castle to receive Rosen.
Rosen blinked and appeared in the castle hall. After sitting down, he got straight to the point.
"I need to ask you a few things," Rosen said bluntly.
"Go ahead," the Immortal Particle replied with a sigh of relief.
"Let's speak somewhere else."
As Rosen spoke, he opened a spacetime boundary gate to the Destiny Study.
The Immortal Particle rose and followed Rosen to the gate, gazing at the Destiny Study in astonishment and deep thought.
It had never been to the Destiny Study, but it knew such a place existed in the universe.
It hadn't expected Rosen to be able to come here as well.
"Have you heard of the Mysterious Nightfall Society?" Rosen asked seriously.
The Immortal Particle was momentarily stunned—its true body hadn't infused this avatar with any memories related to the Mysterious Nightfall Society.
If it simply replied that it didn't know, and the true body did know, wouldn't that offend Rosen?
"I'll need to contact my true body to see if there are any relevant memories," said the Immortal Particle helplessly.
Rosen immediately opened a thumb-sized spacetime boundary gate, allowing the avatar to bypass the isolation of the Destiny Study and connect with the true body.
The Immortal Particle quickly looked at Rosen in surprise—it hadn't expected him to mention the Mysterious Nightfall Society.
Then it realized Rosen must have learned about the Order from the Old Fisherman.
The Immortal Particle gestured for Rosen to close the spacetime gate. Only after the connection to its true body was severed and confirming that the Mysterious Nightfall Society's underground sanctuary couldn't be accessed from within the Destiny Study did it finally feel safe to reveal the secrets that couldn't be spoken outside.
Compared to the Old Fisherman, the Immortal Particle knew much more about the Mysterious Nightfall Society.
This was because, relatively speaking, the Immortal Particle was better at socializing and had more connections.
With more contacts, it naturally came to know things the Old Fisherman did not.
On the surface, the Mysterious Nightfall Society had no leader—only members. But even among the members, there were those who joined earlier and later. It was rumored that those who joined earliest knew the true origins of the Mysterious Nightfall Society. The Immortal Particle even knew the identity of one such immortal god-demon.
(End of chapter)