Chapter 405 - 60: The Baseball-Sized Apocalypse

Chapter 405: Chapter 60: The Baseball-Sized Apocalypse

"First order of business: relocating the Seed."

Ash didn’t wait for Sovereign Lyra Veyra to unfold a spatial path, nor did he look to Sovereign Kael Thorne for guidance. He simply raised his right hand.

Using the spatial coordinates he had absorbed from Orrin’s massive data dump, and applying his absolute mastery over spatial principles, Ash tore a gate right in the middle of the orbital fortress’s command cabinet.

The air didn’t just part; it shattered. A violent blast of superheated air roared through the rift, carrying the suffocating stench of sulfur and melted rock. Beyond the shimmering threshold lay a hellscape of deep orange-red glow, where vast oceans of magma churned and spat molten stone. The crushing geological pressure of the Earth’s mantle immediately tried to push through the tear, a physical weight that would have instantly pulverized a normal Martial King into paste.

But Ash’s presence and his mastery over spatial principles held the hostile environment at bay, keeping the gateway perfectly stable.

"Let’s go," Ash said, stepping through without a second glance.

Sovereign Orrin Reyes followed close behind, and the rift snapped shut behind them with a soft, echoing pop.

***

They didn’t appear at the bottom of the crust. They appeared hovering in the air, hundreds of feet above the ground, inside a massive, hollowed-out subterranean cavern deep within the Earth’s mantle.

Ash looked down and marveled at the alien base.

Even though he had seen every blueprint, schematic, and spatial dimension in Orrin’s data, seeing it with his own eyes was an entirely different experience. The architecture was cold, geometric, and made of a dark, non-reflective material that completely ignored the crushing geological pressure of the magma oceans surrounding it. It felt utterly alien, completely devoid of human spiritual resonance. It was like walking inside the engine block of a dead, planet-sized machine.

There were no decorative curves, no organic shapes. Everything was sharp, deliberate, and built to withstand the birth and death of worlds.

Ash and Orrin took a single step forward. Using spatial folding, they instantly closed the hundreds of feet of distance and arrived at ground level, standing directly in the center of the base.

In the center of the massive chamber sat the Planetary Cultivation Seed.

It wasn’t just a ball of light. It was a violent, swirling tear in reality, bleeding a strange, silver-gold energy that defied standard physics. The air around it was heavily distorted, shifting between freezing cold and blistering heat as local physics broke down and rebuilt themselves in a continuous, chaotic loop. Various human detection instruments and runic arrays surrounded it, constantly measuring, analyzing, and trying to contain its output.

Ash looked at the Seed.

Because he had fully comprehended and perfected the Unique Origin Law of Planetary Genesis, the violent, chaotic swirling of the vortex was slowed down in his perception and it was like an open book to him. The blinding, chaotic light faded into a transparent wireframe of glowing, multidimensional runes. He wasn’t just looking at raw energy anymore; he was looking at the foundational code and principles of the planetary engine.

It held no more secrets to him. He could easily manipulate this Seed however he wanted.

But still, as he looked at the sheer scale and complexity of the multidimensional arrays woven into the vortex, he couldn’t help but praise the original creators.

They built a machine that can edit a planet, Ash thought, a genuine note of respect in his mind. Literally editing a part of reality.

It was a shame they couldn’t finish the job, but the engineering was undeniably brilliant.

Ash wasted no time. He couldn’t wait to experiment on it.

He raised his hand and channeled the Unique Origin Law of Planetary Genesis. He didn’t fight the vortex. He didn’t try to overpower it with raw cosmic energy. Instead, he simply reached into its foundational logic and rewrote its activation syntax.

He projected a conceptual "pause" command directly into the Seed’s core.

The effect was instantaneous.

The violent, blinding silver-gold light dimmed. The spatial tearing in the room stopped. The conceptual pressure that had been suffocating the cavern vanished, leaving the air feeling suddenly light and ordinary. The Seed went completely dormant, its activation sequence locked behind a conceptual firewall that only Ash could control.

***

High above in the stratosphere, Sovereigns Kael Thorne and Lyra Veyra and the others instantly detected the change.

Their divine senses, which covered more than half the entire solar system, had been locked onto the terrifying spike in Origin Law pressure radiating from the Earth’s crust. It had been accelerating for days, a ticking clock that threatened to tear the planet apart.

And then, in the span of a single heartbeat, it just vanished.

Kael and Lyra, who had been standing on the observation deck of the orbital fortress, exchanged a stunned look. The boy hadn’t just stabilized the Seed. He had completely sealed it.

Kael let out a massive, collective sigh of relief, his massive shoulders dropping a fraction of an inch. Lyra closed her eyes, the tight, constant strain of monitoring the spatial tears finally leaving her face.

Kael immediately tapped into the quantum-telepathic network, his thought-voice echoing across the entire orbital fortress and down to the surface command centers.

"Stand down. The anomaly is sealed. Recall the evacuation order. Halt all extraction fleets."

On the orbital fortress and across the external realms, the massive, industrial-scale withdrawal of humanity’s assets stopped. Portals closed. Fleets halted. Martial Masters, Grandmasters, and Emperors who had been working at maximum efficiency for days suddenly received the order.

When all the high-level cultivators heard that the crisis had been solved, a profound wave of relief washed over them.

Although they had sustained significant losses during the rapid pullback—abandoned footholds, left-behind resources, decades of strategic work lost in the rush. But as the Dean and the Vice Dean looked at each other on the fortress bridge, they knew it didn’t matter.

Everything could be rebuilt in time. The planet was safe. The crisis was over.

***

Back in the underground base, Ash turned his attention back to the dormant Seed.

It was still massive, taking up a large portion of the chamber, and it held a terrifyingly vast amount of Origin-level cosmic energy inside it. Leaving it here wasn’t an option; they needed to move it to Mars to test the terraforming process. But carrying a room-sized vortex through a spatial gate was highly inefficient.

Ash decided to make it portable.

He used his mastery over the Law of Space, Law of Gravity, the Law of Force, and his Unique Origin Law to begin compressing the Seed.

He didn’t just squish it. He folded the spatial dimensions of the Seed’s energy containment field.

The massive, room-sized vortex shrank to the size of a house, the alien machinery folding in on itself. Then it compressed further, down to the size of a car. The silver-gold energy inside became denser, the light shifting from a blinding glare to a heavy, almost painful radiance that forced ordinary senses to look away.

Bit by bit, he pushed it smaller. Car-sized to boulder-sized. The physical mass of the non-reflective dark metal compressed into an impossibly dense shell.

Finally, with one last conceptual twist, it shrank to the size of a baseball.

The energy inside was so dense it looked like a captured star. The light it emitted was no longer just bright; it was heavy, humming with a low, almost musical frequency—a resonance that only someone with high Law comprehension could perceive. It sounded like the deep, steady heartbeat of a dying galaxy.

Ash caught it lightly in his hand.

He started tossing it up and down casually, like a baseball.

Orrin’s eyes widened in sheer horror. His hand twitched, almost reaching out to stop the boy before he dropped a celestial catastrophe. But he froze mid-motion, his spiritual sense finally catching up to what his eyes were seeing. The boy had it under complete, absolute control. The Seed wasn’t slipping; it was perfectly anchored to Ash’s spatial authority.

Orrin let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He stared at the eighteen-year-old boy tossing the condensed apocalypse, then at the baseball-sized sphere of apocalyptic power.

"You just put a planetary apocalypse in your pocket," Orrin said, his voice quiet and thoroughly stunned.

Ash stopped tossing the ball and looked at it seriously. The surface of the sphere was warm to the touch, humming with that deep, musical frequency.

"This thing holds an absurd amount of energy," Ash explained, looking up at Orrin. "The original creators spent centuries charging it. After we succeed in making this Seed work on Mars, it’s going to cost humanity a colossal amount of resources to replicate it on Earth."

Orrin nodded slowly, his scientific mind already calculating the logistics. "The energy density required to initiate a planetary rewrite is astronomical."

"Exactly," Ash said. "I can easily build the physical structure of a new Seed using the Unique Law. The blueprint is perfect. But I don’t have the absurd amount of Origin-level cosmic energy required to fill the ’gas tank’. We’ll have to spend decades funneling energy into a new one to get it to this density."

It was a problem for the future, but a solvable one. Humanity had time now.

Ash pocketed the baseball-sized Seed into his spatial pouch. He turned to Orrin, his silver eyes reflecting the dim light of the cavern.

"Okay, onto Mars next. Let’s go. I haven’t been to Mars so I don’t know its spatial coordinates. You can open a gate there, right?"

Orrin chuckled, the last of the tension completely gone from his shoulders. "There is no need to waste my energy on that. We already have a massive, permanent spatial gate built right here in this base with a direct link to the primary spatial gate on Mars. It was built long ago. Come on, let’s go."

Orrin led the way to the far side of the cavern.

Tucked behind a massive pillar of dark, non-reflective metal was a dormant alien archway. It was easily fifty feet tall, inscribed with complex, multidimensional runes that Ash immediately recognized as a high-level spatial transit array.

Orrin raised his hand and activated it with a pulse of his cosmic energy.

The archway flared to life. The air inside the ring twisted and folded, tearing open a stable, massive gateway. Through the portal, the red, dusty, barren surface of Mars was clearly visible. The sky above the Martian landscape was a thin, pale pink, and the wind kicked up small swirls of rust-colored dust.

Ash followed him, stepping through the gate.

The transition was instant. The heavy, crushing atmosphere of the Earth’s mantle vanished, replaced by something entirely different. Ash took a breath and immediately noticed the thinness of the air. The gravity here was weak, pulling at him with only a fraction of the force he was used to.

He extended his spiritual sense. It swept across the red, dusty landscape, searching for the familiar hum of cosmic energy.

Nothing.

The planet was completely, utterly spiritually barren. There were no spiritual veins, no ambient cosmic energy, no life. It was a dead world, frozen in time and dust.

Ash looked out over the endless rust-colored dunes and the pale pink sky. A sharp, excited smile touched his lips.

Perfect blank canvas, he thought.

"Alright," Ash said, his voice carrying easily in the thin Martian air. "Let’s make a world."