CHAPTER 437: CHAPTER 436: STARQUAKE

"Hmph, let’s see what you can do now that you’ve become a Level 4 Civilization. Just don’t let it be all bark and no bite!"

The Desert Sea Civilization, a member of the Fermi Alliance, also refused to be outdone, sending out derisive messages while also launching their most powerful weapon—the Unified Fermi Cannon.

In fact, the Unified Fermi Cannon and the Unified Bose Cannon are based on the same technical principles, both centered around unified energy application. While there are some minor technical wonders in the way each civilization has implemented the technology, they are essentially similar. However, in order to showcase their technology and mark it as their own, the Bose Civilization and the Fermi Civilization each added their names to the weapons. This naming is an expression of their ideological stances and the competition between them.

Knowing that the operational principles of these two weapons were essentially the same, and considering that both the Desert Sea Civilization and the Forest Sea Civilization had recently achieved Level 4 status, their technological levels should be comparable. Therefore, the two differently named but identially principled weapons launched by them would undoubtedly have the same destructive power. The eventual outcome confirmed this; the Unified Bose Cannon collided with the Unified Fermi Cannon in the cosmos, canceling each other out and ultimately creating a terrifying explosion.

However, this did not stop the war between the Desert Sea Civilization and the Forest Sea Civilization.

After the first ineffective strike, they immediately launched more energy weapons and engaged in even fiercer battles.

Nevertheless, because the level of technology and weapon technology were at the same stage, any further attacks were doomed to end like the first one, negating each other and resulting in yet another explosion.

Therefore, one could imagine that the strategy for the war between the Desert Sea Civilization and the Forest Sea Civilization was to bombard each other from a distance and wear each other down. They also knew that their weapons alone were insufficient to deliver an overwhelming victory, so they had to compete in terms of quantity, to see who would run out of energy reserves first. The first to deplete their arsenal would naturally be the defeated side, turning what began as an encounter into a war of attrition.

However, what both the Desert Sea Civilization and the Forest Sea Civilization found surprising was that this war of attrition didn’t last long – it was halted before either side ran out of resources. This was because the Anti-Neutron Star, the target of their competitive conflict, suddenly experienced a dramatic change.

Speaking of the Anti-Neutron Star, this unique neutron star was already in a state of rapid rotation, combined with a high-energy magnetic field that easily caused friction with external particles. This is one of the reasons why an Anti-Neutron Star could remain in a universe composed of Positive Matter; otherwise, it would have long since annihilated upon contact with other particles. However, when the crisis of the universe ceasing its expansion erupted, all interstellar material (including particles and Dark Matter) was stripped clean, ironically providing the Anti-Neutron Star with greater room for survival. Nevertheless, due to its rapid spin and high-energy magnetic field, plus a plethora of Anti-neutron materials, the Anti-Neutron Star was always a highly unstable entity.

Yet both the Desert Sea Civilization and the Forest Sea Civilization overlooked this fact.

They waged a fierce war around the Anti-Neutron Star, and each clash of their weapons caused massive explosions that shoved copious amounts of microscopic particles into the high-energy magnetic field of the Anti-Neutron Star.

Initially, since the number of microscopic particles wasn’t very large, they only produced bursts of electric light within the magnetic field. However, these particle interactions with the magnetic field accelerated the spin of the Anti-Neutron Star and increased its surface temperature.

With time, the spin rate of the Anti-Neutron Star became faster and its surface temperature higher, and when the spin rate reached half the speed of light and the surface temperature exceeded ten billion degrees, the terrible thermal pressure started to crush towards the core from the surface. Given the extraordinary density of the Anti-Neutron Star, its seemingly solid neutron shell encased a strange liquid core. So under the immense pressure, the outer neutron shell cracked and exploded, unleashing boundless radiation and nearly invisible Anti-neutrons. The energy released in that instant equaled the total released by the Sun over 150,000 years, utterly terrifying, with the potential to wipe out all life within dozens of light-years!

This horrific cosmic phenomenon is the exceedingly rare Stellar Quake, seen perhaps once in ten thousand years!

As the name implies, a Stellar Quake is an earthquake on a star, albeit not all celestial bodies can experience one. Only those with extremely strong magnetic fields can. Among all celestial bodies, generally only Super Magnetars within neutron stars can suffer Stellar Quakes, while pulsars or ordinary neutron stars cannot.

Thus, Stellar Quakes are exceedingly rare, unique, and extremely dangerous.

Moreover, the Stellar Quake that occurred on this Anti-Neutron Star was of the highest magnitude, Level 12, making its destructive power even more fearsome!

However, if it were just a simple Stellar Quake, even a Level 12 one, it wouldn’t have greatly impacted the Desert Sea Civilization or the Forest Sea Civilization. After all, they were both Level 4 Civilizations and would have had no problem defending against a Stellar Quake. But the key issue was that this was an Anti-Neutron Star when a vast amount of radiation and Anti-neutrons ejected from the Anti-Neutron Star collided with the particles produced during the war between the civilizations, annihilation explosions became inevitable. If there had been no war between the Desert Sea and Forest Sea Civilizations, things might not have escalated to this point. Yet coincidentally, the war between the two civilizations triggered the Stellar Quake on the Anti-Neutron Star, and the antimatter released by the Stellar Quake in turn met with the particles from their war, leading to annihilation explosions.

In the end, the Anti-Neutron Star underwent a complete and utter annihilation explosion.

The chained annihilation explosions released energy far exceeding that of a million Supernova Explosions combined, and mixed with Stellar Quake radiation, dealt a massive blow to both the Desert Sea Civilization and the Forest Sea Civilization.

In this unprecedented disaster, the Desert Sea Civilization, although hidden underground in the desert, saw its Desert Sea Star shaken by the annihilation explosions and Stellar Quake radiation, causing Level 12 earthquakes. Countless tectonic plates fractured and flew into the sky, destroying all the cities the civilization had built beneath the desert sands. Seventy percent of the population perished. When the disaster subsided, nothing but devastation stretched across the desert landscape, exposing the giant machinery and cities that had been hidden beneath the sand, revealing just the tip of the iceberg.

The Forest Sea Civilization, although not underground and therefore less affected by the earthquakes, did have their cities situated atop gigantic trees. When the annihilation explosions and Stellar Quake radiation struck, they pierced through the atmosphere in a fell swoop, destroying the atmospheric environment of Forest Sea Star and delivering a fatal blow to the forest cities in the sky. Amidst the terrifying storm and radiation, anyone caught in it bled from every orifice and died instantly. Even ancient trees that had grown for hundreds of thousands of years withered and died overnight. The impact on the Forest Sea Civilization was even greater than on the Desert Sea, with at least ninety-five percent of its population perishing in the disaster, and all of their ecological forest cities destroyed in one fell stroke.

At the same time, in the not-too-distant proximity, a hidden civilization was approaching under stealth.