177: Chapter 177 The True Holy Grail Appears! Does it Contain Billions of Stars?

At the peak of this clamor, it was 7:00 AM New York time.

Without warning, every active screen across the globe had its broadcast forcibly cut.

A brand-new sky screen lit up above the massive black sphere in the real-world Tokyo, its image synchronized worldwide.

It was the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau of the Mirror World.

The sky was a pure, heart-stopping azure that could only exist before the industrial age, while below lay rolling snow-capped mountains, their white peaks reflecting a cold, desolate light in a silent world.

The Potala Palace, that grand red-and-white structure, now stood quietly atop the roof of the world.

There was no wind, no sound, and not a single trace of life.

In the next second, a slender golden meteor tore through the tranquility, trailing a long plume of flame as it descended with unerring precision.

Its landing point: the highest golden roof of the Potala Palace.

The golden light receded, and a figure emerged.

A platinum battle skirt flowed with divine radiance, a saintly halo hovered above her head, and a pair of pure gold eyes held no human emotion, only a compassion that looked down upon all living beings.

The Savior, Jeanne d'Arc.

She descended upon this empty holy city, her golden eyes scanning the earth beneath her feet.

In her perception, the entire world was rendered in a 'lifeless' grayscale; the mountains were gray, the buildings were gray, and even the light carried an aura of death.

Except for one place.

A hundred meters directly above the palace, a single point floated in the air.

A singularity emitting an aura of 'creation' that even her divine vision could not parse.

There lay the only source of light in this entire gray world.

Jeanne slowly looked up.

She saw it.

A holy grail, composed of the slowly flowing radiance of a galaxy, floated there quietly.

It had no physical form, as if some concept of the universe itself had been forcibly compressed into the shape of a cup.

Its mere presence caused the surrounding spatial structure to emit faint, overburdened groans, creating ripples visible to the naked eye.

It wasn't mana, nor was it energy.

It was something more fundamental, more essential than all of that.

Jeanne confirmed that this was indeed the 'true holy grail' she was searching for.

The status of this object far exceeded any divine artifact she knew, even surpassing 'God' itself.

For the first time since her birth, she felt such a pure sense of oppression originating from the root of the world.

This was the true 'Almighty Cauldron'.

Her mission was to relocate it before the pollution of the Abyss spread here.

Jeanne focused her mind and hesitated no longer. Defying gravity, she slowly rose into the air, flying toward the creation that seemed like the center point of the universe.

The closer she got, the more terrifying that sense of oppression became.

The divine radiance flowing from her platinum battle skirt began to flicker unstably, like a candle in the wind.

Finally, Jeanne stopped three meters away from the holy grail.

She did not dare advance another inch.

That was the limit her divine instinct could endure; any closer, and her saint graph might be directly assimilated or decomposed by that aura of creation.

From three meters away, she could clearly see that what flowed within the inner walls of the holy grail was neither liquid nor energy.

But rather... countless miniature galaxies being born and extinguished!

Stars ignited within it, only to rapidly turn into supernova explosions; nebulae gathered, only to be swallowed by black holes.

Life and death, beginning and end, were playing out frantically at billions of times their normal speed within a small cup.

This scene completely overturned her understanding.

This creation was not some wish-granting machine at all.

Its essence might be... a 'prototypical universe'!

Jeanne's divine core was trembling.

But the mission had to be completed.

She hesitated no longer, reaching out her right hand encased in a platinum gauntlet, mobilizing all the power of the Saver class. With all her might, she reached out to touch the creation that did not belong to the mortal realm.

Two meters.

One meter.

Fifty centimeters.

Her fingertips, wreathed in the conceptual light of 'Salvation,' were about to touch the flowing galaxy on the outer wall of the holy grail.

In the instant before contact.

*Click.*

The entire world froze.

Whether it was Jeanne slowly ascending in the Mirror World, the holy grail she was about to touch whose interior was still cycling through life and death, or the live broadcasts on all the sky screens in the outside world.

Everything turned grayscale.

Time stopped flowing... "Is it cut? Is the signal cut?"

"No, it's not cut, it's frozen! Holy crap, what's going on?"

"Refresh! Refresh it quickly! How can it freeze at a critical moment like this!"

The seven billion viewers worldwide, after a second of bewilderment, instantly erupted into a frenzy.

Countless people hammered their keyboards, refreshed webpages, and restarted devices, thinking their own networks had failed.

But soon, people realized something was wrong.

It wasn't a lag or a freeze.

The image had no blurriness or static; it was terrifyingly clear.

Every sacred rune on Jeanne's outstretched arm and gauntlet was visible in minute detail.

The golden strands of hair fluttering behind her were each frozen in mid-air, maintaining a perfect curve.

Even the ripples caused by spatial distortion around the 'holy grail' were like waves preserved in amber, so still it was unsettling.

This wasn't a broadcast error.

This was... time within the world of the screen being paused.

When this realization struck everyone's brain like an electric current, a deep chill rose from the base of everyone's spines.

Immediately following that, people's attention shifted from the terrifying fact of 'time stop' to the image itself.

They focused on the 'holy grail' that had made even the Savior so cautious and had ultimately triggered the time stop.

"What... what is that thing?"

"The holy grail... is this the real holy grail?"

"My God... inside there... are those stars?"

At first, it was just scattered, trembling questions.

Soon, it converged into a cognitive tsunami sweeping across the globe.

In Geneva, at the underground control center of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).

Hundreds of the world's top physicists were gathered around a screen, falling into a state of collective madness.

"Impossible! This violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics! How can an isolated system decrease in entropy and spontaneously create!"

"That's not energy! It's not matter! That's... those are rules! It's the law of causality itself being manifested!"

A white-haired Nobel laureate gripped his hair tightly, repeatedly muttering: "A singularity... a stably existing, macroscopic, observable singularity of creation... God, the answer to the universe we've spent our lives searching for turns out to be just the scenery inside a cup..."

The Vatican, St. Peters Square.

The hundreds of thousands of believers gathered there knelt on the ground simultaneously the moment they saw the holy relic.

They didn't need any scientific explanation; that supreme, holy aura permeating through the screen was the most direct miracle.

"It is the Lord! It is the holy grail used by the Lord during creation!"

"A miracle! This is a true miracle!"

Fervent prayers and cries of joy echoed through the skies.

And in China, on major social media platforms, netizens who were just arguing over whether Li Bai or Newton was stronger now fell into an eerie silence.

All arguments seemed so childish and laughable in the face of that 'prototypical universe'.

"I... I take back what I said earlier. No matter how awesome Li Bai and Newton are, they're just playing on the Earth server... but this thing, it's a server itself!"

"Stop arguing, everyone stop... I suddenly feel like we humans are like a group of ants, feeling smug about who can move a bigger pebble, not knowing that there has always been an eye in the sky watching us..."

"So... the previous Holy Grail War, where we fought tooth and nail, was actually just to fight for a... universe?"

This comment was like a key, opening the deepest Pandora's box in everyone's hearts.

Greed.

The most primitive, pure, and undisguised greed.

If the 'Mirror World' had previously stirred up the nations' desire for land and resources.

Then at this moment, what this 'Almighty Cauldron' ignited was every intelligent life form's ultimate desire to 'become a god'.

Who could obtain it?

Who could wield this authority of creation?

This question caused the breathing of the top leaders of all major powers worldwide to quicken at the same time.