Seraphine Voss had tried to ascend four times.

Every single time, she had gritted her teeth and powered through the lightning tribulation, only for the guiding light from the upper realm to never show up. End result? Total failure, every time.

At last, after another long seclusion and bitter cultivation, she faced her fifth ascension.

Three hundred and sixty-six heavenly lightning strikes. Seriously. This time, the bolts didn’t just hit her.

They erased her on the spot.

...

Stellar Year 3919.

Planet C875. Ore worksite.

"Hey... she’s dead, right?"

"Probably. She hasn’t moved in forever. Looks like she didn’t survive the mental energy frenzy."

"Without a mental stabilizer or suppressant, trying to tough out a mental energy meltdown head-on has, what, a seventy percent death rate."

"Tsk. She looks so young too. What a waste."

Amid the low chatter around her, two service robots rolled over, clearly getting ready to haul the body off for disposal.

And then the woman who had been lying there stiff as a corpse suddenly sat upright.

Seraphine pressed a hand to her forehead, head pounding, while she sorted through the flood of unfamiliar memories crashing into her mind.

A second later, she cursed in her heart with an obscenely filthy swear word.

Damn it.

She had transmigrated and reincarnated again.

And this time she had jumped straight from the cultivation world into the interstellar age.

The original owner of this body was also named Seraphine Voss, a girl who had only just turned nineteen, with a life story so tragic and messy it was honestly ridiculous.

She had originally been the daughter of a noble family on an A-rank planet. When she was three, she went out with her mother, got separated by accident, and ended up stranded far from home. At fifteen, the family finally found her and brought her back to the Voss family, but nobody there really liked her.

This was an era where mental power aptitude and awakened talent meant everything.

Mental power ranks, from highest to lowest, were: 4S, 3S, SS, S, A, B, C, D, E, and F.

Among them, anyone whose mental power could reach A-rank or above was basically heaven’s favorite. Their future was pretty much guaranteed to be bright.

But people like that were still a minority. Most people’s mental power sat around B, C, or D rank. C and D were the most common, while B was already relatively rare.

As for E and F?

Those were basically trash-tier.

The original Seraphine Voss, though, had B-rank mental power. Honestly, that was already pretty decent.

Too bad decent meant nothing in her situation.

After her mother died, her father remarried his old first love. Then came a younger half-sister, born just three months after her.

That little sister, Vivienne Ashford, had A-rank mental power.

Not only that, she had also awakened a talent and got specially admitted into the talent academy on the capital star.

And getting into the capital star’s talent academy?

That was the kind of thing that made a whole family walk around with their heads held high. Straight-up glory.

So yeah, once the two sisters were put side by side, the original Seraphine didn’t even stand a chance. Not even close.

To begin with, her father had never really liked her much. He thought growing up on a C-rank planet had made her small-minded, cheap, and lacking polish, like she could never be presented properly in high society. If she hadn’t been his biological daughter, he probably wouldn’t have spared her a second glance.

And now, compared to Vivienne, she looked even more embarrassing.

Anyway, after being taken back into the Ashford family, the original Seraphine was basically like some random outsider who had barged into their home by mistake. She even kept the name Seraphine Voss. No one bothered changing it. In that house, her presence was so faint it was practically zero.

So she swallowed her anger and endured it all in the Ashford family for three whole years.

Then, on her grandfather’s seventieth birthday banquet, everything blew up.

She was accused of stealing Vivienne Ashford’s mecha energy core.

The thing was found in her bag.

But the original Seraphine had no idea how it had gotten there. She didn’t steal it. She kept explaining, over and over, voice shaking, trying to defend herself, but not a single person believed her.

No one.

In the end, she was locked in a dark room as punishment.

And that outcome only happened because Vivienne had supposedly “pleaded for mercy” on her behalf.

How ironic.

What nobody knew was that while she was being locked up, her mental power went berserk.

In that violent, unstable state, she almost died.

She barely managed to survive by gritting her teeth and forcing herself through it, but without any proper soothing treatment, her mental power was badly damaged. It crashed all the way down to F-rank.

Three days later, she was finally released from the dark room.

By then, her heart was completely cold.

She packed her things and planned to leave the Ashford family for good, but Vivienne noticed.

Vivienne stopped her in the stairwell and refused to let her go.

The two of them argued back and forth, neither willing to back down.

And right in the middle of it, that so-called little sister pulled a shameless stunt. She deliberately threw herself down the stairs.

In the end, Vivienne was injured.

And the original Seraphine, whose mental power had already fallen to F-rank, was kicked out of the Ashford family and expelled from the A-rank planet as well.

By now, the original Seraphine had already been stuck on this planet for more than half a month.

Who would’ve thought that while working here, she’d suffer another psychic rampage and die on the spot.

After sorting through all those memories, Seraphine Voss couldn’t help letting out a quiet inward sigh.

Life really loved taking cheap shots at the soft ones.

"You’re not dead, huh? If you’re not dead, then get up and work. Quit slacking."

A rough, gruff voice suddenly dropped from above her head, cutting straight through her thoughts.

She lifted her eyes and saw a burly middle-aged man standing there, broad-shouldered and fierce-looking. He was one of the supervisors in this mining zone, Brock Dunmore.

Right. Wage slave mode on. Time to work.

Seraphine got to her feet at an unhurried pace.

She’d already gone through one rebirth-and-transmigration mess before, so she adapted fast. As she obediently headed toward the ore-sorting section, she secretly started calling for the system in her head. But after a long while, there was still no response at all.

Seraphine froze for a second.

Then the corners of her mouth started rising on their own.

Holy crap. Was she finally unbound from that system?!

She almost couldn’t believe it. She called for it again and again for quite a while, but still got absolutely nothing back.

Ahhh, Seraphine was so happy she could practically explode.

Back then, after she worked herself to death from overtime in the twenty-first century, she’d been reborn into the cultivation world and forcibly bound to some "Build the Number One Sect" system. If she failed the mission, she died. Simple as that.

Those years, she’d clawed her way through life in the most miserable way possible. On one hand, she had to grind like crazy to raise her cultivation. On the other, she had to break her back building up the sect, running herself ragged day and night. She’d fought tooth and nail before finally turning that sect into the number one sect in the entire cultivation world.

She really thought that meant she could retire with honor and finally catch her breath. I mean, she’d been spinning like a top for years.

But nope. The system still wanted to squeeze every last drop out of her.

It kept tossing missions at her out of nowhere. Stuff like, as the master of a great sect, she had the duty to stop the demons from wreaking havoc, fend off beast clan invasions, and basically go wherever it pointed and start fighting. Total "mark a spot, send her there" energy.

And if she failed the mission?

Yep. Still death.

Heh. After so many years of being a miserable corporate grunt and a miserable survivor, Seraphine Voss was officially done with all of it.

"Damn it, if I die, I die. Whatever. Screw this."

She had fully entered salted-fish mode, flat on her back in spirit, and was absolutely not working overtime for fate anymore.

Maybe the system had really gotten scared by her full-on passive strike, because it told her that if she could ascend to the upper realm, she’d be able to unbind from it for good. After that, the world would be wide open, and she could go wherever she wanted.

Sounds nice, right?

Yeah. Except at the very last step of ascension, she got blasted straight into the interstellar era by lightning.

Honestly, after failing ascension that many times, Seraphine had seriously suspected the system was secretly messing with her behind the scenes.

But the system had denied it with total confidence. "Absolutely not. I did not pull anything. I’m not that overpowered, okay? There’s no way I could mess around under Heaven’s watch in the cultivation world."

At this point, though, Seraphine really didn’t care anymore.

As long as the system was gone, and she no longer had to live like some overworked spinning-top nobody while struggling just to stay alive, then wherever she ended up was fine by her.

Her mood instantly improved. Once she felt good, even working with her hands didn’t seem so annoying.

Ore sorting wasn’t complicated in the first place. She just had to pick out the useful ores from the useless ones in a mixed pile, then separate them into categories.

That said, among the huge mess of different stones, there were radioactive ores mixed in too. They wouldn’t kill someone on the spot, not usually, but doing this kind of work for a long time would definitely chip away at a person’s health. If luck was bad, it could even leave lasting damage.

That was exactly why this job paid a high monthly wage of four thousand Alliance credits. In the other mining zones, most people could only earn two thousand at best.

Around her, quite a few workers had personally seen "Seraphine Voss" go into mental power frenzy earlier. So now, seeing someone who had looked dead as a doornail one second suddenly sit back up the next, like nothing had happened, and even return to work, they couldn’t help sneaking glance after glance at her.

Anyone with common sense knew this was weird.

Even after using a stabilizer, people usually went through a stretch of dizziness, nausea, and general discomfort. And that was with medicine. As for someone surviving a mental power frenzy by just gritting their teeth and powering through it raw? That was insane.

Of course, mental stabilizing injections were a whole different story. Compared to those, ordinary calming agents were basically trash-tier and not even worth mentioning in the same sentence.

Not to mention the gap in price.

Forget the difference in results—just one lowest-grade stabilizing injection cost at least ten thousand Alliance credits. On some planets, you couldn’t even buy one no matter how much money you had.

Seraphine ignored the curious stares coming from all sides.

Her attention was fixed on the gray stone in her hand, and her eyes showed a flicker of genuine surprise.

There was spiritual energy inside it.

Very thin, yes—so thin it didn’t even measure up to half of a low-grade spirit stone from the cultivation continent—but this was a Class C planet, a place where there shouldn’t have been a single thread of spiritual energy at all.

She had noticed that the moment she woke up.

Can this body actually absorb spiritual energy?

The thought rose quietly in her mind, carrying a trace of uncertainty. Her fingers tightened around the gray stone as she carefully followed the circulation method from her cultivation art and began trying to draw out the spiritual energy within it.

It worked!

And on top of that, it went insanely smoothly.

Seraphine Voss’s eyes lit up on the spot. She turned to look at the pile of gray stones marked as trash and useless, and her gaze instantly turned blazing hot.

“Manager Brock, can I apply for a ten-minute break?” Seraphine walked over to Brock Dunmore, who was standing outside the ore-sorting area, and asked.

Brock was the middle-aged man who had just barked at her to get back to work. He gave her a look, but didn’t make things hard for her. In his usual rough voice, he said, “Since you just went through a mental riot, I’ll give you ten minutes. No more than that.”

“Thank you, Manager Brock.” Seraphine thanked him politely, then turned and walked back. A moment later, she sat down cross-legged beside the heaps of gray stones, shut her eyes, and slipped into meditation.

That was when she realized this body actually had a heavenly spiritual root.

She just couldn’t figure out why there was a strand of demonic energy moving around inside her, slowly gnawing away at her life force.

Seraphine was puzzled, but luckily, it didn’t stop her from drawing qi into her body.

From the moment she stepped into the Qi Refining stage to the time she reached the fourth layer of Qi Refining, all she had done was absorb every last trace of spiritual energy from the pile after pile of gray stones in this mining zone.

That was how savage it was.

That was how fast it was.

That was how ridiculously unreasonable it was.

Using her spiritual power, she cleared out the small amount of demonic energy inside her. Only then did Seraphine suddenly notice something.

After being hammered by seven to eight hundred tribulation lightning strikes across five ascension attempts, her soul had been tempered into something... weirdly terrifying.

There was no perfect way to describe it.

It just felt crazy strong.

Maybe, if she worked harder, then harder still, and kept grinding at her cultivation, she might actually be able to reopen her void space.

And inside that void space?

There were plenty of rare treasures from the cultivation world, plus heap after heap of high-grade and top-grade spirit stones.

————Reading Guide————

1. This is set in an interstellar era, a mash-up of sci-fi, cultivation, and fantasy elements, with lots of personal worldbuilding. The female lead’s cheat is absolutely huge. The romance was originally a “pick your ship” setup

sorry, not doing that anymore, I can’t write it well; the male lead is Elias Thornton

. Ending is 1v1.

2. This is a brain-off feel-good power fantasy with zero logic, also known as “She Builds a Sect in the Interstellar Age” and “She Became a God in the Stars.”

3. Read for fun. Everyone’s got different tastes, and what one person loves might not be someone else’s thing. If this isn’t your cup of tea, we can part ways peacefully, okay? Thanks.