My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 747: Descending Into A Behemoth

Liam looked at Alex for a moment, momentarily taken aback by the question. He genuinely hadn’t expected it.

He smiled, then walked a few steps ahead of the group, his eyes lifting to the enormous banded giant hanging in the sky above them. Jupiter. Slow and vast and silent, filling half the heavens.

He noticed how quiet everyone had gone behind him. The friends who never stopped talking, who bickered and teased through everything, had fallen still, waiting for his answer. Absurd as the question was, they wanted to know too. Every one of them was watching his back, holding the same small breath.

And it wasn’t just them. The whole world was holding it too.

Down on Earth, the roaring comment section that hadn’t gone quiet in over an hour simply stopped, frozen mid-scroll, millions of people staring at their screens and waiting on a single answer.

They were hoping, most of them, that he couldn’t. That there was finally a line somewhere, a thing even he could not do, a place where the impossible man ran out of impossible. They needed there to be a limit. Everyone needs the world to have edges.

But after everything they’d seen today, hope was a thin thing to stand on. A man who breathed vacuum. A man whose friends wore suits that survived the sun and still couldn’t touch him. A man who treated interstellar travel like a weekend plan.

Against all of that, "can he go into Jupiter without protection" no longer sounded like a ridiculous question. It sounded, horribly, like it might have a yes attached to it.

’Please let it be no,’ a hundred million people thought at once. ’Just let there be one thing.’

Yet even the ones who understood the science knew that surviving space and descending into Jupiter were not the same thing. Not remotely.

Space was empty. Space asked a body to hold itself together against nothing — no air, no pressure, only cold and radiation and the void. Terrible, yes, but it was the terror of absence.

Jupiter was the opposite. Jupiter would not leave a body alone in emptiness. It would crush it. The deeper you sank into that endless atmosphere, the more the pressure climbed, thousands of times, then millions of times what any human had ever endured, a weight that turned gas into liquid and liquid into metal, that would flatten anything and anyone into nothing long before they ever reached the bottom that had no bottom. And beneath the pressure, heat. Thousands of degrees. A furnace with no floor.

Surviving the void was surviving nothing. Surviving Jupiter meant surviving everything, all at once, pressing in from every side.

So even the people who had accepted that Liam could stand in vacuum told themselves this was different. This was where it stopped. A man could hold his breath against the void. No man could hold himself against the crushing heart of a gas giant. There had to be a limit, and surely, surely, this was it.

Liam, for his part, turned back to face the group, and to face the camera, and answered in a matter of fact tone and with a smile, "Of course."

He looked at Yanxia. "I will be back shortly," he said, and tried to peel her off him, but she hung onto him even tighter.

"Let’s go together, Papa" she said.

"Okay then," Liam smiled and leaped into the air, then turned towards Jupiter, and flew to it at blitzing speed.

The world were shocked by the fact that Liam’s sister also wants to follow him into Jupiter, but when they saw how fast Liam flew through the void of space, their brain short-circuited because of what it means.

In less than a few seconds, Liam and Yanxia was already right in front of Jupiter and he allowed the planet’s gravity to pull them to it, until they disappeared into it.

Inside the planet, Liam looked around him, and all he could see was storm.

Endless streams of pale and dark cloud rushed past them, thick as smoke, tearing sideways in winds faster than any hurricane Earth had ever known. Lightning cracked in the distance, far bigger than the lightning back home, splitting the murk with white fire. The cold bit at the air around them, colder than Callisto had been, and the two of them simply hung there in the middle of it, untouched.

"Wow," Yanxia said, peeking out from where she was pressed against him. "It’s really cloudy."

"It is," Liam agreed. "Hold on. It gets more interesting the deeper we go."

He let Jupiter’s pull take them, and they began to sink.

The clouds thickened. The pale ammonia haze gave way to deeper layers, and the cold began, strangely, to fade. The further they fell, the warmer it grew, and the heavier the air became, pressing in from every side.

The wind stopped tearing and started pushing, a solid weight that thickened around them by the second, until the gas no longer felt like gas at all.

Yanxia watched it change through half-lidded eyes, unbothered, resting against her father as though he were carrying her down a flight of stairs.

Then the gas became sea. There was no shoreline, no surface, no moment where one became the other.

The thickening atmosphere simply closed over them into a vast, dark ocean of liquid hydrogen, endless in every direction, warm now and growing warmer, the pressure climbing past anything a human body could have imagined.

Anything else that had ever entered here would have been crushed to nothing a thousand times over by now.

Liam kept sinking, calm and steady, and Yanxia yawned.

Deeper still, the ocean changed again. The liquid hydrogen was crushed, layer by layer, into something that gleamed even in the dark — a shifting, metallic sea, liquid and bright, conducting the planet’s colossal magnetic field through its endless depths. Metallic hydrogen. A state of matter that could not exist anywhere on Earth, that humanity had spent a century chasing and never truly held.

Liam slowed for a moment, looking at it.

’This is the stuff,’ he thought. ’The world would lose its mind over a piece of this.’

He reached out and gathered a portion of the metallic hydrogen into his palm, a small, gleaming mass of it. The instant it left the crushing weight of the depths, it would want to burst back into ordinary gas and scatter — so Liam didn’t let it.

He wrapped a shell of pressure held by his will alone, recreating the crushing heart of Jupiter in the space of his hand. The metallic hydrogen sat there, stable, gleaming, held in a state it should never have been able to hold outside the planet.

"What’s that?" Yanxia asked, poking at the shimmering shell.

"A souvenir," Liam said. "Careful. It only stays like this because I’m holding it."

"Ooh." She stared at it, delighted.

But he wasn’t finished. He kept descending, down toward the very center, where the pressure and heat became truly monstrous — tens of thousands of degrees, a weight beyond all comprehension, the diffuse superheated core where the heaviest matter of the planet had settled over billions of years.

And it was there, in the deep, that he found the other thing.

Carbon, sunk from the storms far above, crushed over ages into crystal. Diamond. Formed not in the dirty depths of a small planet’s crust, but in the clean, immense pressure of a gas giant’s belly — grown to a purity and perfection no diamond of Earth had ever come close to, flawless and clear, catching what little light there was and throwing it back.

Liam took one. A single perfect diamond, born in the heart of Jupiter.

"For you," he said, and pressed it gently into Yanxia’s small hand.

Her eyes went wide, and she clutched it to her chest like the most precious thing in the world. "Thank you, Papa!"

"Don’t lose it," he chuckled. "It’s the only one from this deep."

"I won’t! Ever!"

Liam smiled and looked around the crushing, burning heart of the largest planet in the solar system, a place no living thing had ever reached or ever could — and found it, in the end, rather peaceful. It was quiet in its own vast and terrible way.

"Alright," he said. "Let’s head back before the others start panicking."

He turned upward, and they began to rise — through the metallic sea, through the ocean of liquid hydrogen, up through the thickening-then-thinning gas, past the deep warm dark and into the cold storming clouds, until at last the pale banded top of the atmosphere fell away beneath them and the black of space opened up above.

Then they were out, the enormous curve of Jupiter falling away behind them, and Callisto’s grey little shape waiting ahead.

Liam flew back toward it at blistering speed, the metallic hydrogen still gleaming stable in one hand, Yanxia’s diamond clutched safe in hers.

A moment later, his feet touched down on the cratered surface, right where he’d left, in front of the small group of friends who hadn’t moved an inch, every one of them staring at him with their mouths slightly open.

Liam smiled.

"We’re back, guys."