BUZZ!
Amidst the silent, pitch-black expanse of the night sky, that radiant sun of pure True Qi, forged through Calamitas's 'Raging Rivers' art, radiated an overwhelmingly suffocating presence the instant it manifested.
Over two million souls across the inner and outer districts of the metropolis instinctively felt a shiver down their spines, dazedly looking up into the vast expanse above.
And then, they bore witness to pure terror, at the limits of their vision, a blinding, white-hot sphere of light wrapped in a ferocious aura of apocalyptic slaughter was plummeting toward the earth at breakneck speed.
That cold, unbridled malice and destructive intent caused countless hearts to spasm in pure dread.
Everyone stared skyward, their eyes wide with confusion, disbelief, and mounting hysteria.
None could comprehend what this orb of light was, nor where it had come from.
Even less did they know what catastrophic doom it was about to bring upon their heads.
Panic spread like wildfire.
"Wh-what is that thing?"
"Why is its aura so soul-crushing?!"
"Is it a calamity star descending from the heavens?!"
"The Emperor is wicked! Heaven has sent its judgment! Hahaha!"
"Quiet! Hush! Don't speak such mad blasphemy!"
People frantically exchanged panicked theories, desperate for answers.
Yet no matter what they screamed, it did nothing to halt the blinding orb from blazing brighter as it barreled ever closer to the ground.
Watching the radiant sphere descend, ordinary mortals were merely consumed by blind dread.
However, the Innate-tier martial champions and murim grandmasters stationed throughout the capital were struck with bone-deep, paralyzed horror.
For the surging True Qi fluctuations radiating from that sphere were simply too boundless, too colossal.
It was like a roaring, tempestuous ocean of raw power crushing down upon them, leaving their limbs shaking uncontrollably.
"The Innate Zenith, that is unmistakably the Innate Zenith!"
"No, that's wrong! This True Qi feels even more terrifying than the Innate Zenith!"
"Merciful heavens, it's a supreme monster! Everyone fall back!"
"Too late, it's already too late! Its killing intent has locked down the entire city; there's nowhere to run!"
"Where are the Royal powerhouses?! Why haven't they stepped forward yet?!"
CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!
Cloud layers fractured into dust as the heavens shuddered in violent succession.
Within mere breaths, the Raging Rivers strike traversed the vast expanse, trailing a storm of thunderous sonic booms as it plummeted toward the capital.
Right at that critical juncture:
"Which scoundrel dares?!"
"Insolent cur!"
"Courting death!"
Roars erupted across the metropolis as three radiant figures shot into the sky simultaneously from the Imperial Palace, the Inner City, and the Outer City.
Surging with terrifyingly powerful auras, the three silhouettes cleared over a thousand meters in a heartbeat, unleashing their ultimate techniques in seamless unison to blast upward against the descending True Qi sphere.
BOOM!!!
The night sky detonated with blinding fury, vaporizing countless cloud layers into nothingness.
A blazing artificial sun manifested a thousand meters above the metropolis, casting blazing waves of white-hot light and searing heat across the land.
The glare was so intensely blinding that tears streamed from the eyes of millions of onlookers below.
Yet despite the pain, everyone felt a wave of relief washing over their souls.
The apocalyptic orb of light had been shattered after all.
They were safe.
SWOOSH! SWOOSH! SWOOSH!
Having obliterated the sphere with their combined might, the three Innate Zenith powerhouses tumbled unsteadily back to the ground.
Yet the moment their boots touched the dirt, they couldn't even stand; collapsing with ashen faces, they began desperately circulating their inner arts to suppress grievous internal injuries.
Clearly, Calamitas's single casual strike had pushed all three of them to their absolute breaking points.
Watching the three masters struggle to breathe, sharp-eyed champions throughout the city cried out in utter disbelief:
"Aren't... aren't those the Three Great Immortals of the Great Min Royal Court?!"
"Wait... are they vomiting blood?!"
"How is this possible? Even with all three joining forces, they were still gravely injured?!"
While the masters were paralyzed with horror, a booming, wild laugh echoed down from ten thousand meters above the clouds:
"Hahahahaha! Fun! Truly fun!
Splendid! Since you managed to block the first one, then... how about the second?"
BUZZ!
Under the terror-stricken gazes of millions, a pitch-black vortex materialized in the deep night sky. Though far more compact than the previous sphere, the aura it radiated was infinitely more suffocating and cataclysmic.
In that single moment, the three Terrestrial Immortals and the entire populace of millions plummeted into utter despair.
It was over. Everything was finished.
This black vortex was the Second Slaying of the White Empress Holy Fist: Overturning Mountains.
Unlike the purely explosive, single-burst kinetic blast of Raging Rivers.
Overturning Mountains was an implosive, continuous-detonation strike forged by Calamitas after deciphering the terrestrial magnetic attraction of this world, synthesized with the physical concept of a Black Hole from materialist cosmic physics.
By constructing multi-layered, counter-rotating True Qi vortexes aligned with the laws of Terrestrial Magnetism, it exerted an overwhelming gravitational pull akin to universal attraction.
Once launched, it operated like a rampaging, low-tier Black Hole, drawing every shred of matter along its trajectory into its swirling core and ripping it into microscopic dust.
After wreaking catastrophic havoc and tearing through massive swathes of matter along its descent, the projectile would strike its target and detonate violently.
In the heart of that initial blast, it generated a secondary multi-layered True Qi backdraft vortex, producing a colossal vacuum that dragged the surrounding atmosphere and debris inward to serve as fuel; harmonizing with the vacuum's core vortex, it culminated in a secondary detonation infinitely more violent and terrifyingly hotter than the first.
SWOOSH!
Faster than thought could follow.
Within a few breaths, the True Qi black hole forged from the Overturning Mountains strike descended from the ten-thousand-meter firmament, wreathed in roaring whirlwinds and rolling thunder.
Carrying a majestic aura that promised total annihilation, amidst frantic shrieks and weeping cries of absolute despair, it slammed squarely into the dead center of the ancient metropolis.
BOOM!!!
The moment it made contact, the historic heart of the imperial capital detonated with cataclysmic fury.
Millions of searing light torrents erupted from the blast like rabid demon dragons, instantly engulfing the nearest tens of thousands of citizens around Ground Zero and reducing them to fine blood-ash in a fraction of a millisecond.
Behind them, high-rise pavilions, ancestral shrines, grand estates, towering fortress walls, avenues, and imperial palaces were instantly boiled, dissolved, and shattered under the deluge of blinding radiant flows; the apocalyptic energy superheated the debris into a molten tsunami that swept outward in an unstoppable wave of utter ruin.
RUMBLE! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Just like that, the boiling tsunami of searing light surged across the four horizons, violently toppling structures of every scale and ruthlessly shredding, melting, vaporizing, and wiping out countless wailing mortals trapped within.
After five or six breaths of relentless detonation, the epicenter mutated into an inescapable gravitational vortex without warning, unleashing a terrifying, all-consuming vacuum pull in every direction.
Across dozens and even hundreds of miles, ruins, soil, shattered masonry, and the very atmosphere were violently dragged backward, collapsing into the ravenous eye of that apocalyptic vortex like an inverted ocean.
And right then, the true secondary detonation of Overturning Mountains made its grand entrance.
BOOM!!!!
Completely devoid of messy shockwaves or chaotic flame crests.
This explosion was nothing but a pure, flawless, white-hot sphere of boundless radiant annihilation, expanding outward at breakneck speed.
In an instant, with a low, vibrating hum, it swallowed the land for hundreds of miles around.
Dragging the pulverized city along with its sprawling outer suburbs into the radius of absolute obliteration.
Within mere breaths, the colossal sphere of light faded into nothingness.
Leaving behind a massive, molten crimson abyss measuring 190 kilometers in diameter, its rim mathematically symmetrical and its contours impeccably smooth.
If someone were daring enough to descend along the scalding cliffs of that abyss.
All the way to the absolute bottom.
They would discover that the dense lava lake at the base was situated precisely ninety-five kilometers below the surface.
Exactly half the crater's diameter.
In other words, with a single casual technique, Calamitas had hollowed out a geometrically flawless, near-perfect hemispherical basin.
As for the metropolis that once stood above that void, along with the several million citizens residing within...
All had vanished into smoke and ash, leaving not a single speck of dust behind.
Yet, there was one solitary exception.
Slightly north of the massive basin's dead center, a towering stone pillar stood in absolute silence, measuring ninety-five kilometers in height and three thousand meters in diameter.
Perched atop this miraculous column, a height equivalent to ten Mount Everests stacked atop one another, the Great Min Imperial Palace sat perfectly intact, completely unscathed.
This was entirely deliberate on Calamitas's part.
After all, she hadn't yet browsed through the precious records preserved within those imperial vaults.
Such miraculous precision, wiping out all matter while sparing a single target, was not something achievable through the White Empress Holy Fist alone.
It was born entirely from Calamitas's own godlike perception and micromanagement, a pinnacle where the application of raw kinetic force had reached the sublime level of pure art.
If Calamitas, equipped with such 'Art of Annihilation', were dropped into a mundane, modern Earth space-time without a shred of supernatural power.
She could use half a toothpick to effortlessly orchestrate an epic-scale multi-car catastrophe on any highway.
SWOOSH!
A streak of light flashed as Calamitas descended from the boundless night sky, touching down gracefully before the grand gates of the Golden Throne Hall within the imperial palace.
Casting her eyes across the chamber, she found the old emperor and his civil and military officials all prostrated with their foreheads pressed against the floor, shivering uncontrollably.
"Quite sensible, aren't we?"
Grinning casually, Calamitas strode barefoot across the grand hall and took a seat directly upon the dragon throne.
Once seated, a sudden whim struck her; she tilted her head back and peered up at the Great Min's National Destiny.
Sure enough, the ancient dragon that had previously commanded an imposing aura was now mangled, riddled with thousands of festering wounds, its form translucent and fading on the verge of complete extinction.
"Haha, looks like this Great Min is well and truly doomed."
Not giving a single damn about the empire's fate, Calamitas rested her chin on her palm and asked, "Does anyone happen to know where the archives are located?"
No one answered.
No one... dared to utter a sound.
"No need to be so terrified."
Calamitas gently consoled them with a smile, "Just speak plainly, or I will slaughter every last one of you."
With a casual flick of her wrist, dozens of blazing light blades erupted, ruthlessly mincing half of the ministers nearest to her into piles of bloody slurry.
A surging wave of blood instantly washed over the knees and palms of the surviving officials.
Faced with this casual butchery, the remaining ministers convulsed in sheer panic, babbling over one another to pinpoint the exact coordinates of the archives.
Having received her answer, Calamitas nodded with satisfaction, casually waved her hand to slaughter the remaining officials, and shot upward, shattering the palace roof into dust as she trod empty air straight toward the imperial archives.
...
"This should be the place."
Glancing indifferently at the damaged doorway, she stepped into the grand archives.
Upon crossing the threshold, Calamitas found that despite bearing the name of an 'archive'.
The interior was neither cramped nor dreary; instead, it was far more spacious and brilliantly illuminated than anticipated.
"Not a bad little spot."
Sweeping her sharp gaze across the hall, Calamitas noted that the thick walls, near and far, were hung with scrolls depicting flowers, birds, fish, insects, majestic landscapes, and historical portraits, alongside striking calligraphy scrolls brimming with masterful brushwork.
Yellowed parchments glowed under flickering candlelight, and wall-alcove incense burners emitted faint, delicate fragrances, lending the hall a deeply classical ambiance.
"Oh? There's actually a Painting Spirit tucked away in here?"
Calamitas's gaze locked directly onto a landscape scroll hanging on the wall seven or eight meters away, murmuring with amusement, "Hmm, such a dense, weathered presence. Must be an ancient relic."
Speaking aloud, she strolled casually over to the painting.
Her gaze drifted slowly across the parchment.
Gliding over the light ink washes depicting serene mountains and rolling rivers.
Calamitas's eyes came to rest upon an old fisherman standing on the riverbank within the painting, clad in a conical hat and coir raincoat, sketched with merely two or three minimalistic brushstrokes.
Perhaps her gaze was simply too heavy and suffocating; the roughly drawn old fisherman shuddered violently, dropped his fishing rod and wicker creel, scrambled across the canvas, and dove headfirst into the misty river rendered on the scroll.
Immediately following that, the old man's aura vanished completely from the painting.
Calamitas swept her gaze across the hall, locking her calm eyes onto the deeper section of the archives dozens of meters away.
Another ink wash scroll happened to hang on the wall there.
The faint aura of the Painting Spirit that had just fled was already seeping out from within that second scroll.
"Haha, quite intriguing. Able to wander freely across any ink wash painting, taking in painted vistas and enjoying their unique charms.
Tsk tsk, a 2D lifeform in a sense; I wonder if it could phase into anime, movies, or video games."
Chuckling indifferently, Calamitas paid it no further mind, shifting her gaze to the right of the painting.
Towering rows of tall bookshelves stood lined up there.
Packed densely along the shelves were countless ancient volumes.
Among these books should be the very texts she was looking for.
With those thoughts in mind, Calamitas strode toward the rows of bookshelves.
After a few paces, she noticed an enormous, elegant wooden desk standing in a corner of the archive, laid out with ancient classics and the Four Treasures of the Study.
A slender calligraphy brush lay resting on its rack, as if awaiting someone to wield it.
"Fascinating."
Calamitas looked with amusement at the shallow puddle of dark ink sitting in the small inkstone, "The scholarly aura here has actually nurtured several rare Inkstone Spirits."
Piercing through the liquid ink with her gaze, she suddenly saw a shimmering, pitch-black 'Ink Lake' resembling dark jade.
Beneath the lake's surface in the deep spectral waters, three to five pure black fish resembling miniature carp were swimming and frolicking playfully.
"Manifestly weak and fragile, yet capable of effortlessly conjuring a microscopic pocket of localized space-time within a hairline's breadth."
Calamitas marveled with genuine curiosity, "Furthermore, this miniature space-time is neither a pocket universe, an extra spatial dimension, a simulated virtual realm, nor the 2D informational plane inhabited by that Painting Spirit.
This is a... genuine reality, a miniature world sustained upon mere milliliters of ink, providing a habitat for these tiny fish to live and thrive.
Haha, before these few little carp, spatial physics, dimensional theory, and cosmic sciences are made to look rather dim and eclipsed."
Her respect and fascination for the idealistic metaphysics of this space-time deepened considerably in an instant.
Merely a handful of minor artifact spirits could leverage negligible physical matter and expend negligible energy to effortlessly sustain a pocket space of over a thousand cubic meters, without occupying a single inch of external space-time volume.
It was... truly mind-bending.
This was an achievement that even a Milky Way Overlord or a Universal Sage could never pull off.
Or rather, if they wished to accomplish such a feat, they would have to expend astronomical quantities of matter and energy to do so.
From this, it became clear that much of the String Swarm's conceptual framework was likely confined strictly to the String Swarm itself.
Forcibly applying its rules to define and explain the phenomena of the Desolate Ancient Swarm was clumsy at best, and fundamentally divergent at its core.
Yet, this was precisely the allure of encountering distinct Swarms.
If every cosmic domain functioned identically, existence would lose all intrigue.
At the same time, this revelation made Calamitas realize that compared to the Desolate Ancient Swarm, the high-energy lifeforms across the infinite space-times and dimensions of the String Swarm, including herself, were excessively crude in their application and manipulation of power.
Her peers, and she herself, had largely walked the path of 'brute force creating miracles'.
In short: to manifest vast cosmic phenomena, one had to burn titanic quantities of mass-energy.
Accomplishing anything or creating any construct within the String Swarm relied entirely on raw, uncompromising physical output, devoid of mystical subtlety.
The Three-Dimensional Ungrateful Sons were a prime example of this principle.
They were only capable of wiping out an observable universe in a single strike because their physical mass had already expanded to the scale of an observable universe itself.
Yet these tiny artifact spirits, the Painting Spirit, and the local Innate Zenith masters commanded bizarre and domineering feats while their physical weight and mass-energy footprints remained light and nimble, never overly bloated.
For instance, an Innate Zenith master could unleash a hundred million kilograms of devastating force through their cultivation, yet their body weight rarely exceeded a hundred kilograms.
Even Calamitas's current physical avatar remained grounded in mundane biology, weighing only two hundred kilograms.
"The Ether of this Swarm..."
She pondered deeply, "Seems vastly superior to that of the String Swarm when it comes to awakening the intrinsic latent potential of all phenomena, driving them to bloom into miraculous realities.
The same Ether, at identical concentrations, manifests so starkly differently across two distinct Swarms... what profound mystery lies beneath this cosmic divergence?"
After a few breaths of deep contemplation, Calamitas suddenly reached a revelation:
"Indeed. In the various space-times of the String Swarm, the bedrock of all existence is rooted in elementary particles, rendering Ether little more than a bizarre, bewildering supernatural anomaly.
Yet in the Desolate Ancient Swarm, which is anchored upon countless strains of 'Origin Qi', Ether is a tangible, foundational substance of absolute reality.
Consequently, compared to the String Swarm, the Ether of the Desolate Ancient Swarm participates on a far deeper level across every stratum of reality.
One could even argue that Ether is very likely one of the core fundamental 'Origin Qi' elements that actively constructs, sustains, and drives the entire operational framework of the Desolate Ancient Swarm.
Rather than merely floating atop the world's surface without truly participating in its cosmological creation, as it does in the String Swarm."
Through these conceptual deductions, Calamitas's comprehension of this world's underlying cosmic laws surged exponentially once more.
BUZZ!
She slowly opened her palm, light gleaming in her center.
Suddenly, within the interior of her mortal avatar, a miniature pocket space-time manifested out of thin air, measuring twenty miles in length, width, and height, with a spatial volume exceeding a thousand cubic kilometers.
Indeed, through her newfound grasp of local laws, Calamitas had hollowed out a genuine pocket dimension anchored within her own physical body.
Simultaneously, the century's worth of White Empress True Qi surging through her meridians multiplied tenfold without warning, effortlessly breaching the thousand-year milestone.
"Fascinating. A complete disregard for the Law of Conservation of Mass."
Calmly sensing the roaring torrents of True Qi surging within her, Calamitas chuckled softly, "Is this the true wonder of a cultivation realm? All matter born of 'Origin Qi', every worldly phenomenon a manifestation of the 'Dao', where pure thought and intent alone can rewrite physical reality. Just like the previous owner of this mortal vessel, whose sheer, unyielding obsession with 'seeking immortals' sustained him for so long without a drop of water or a grain of rice."
Afterward, she strolled over to the towering bookshelves, casually sliding out scrolls and ancient chronicles to piece together the lost history of this world.
Time ticked by, second by second.
While Calamitas was immersed in the historical records, scout detachments from various factions across the Great Min Dynasty began arriving at the edge of the gargantuan crater she had forged.
Bearing witness to the fathomless, glass-smooth abyss, their minds were seized with speechless terror.
Overcome with sheer, primal panic, the scouts fled the perimeter at breakneck speed, terrified of crossing paths with the calamity that had hollowed out the earth.
Meanwhile, seated deep within the imperial archives, Calamitas had already unraveled more than half of this realm's true history.
However, these mundane political records were not the focus of Calamitas's attention.
What truly captured her interest was that across these countless ancient annals, there were scattered mentions of beings known as the Upper Realm Folk.
Documented records regarding these Upper Realm beings were extraordinarily scarce.
The earliest verifiable mention traced back to the late Ancient Kingdom Era.
Fascinatingly, it was precisely from that era onward that ghosts, spirits, demon beasts, and bizarre anomalies began manifesting with explosive frequency across the mortal realm.
Simultaneously, human martial artists who broke through to the Innate Zenith could no longer shatter the void to ascend, left with no choice but to wither and die of old age in bitter despair.
Among these limited fragments, one chronicle described a mortal encounter with an Upper Realm being deep in the mountains, recording a brief exchange between the two.
Throughout that short conversation, the Upper Realm visitor referred to themselves as a [Qi Refiner].
"So the strange distortions plaguing this realm are likely the handiwork of these Qi Refiners descending from higher-tier worlds."
Stroking her chin, Calamitas mused, "Where are these Qi Refiners hiding? Was that sword-riding old man who appeared around Black Soil Town a decade ago one of these Qi Refiners?"
While lost in thought, dawn broke over the horizon.
The [Infinite Cultivation] system triggered its daily cycle once more, violently detonating her reserves as her White Empress True Qi skyrocketed straight to one million years.