1 : 1,000,000...
What an absurd, despair-inducing disparity.
Imagine this: two mortals entering the sect gates on the exact same day.
One is gifted with a Heaven Spirit Root, while the other is cursed with a wretched, Impure Spirit Root.
The former breezes through Qi Refining in a few mere months, effortlessly condensing a Primordial Soul, transforming into an astral-tier monster capable of flattening a hundred thousand miles of terrain in a single strike, boasting an eternal lifespan spanning eons, with the clear potential to crown themselves a Void Monarch and dominate Caelum-Arcanum.
In short: unlimited potential, a future bathed in glory.
And the latter? A full year passes and they haven't even scratched the threshold. Worse, the sect elders hand down the grim verdict: even with a lifetime of ceaseless grind, reaching High-tier Qi Refining is a pipe dream. Scraping into the Mid-tier would already require praying to every god in existence.
Lifespan? Capped out at a miserable few centuries, at best.
In short: completely cooked. A guaranteed dead end.
Staring down a road that leads straight to irrelevance, how shattered would that cultivator's Dao Heart be?
Could they genuinely summon any ambition or drive to keep walking the path?
Calamitas figured the answer was an obvious no.
It was easy to imagine the sheer reverence, worship, and obsession showered upon those wielding Heavenly Roots across Caelum-Arcanum.
They were the true, undisputed prodigies favored by the cosmos itself.
A far cry from the pathetic deadweights Calamitas had rounded up.
Low-grade Spirit Roots across the board, every single one of them.
Trash that would have to grind for a hundred thousand years just to match what a genuine Heavenly prodigy pulls off in twelve months.
Hell, the oldest bastard among them had pushed past two thousand years of age and was still hard-stuck at the absolute bottleneck of Peak Qi Refining, a Primordial Soul was something they didn't even dare fantasize about.
Their entire existence, essentially pissed away like that.
Tsk. Absolute scrubs, barely a step above the dead-last Impure trash.
Still, Calamitas observed that along the path of Qi Refining, a Spirit Root was merely the baseline.
Across the boundless expanse of Caelum-Arcanum, a host of other variables heavily dictated the true velocity of one's ascension.
Factors like the environmental Ether density of one's cultivation sanctum; rare ingestible elixirs and topical astral herbs; or specialized catalyst arrays and auxiliary artifacts engineered to cycle Qi.
And most crucial of all: the core cultivation scriptures themselves, each wielding unique efficiency curves and arcane outputs.
Even with a god-tier Spirit Root, if your core scripture is utter garbage, your ceiling remains pathetically low.
A web of factors like this directly dictates a cultivator's entire trajectory.
Furthermore, when factoring in scriptures, one runs headfirst into another vital metric of the Spirit Root.
Namely: Elemental Affinity.
Sifting through the shattered memories of those bottom-tier Cultivators she captured, Calamitas realized that even within their pathetic horizons, known Spirit Root affinities numbered in the dozens.
The quintessential Five Elements: Metal, Wood, Water, Fire, Earth.
These five formed the baseline across Caelum-Arcanum, claiming nearly 99% of the cultivation population.
Beyond them lay an esoteric catalog: Lightning, Luminescence, Nether-Darkness, Poison, Frost, Geo, Gale, Yin, Yang, Draconic, Phantom, Titan-Force, Vitality, Death, Edge, Bone, Mist, Flora, Dune, Astral-Starlight, Phoenix, Vulpine, Raven, Serpent, Ocean, Blood, Owl, Mirage, Passion, Charm, Shadow, Magnetism, Vapor, Beast, Sonic, Solar, Lunar, Swarm, Corpse, Hex, Mystery, Spellcraft, Talismanic, Boundary, Cerebro, Indigo, Adamant, Mountain, Sword, Strife, Fiend, Corruption, Karma, Void... an endless array of resonance types.
Not to mention the countless composite mutations hybridized from mixing these singular affinities.
And that was merely what bottom-tier trash knew; what truly lurked beyond their knowledge was impossible to calculate.
In theory, the spectrum could be infinite.
Of course, elemental affinity alone doesn't decide one's ultimate fate.
While awakening an exotic, deviant Spirit Root might warp a cultivator's spells and divine abilities into cataclysmic, eldritch, or utterly incomprehensible miracles once paired with a matching scripture...
Extreme rarity also meant a near-total drought of predecessor records, compatible methods, and resources.
Every path under heaven is carved out by those who came before.
The more who tread a path, the wider the highway becomes.
The fewer who walk it, the narrower, and deadlier, the trail.
All paths might ostensibly lead to Immortal Ascension.
Yet when wielders of rare, esoteric Spirit Roots hit an inevitable bottleneck without ancestral records or guides to decipher the path, they end up hard-stuck in a single realm, stagnating until dying of old age in bitter futility.
It simply proved the universal law of exchange: nothing under heaven is flawless, and no path offers an absolute cheat code.
Another critical piece of intel: a cultivator must prioritize a scripture that resonates with their Spirit Root's innate affinity.
A mismatch yields half the result for twice the agony; in severe cases, severe Qi deviation shatters both physical vessel and soul.
Which likely explained why the techniques harvested from those dozen-plus captives overlapped so heavily.
Even a supreme scripture is completely useless if the Spirit Root's elemental resonance clashes with it.
Conversely, a bottom-barrel scripture is tolerable so long as the resonance aligns.
As for composite hybrid affinities, their situation is outright tragic.
Scriptures tuned to multiple fused affinities are exponentially harder to come by than even the rarest singular elements.
Yet, if a composite wielder does manage to cross into the Dao, their raw combat output utterly shatters peers of the same tier.
Having parsed through the vast sea of Spirit Root data, Calamitas remarked with casual nonchalance:
"Looks like I'll just have to forge a Spirit Root of my own."
Indeed. If lacking a Spirit Root barred one from Qi Refining and immortal ascension...
The solution was brutally simple: craft one from scratch.
Calamitas's logic and execution had always been this viciously direct.
As for how to engineer a root from nothing...
In truth, while casually browsing those memories, she had wielded her boundless cosmic intellect to devise a fully viable blueprint in mere moments.
Or rather, a Root-Forging art that was effortless for someone of her caliber, but suicidal madness for any mortal across the cosmos.
This method was christened by Calamitas as the "World-Piercing Rite".
It not only covered the artificial genesis of a Spirit Root, but also the construction of a Dao Foundation, alongside the seamless transmutation between True Qi and Spiritual Mana.
In theory, any mortal, even a cripple born completely barren of Ether, could walk the path of true cultivation in three distinct steps, provided they possessed the sheer audacity to brave the fatal risks.
The very first sequence was dubbed by Calamitas as [Born from Ruin].
True to its name, without insane resolve and utter fearlessness, stepping into this phase was tantamount to courting instant death.
HUM!
Her vessel shuddered faintly as Calamitas wielded her divine, godlike will as a blade, carving a massive, gaping fissure across the surface of the soul-core nestled deep within her frame. Completely disregarding the soul-rending agony that would drive a mortal instantly insane, she exerted her absolute will to anchor the bleeding edges of the rift, locking the wound open and denying it any chance to heal.
This tear was the 'Rite', the keystone structure of her artificially engineered Spirit Root.
As for the moniker 'Rite,' the philosophy behind it was absolute:
If the cosmos refuses to open the gates of ascension for me, then I shall become the gate itself.
WHOOSH!
The moment this torrent of Soul Essence escaped Calamitas's vessel into the surrounding world, it began violently clashing, grinding, and interweaving with the ambient atmospheric forces, setting off a storm of micro-reactions.
And surging within that vast wash of ambient cosmic energy was none other than... Ether.
This was Calamitas's exact objective.
Next came stage two.
As her soul continuously unleashed geysers of raw vitality and Soul Essence...
Calamitas leveraged the effluent stream, which bridged the microcosm of her inner body to the macrocosm of the outer world through the Rite, as an anchor.
Using the subtle spiritual tether between her discharged essence and her soul matrix, she began siphoning and funneling the boundless atmospheric Ether back into her core, tempering both flesh and spirit.
She was deliberately reverse-engineering and simulating the operational framework of a genuine Spirit Root.
WHIRL!
The surrounding Ether mobilized abruptly, seamlessly pouring into Calamitas's body and soul.
She had succeeded.
Better yet, its baseline throughput instantly pushed past normal thresholds, rivaling a High-grade Spirit Root.
And this was merely the opening act.
Theoretically speaking, the greater the soul-bleeding throughput Calamitas allowed her Rite to discharge, the more massive the ocean of Ether she could forcefully drag into herself.
In other words, she retained absolute freedom to customize and scale the intake velocity of her Spirit Root at will.
Even the revered Heaven Spirit Root was nowhere near the ceiling of what her artificial root could become.
Of course, this suicidal exploit was a privilege exclusive to a bugged entity like her, possessing [Potential Infinity] in both vitality and soul capacity.
Anyone else would bleed their soul dry in minutes, collapsing into a hollow, braindead corpse.
Should ordinary mortals ever attempt to tread the path of immortal ascension via the "World-Piercing Rite", they would have to advance with agonizing caution, cutting their losses early, lest they court instant annihilation.
Next, Calamitas set about transmuting her colossal, million-year-accumulated True Qi reserves.
Refining it directly toward true energy.
HUM!
In the blink of an eye, under Calamitas's precise control, that million-year White Empress True Qi was entirely transmuted at a 1000:1 ratio into a thousand years of pristine, completely attribute-less true energy.
Next came the third step.
Infusing the true energy with an elemental attribute.
And then using it to inversely forge and anchor the Spirit Root.
True energy was ultimately the resulting [Effect] produced after a Spirit Root operated through its cycles.
Meanwhile, the Spirit Root was the foundational [Cause] that generated true energy through those very cycles.
Therefore, once the [Effect], true energy, was brought into existence prematurely, the [Cause], the Spirit Root, could be inversely engineered with far greater ease.
Calamitas shifted her cold gaze, slowly turning toward the dozen-plus mutilated corpses floating in the distant sky.
A thought flickered through her mind.
HUM!
Suddenly, four strands of formless, intangible radiance, each pulsing with distinct qualities of heavy weight, blazing inferno, fluid softness, or razor-sharp speed, were excavated from the lingering residual souls of four corpses. They streaked like shooting stars into Calamitas's vessel, piercing straight into her soul-core.
These four radiant nodes were none other than Low-grade Spirit Roots of the Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind affinities.
Under the manipulation of Calamitas's iron will, the four Spirit Roots instantly coalesced into a single cluster. Through her endlessly complex, indescribable micro-operations, accompanied by the recursive circulation of true energy washing through her inside and out, they began to slowly fuse into one with the ethereal Rite embedded deep within her soul layer.
That's right: Calamitas intended to artificially forge a composite Spirit Root harboring all four elements of Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind.
Though the cultivation world of Caelum-Arcanum universally believed that multi-attribute Spirit Roots were a path of extreme suffering, with the difficulty scaling exponentially per extra attribute, dual-attribute was already pushing the ceiling. Tri-attribute was practically a death sentence with zero compatible scriptures, making it an extreme rarity.
Quad-attribute roots had practically never been recorded; even if one miraculously surfaced, no major sect would ever accept them.
The primary reason was simple: compatible scriptures were painfully scarce and impossible to find.
The secondary reason was that multi-attribute cultivators struggled perpetually to maintain a stable equilibrium between their conflicting elements.
An imbalance like that made Qi deviation an absolute certainty.
However, Seraphine had always relished shattering conventional wisdom.
The more people claimed something was impossible, the more she loved turning it into reality.
HUM!
In that exact fraction of a second, Calamitas's bespoke Spirit Root finished forging.
Taking advantage of the critical juncture where the Spirit Root was on the verge of finalization, she violently maxed out her Rite's Soul-Bleeding output, shoving it past all imaginable limits.
BOOM!
A colossal, boundless torrent of Soul Essence, vast enough to shroud the entire realm and equivalent to the soul power of hundreds of millions of living beings combined, roared and surged violently outward.
Conversely, the endless oceanic Ether of the outside world was greedily sucked into her body by Calamitas, transforming her into an Ether-devouring "Black Hole."
CRACK!
RUMBLE, CRACK!
Driven by her boundless, terrifying devouring force, the skies spanning thousands upon thousands of miles above the world abruptly tore open with violent thunder, lightning, and torrential downpours.
The inhabitants of the great and small nations scattered across the vast continent below trembled as they looked up at the heavens, frantically praying for the wrath of the skies to pass them by.
Little did they know that these apocalyptic global phenomena were merely the side effect of a single person absorbing Ether.
Meanwhile, amidst these colossal cascading shocks, the ethereal Spirit Root deep within Calamitas's soul violently skyrocketed in output, leaping instantly from the High-grade baseline (1,000) straight up to the Heaven Spirit Root tier (1,000,000).
And this was merely the beginning.
Model 7:11 PM
Yet within a single split second, her operational throughput shattered the million mark, skyrocketing straight into the tens of millions.
Right after that... thirty million... two hundred million... a billion... eight billion...
HUMM!
Barely two or three breaths later, the moment Calamitas's Spirit Root finished its structural genesis, its raw output violently spiked... reaching a mind-boggling scale of a hundred trillion.
Technically speaking, Calamitas had now forged a super Spirit Root whose cultivation velocity utterly eclipsed a Heaven Spirit Root by hundreds of millions of times.
One single day of cultivation for her was equivalent to hundreds of thousands of years for a Heaven Spirit Root, and hundreds of billions of years for a wretched Impure Spirit Root.
With her official entry onto the path of immortal cultivation locked in, she immediately set her sights on the next critical agenda: Inventing a Scripture.
To invent a scripture, one naturally needed raw "materials."
As it happened, Calamitas currently had four sets of "materials" enthusiastically donated by those dozen-plus cultivators: the Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture, the Heavenly Blaze Fourteen Stances, the Starfall Sword Codex, and the Seventy-Two Cloud-Overturning Swords.
Naturally, through her eyes, all four of these cultivation manuals were thoroughly generic, truly mediocre to the extreme.
Yet precisely because of that mediocrity, they had managed to circulate for so long and across such vast territories. This meant their underlying foundations were rigorously ironclad, and their cumulative heritage ran exceptionally deep.
Over countless eons, an endless procession of cultivators who had practiced these four techniques had already utilized their shallow or profound wisdom, their brief or protracted lives, to patch up every single flaw, bug, loophole, and amateur oversight hidden within the manuals.
Polished to absolute perfection, they provided Calamitas with an immensely solid theoretical baseline for her scripture-creation.
In truth, long before she finished parsing through the four manuals, her soul and mind had already begun spawning torrents of swelling, fierce inspiration.
These sparks of insight fluttered like agile, dancing swallows within Calamitas's boundless mind, coiled and ready to burst forth.
Prepared at any moment to take flight in a flock, pushing the deduction of all four techniques straight to their absolute endpoints.
The very next instant, a blazing flash erupted from Calamitas's calm, chilling eyes as she initiated the overhaul, optimization, and revolutionary evolution of all four scriptures.
These four manuals happened to correspond to the four fundamental elements: Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind.
Linguistically speaking, matters relating to [Earth] encompassed soil, bedrock, plateaus, mountain ranges, and continents;
Matters relating to [Fire] encompassed combustion, raging flames, scorching heat, calcination, and brilliance;
Matters relating to [Water] encompassed rainfall, lakes, rivers, tidal waves, and the boundless oceans;
Matters relating to [Wind] encompassed breezes, gentle zephyrs, howling gales, velocity, and tempests.
Thus, Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind could represent the four primary categories of natural phenomena in the world.
Namely: the Four Symbols.
And most intimately linked to the Four Symbols were the Four Divine Beasts.
The Four Divine Beasts could be bifurcated into the Celestial Four Spirits and the Terrestrial Four Spirits.
The Celestial Four Spirits were the Azure Dragon, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird, and Black Tortoise.
Meanwhile, the Terrestrial Four Spirits, often styled as the mortal realm's four pillars, were scaly beasts, phoenixes, tortoises, and dragons.
Both categories could be fully subsumed under the Dao of the Four Symbols.
At the same time, viewed from another angle, the Four Symbols could equally be understood as a description of the four states of Yin and Yang.
Namely: Lesser Yang, Greater Yang, Lesser Yin, and Greater Yin.
Furthermore, the cyclical flux of Yin and Yang births the four seasonal chronologies: spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
Spring is Lesser Yang, representing the breath of germination, belonging to the phase of abundant Yin and nascent Yang;
Summer is Greater Yang, representing the breath of expansion and release, belonging to the phase of scant Yin and exuberant Yang;
Autumn is Lesser Yin, representing the breath of harvest, still belonging to the phase of scant Yin and exuberant Yang;
Winter is Greater Yin, representing the breath of dormancy and storage, where the phase cycles back to abundant Yin and nascent Yang.
Such being the case, the rotation of the four seasons and the alternating recurrence of Yin and Yang could also be styled as the flow of the Four Symbols.
Moreover, the saying goes: The Two Modes engender the Four Symbols, and the Four Symbols engender the Eight Trigrams.
Among the Eight Trigrams, Qian, Kun, Zhen, Xun, Kan, Li, Gen, and Dui, the four trigrams of Zhen, Li, Dui, and Kan precisely map to the four cardinal directions of the world: East, South, West, and North.
Thus, the four cardinal directions of the world could likewise be subsumed under the Dao of the Four Symbols.
Consequently, starting from the four fundamental attributes of Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind, Calamitas comprehended and deduced within a fleeting moment the Daos of the Four Symbols, the Four Spirits, the Four States, the Four Seasons, and the Four Directions, all intimately or distantly tied to those four basic attributes.
As a result, under the influence of the profound cosmic laws she had just enlightened, those four mundane manuals continuously mutated and optimized, rapidly evolving into four supreme sword classics: "HouoH", "ZuroZ", "GooG", and "FeleN".
Any single one of these classics far surpassed the original four manuals, allowing cultivators matching those affinities to breeze through every single bottleneck and threshold all the way up to the Void Reversion realm, or even higher planes of existence.
That's right: even though Calamitas currently possessed only a thousand years of true energy, her Qi Refining cultivation hadn't officially commenced, and her Primordial Soul remained un-condensed...
Yet, relying solely on her realm-defying enlightenment (Rule Harvesting) ability, she had managed in a mere few breaths to deduce the paths leading all the way past the Primordial Soul realm and into even loftier heights.
Yet this was far from finished.
The Four Symbols, the Four Spirits, the Four States, the Four Seasons, and the Four Directions were nowhere near the limit of the four attributes' "evolution."
In truth, Calamitas believed that Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind could never be fully and comprehensively encompassed by the five categories of [Primitive Philosophy] she had previously deduced.
On a profoundly esoteric level, Calamitas leaned heavily toward viewing Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind as a summary of cosmic principles.
So-called principles referred to the underlying [Logic], a property capable of piercing through all phenomenal existence.
She deduced that [Earth] represented submissiveness, embodying [Stability];
[Water] represented cohesion, embodying [Aggregation];
[Fire] represented transformation, embodying [Progression];
[Wind] represented kinetic fluidity, embodying [Change].
Stability, aggregation, progression, and change.
These four could weave through all forms and encapsulate all things in creation.
Not a single natural phenomenon could ever divorce itself from these four fundamental properties.
Everything under the sun invariably shared an intimate or distant connection to stability, aggregation, progression, and change.
Proceeding from this premise, Calamitas continued her uninterrupted deduction.
And upon pushing that deduction straight to its absolute endpoint.
She attained sudden enlightenment... realizing that Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind were, at their core, Matter, Energy, Time, and Space.
HUMM!
The ambient Ether went wild.
In an instant, with Calamitas as the epicenter, a staggering domain spanning a full hundred thousand miles was smothered by sweeping, grandiose spectacles of divine manifestation.
Across every cardinal direction, East, South, West, and North, millions of towering, majestic mountain ranges inexplicably turned weightless and ethereal. In utter silence, they disintegrated into hundreds of millions of invisible, intangible currents, some dark, some grey, some earthy, some verdant, manifesting as gentle breezes, cascading gales, and roaring tempests that swept across the horizons, dancing and swirling in a frantic frenzy.
In the span of a breath, all the mountains of the mortal world had vanished.
The vast continent had never been flattened so thoroughly since the dawn of its creation.
Every single peak and ridgeline had transformed into fleet, nimble winds, brushing past all things freely without inflicting the slightest harm upon their inner or outer vessels.
As for the countless mortals and fierce beasts dwelling deep within those mountain ranges, they found themselves utterly dazed and bewildered, riding the ancient gales as they were passively whisked away toward the four corners of the world, across the lakes and seas.
Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!
While the winds born from the mountains engulfed the globe, the boundless oceans, inland seas, lakes, and winding rivers scattered across every corner of the world unexpectedly transformed, under the continuous scouring of those mountain-gales, into roaring, churning, crimson-burning fire.
And this wasn't merely a superficial layer, from the deepest abysses of the seabeds and lake floors down to the surface, the entirety of the water bodies mutated into fire within a split second.
Miraculously, however, these dazzling, incandescent torrents of surging, boiling flames did not incinerate or steam-cook the countless fish, whales, and sharks swimming within their depths.
The aquatic life remained entirely intact and active, swimming back and forth through the roaring sea of fire, fire-lakes, and fire-rivers.
It was just that the blazing oceans were so blindingly luminous that the creatures could barely perceive anything, causing them to scurry about in blind panic, desperate to retreat into the familiar, cold darkness they once knew.
Meanwhile, the countless ships of all sizes sailing across the seas, lakes, and rivers gazed in abject terror, realizing they felt as though they were drifting across the surface of a Great Sun, every direction flooded with blinding radiance, nothing visible save incandescent flame.
And above the boundless earth, the Solitary Moon that usually ruled the nocturnal firmament in lonely solitude no longer stood alone.
Suspended in the sky ten thousand miles away, directly opposing it, a vast Great Sun abruptly manifested.
It was a phenomenon of... the Sun and Moon shining simultaneously.
Yet, this Great Sun, which ought to have scorched the earth with blinding ferocity, no longer carried any searing glare.
Its dazzling exterior had morphed into a pitch-black abyss.
At a glance, it appeared even dimmer than the waning moon.
At this moment, the myriad anomalies gripping the realm were far from mere illusions.
Every single one of them was the direct consequence of Calamitas's scripture-creation violently subverting and fracturing the operating rules of the entire world.
And the scripture responsible for these world-shaking anomalies finally finished materializing at this very moment. Built upon the foundation of the four sword classics, "HouoH", "ZuroZ", "GooG", and "FeleN", and fusing the Dao of Matter, Energy, Time, and Space alongside her profound insights into the realm's atmospheric meridians, she had forged a peerless art.
The core objective of this scripture was none other than to Transform into a Dragon and Ascend with the Heavens, leveraging one's personal momentum to override the grand momentum of the cosmos, thereby re-forging Earth, Fire, Water, and Wind, and re-enacting the creation of the cosmos.
Consequently, this method was christened by Calamitas as the: "Heaven-Ascending Dragon Momentum".
Aside from its nine-stage major chain links and forty-nine minor chain links, forming a colossal, map-clearing ultimate known as the [Seven Heaven-Ascending Swords], this scripture possessed "Momentum" without "Technique" or "Stance," nor did it cultivate any traditional sword Qi or sword light.
Because for someone of Calamitas's caliber, every stray thought could manifest as a technique, and every passing whim could forge a stance.
So long as she willed it, everything within her field of vision and the reach of her perception could instantly transmute into various forms of sword Qi and sword light.
Whether it was a single droplet of water, a blade of grass, a spark of fire, an entire mountain range, a vast ocean, or an entire continent.
Even an enemy's sword Qi, sword light, or divine spell and magical arts would, under the almighty power of the "Heaven-Ascending Dragon Momentum", be instantly subverted into Calamitas's own wisps of sword Qi and sword light, turning them into tools for her to wield and command.
More importantly, thanks to Calamitas's transcendent intellect, this scripture was violently shoved all the way from the Void Reversion tier of the original four sword classics straight to the absolute apex of Dao Convergence.
According to Calamitas's deductions, the ultimate peak of Dao Convergence ought to correspond to the Early Earth Immortal stage, the Realm of Divine Insight.
As for what lay beyond Divine Insight, she was temporarily unable to deduce any concrete details.
"Therefore, it's about time I left this realm and headed for Caelum-Arcanum."
Amidst the boundless firmament, Calamitas, swathed in tens of millions of mountain-gales, slowly opened her eyes, gazing down at the sprawling, boundless expanse of the continent below.
Following the successful genesis of her scripture, her cultivation realm naturally surged to the pinnacle of Essence Refining, with her true energy volume hitting the ten-thousand-year milestone.
Absolute supremacy, just beneath the Spirit Transformation tier.
It wasn't that Calamitas couldn't push higher, but the ambient Ether density of this realm could only support her up to the absolute peak of Qi Refining; climbing even an inch further by sheer force was impossible.
Alas, the evolutionary laws of the Desolate Ancient Swarm seemed overwhelmingly dependent on Ether.
If the outside world's Ether concentration was insufficient, no matter how monstrous a cultivator's talent, ascending further remained a pipe dream.
Yet this presented a rather thorny issue.
Namely, this world appeared to have been completely locked down by the so-called Godforge Guild using a Primordial Soul-tier forbidden spell, rendering Ascension entirely impossible.
This piece of intel was likewise harvested by Calamitas from the memories of those dozen-plus captive cultivators.
The reason why no one in this realm had managed to shatter the void and ascend to Caelum-Arcanum in over two thousand years was intimately tied to this forbidden array.
Worse still, this seal could only be unlocked from the outside in, and could not be violently shattered from the inside out.
Unless wielding Primordial Soul-tier true energy, no amount of Qi Refining-tier true energy could breach this seal from the inside.
Of course, when Calamitas thought of "no amount," she certainly didn't mean it in the absolute sense.
According to her calculations, roughly one to ten billion years' worth of Qi Refining-tier true energy would be more than enough to violently bash the seal open from the inside out.
Thus, she merely needed to wait two days for her system to work its magic and multiply her cultivation output by a millionfold, making a brute-force breakthrough trivial.
Yet what kind of person was Calamitas?
Given her modus operandi, how could she ever be so passive?
"This Godforge Guild treats this world as their personal ranch, refusing to even permit the mortals within to ascend."
Before she knew it, Calamitas, now clad in sleek, form-fitting attire across her robust frame, drifted effortlessly back down to the surface of the continent.
"I need to find a way to shatter this seal."
Lost in deep thought, she slowly sat cross-legged. Using the captured cultivators' memories as a foundation, coupled with microscopic fluctuations in the world's atmospheric meridians, she began deducing a method to crack the array.
Time flew, and nearly an hour later, the operational cycle of the [Infinite Cultivation] system triggered once again.
HUM!
Amidst a violent tremor of the earth, Calamitas's Qi Refining-tier true energy abruptly surged straight to the tens of millions of years tier.
And at that exact second, she cracked the method to dismantle the restriction.
"Got it."
Calamitas stood up abruptly, lifting her gaze toward the heavens. "This obscure forbidden spell has an intermittent logical flaw. By shaking this specific loophole, I can collapse its entire architectural framework and render it completely scrap."
Based on her observations and deductions, the bottom-tier operating code of this forbidden spell had been hardcoded with a fixed logical "Pre-calculation."
That pre-calculation dictated: The number of individuals attempting simultaneous Ascension from this realm must not exceed one hundred.
The moment simultaneous Ascenders surpassed this threshold, it would critically congest the spell's core processing pipeline, plunging its background queue into an infinite hang and crashing the operating loop.
Unless someone manually rebooted the array, the realm would gradually recover its normal state over the passage of time.
At that point, anyone capable of shattering the void would finally be free to ascend to Caelum-Arcanum.
However, waiting that long was far too slow.
Calamitas wanted to ascend immediately; she had no intention of wasting time.
"Therefore, I'll just have to send a massive crowd up at the exact same time. One hundred? Heh, nowhere near enough."