HUMMM!
An impossibly vast, scorching surge of True Qi abruptly erupted from deep within Calamitas's dantian out of thin air.
Coursing rapidly through her, it permeated and merged into every fiber of her formidable physique, inside and out.
CRACK-CRACK-CRACK!
Amidst the violent popping of bones, Calamitas's frame ballooned once again.
Shooting up from her original 2.6 or 2.7 meters straight to a staggering three meters tall.
Stimulated by this surging True Qi, Calamitas, crimson hair dancing wildly without wind, split her mouth wide, revealing sharp teeth as she threw back her head and exhaled a burning blast of air:
"WHOOSH!"
Instantly, a visible, raging gale manifested out of thin air around Calamitas, coalescing into vicious tornadoes that roared and tore through the archives with a deafening rumble. In a heartbeat, the structure was ripped apart and pulverized into countless splinters and debris, shooting outward in every direction like high-speed machine-gun fire.
In merely an instant, a third of the Great Min imperial palace crumbled into ruin.
The royals and retainers sheltering within were buried alive before they could even let out a scream.
CRASH!
Dust and scorched earth rained down.
"Hahaha."
Towering amidst the vast cloud of dust, Calamitas's grin stretched from ear to ear as she spoke in a booming, bell-like voice:
"A million years of cultivation power. Not bad. Feels like I could crush my past self with a single finger."
With that, her sinister eyes suddenly flared, shooting twin beams of thick crimson light straight toward the ancient palace walls hundreds of paces away.
SWOOSH!!
The massive, sturdy stone ramparts instantly liquefied into churning lava under the crimson rays, crackling sparks bubbling up as molten rock cascaded across the ground.
Piercing straight through the Great Min imperial palace, the two crimson beams crossed a two-hundred-mile abyss. They seared across the distant horizon, blazing a molten highway dozens of miles long into the earth. At its terminus, a thousand-meter-tall mountain range was instantly melted down and collapsed, transformed into a violently steaming, active volcano.
As for the scouts of this realm's various martial arts factions lurking within this domain, all suffered a grim fate.
Under the focus of that pair of "gazes," they were ruthlessly vaporized into boiling steam, leaving behind neither ash nor bone.
"Boring flies."
Glancing faintly into the distance, Calamitas redirected her focus toward the pitch-black Dragon Ball resting in her palm.
Compared to yesterday, her cultivation power had multiplied ten thousand times.
It should be more than enough to crush this bead open.
With that thought, Calamitas's fingers abruptly tightened around the Dragon Ball.
Subjected to the titanic pressure, the black Dragon Ball violently trembled and fractured.
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
As its outer shell cracked, hundreds of streams of intensely condensed, frigid energy erupted from the black orb.
The moment this yin qi emerged, it ignited with ghostly green flames accompanied by shrill demonic wails, shrieking and spinning outward in all directions to thoroughly corrode and dissolve the remaining thousands of palace chambers, in an instant mutating them into an eerie ghost ruin, dilapidated, dim, and echoing with muffled weeping and cackling laughter.
"Hmm?"
Tilting her head slightly, she began to sense the surging, pulsating [Qi Veins] woven between the rivers and mountains across this realm's four quarters.
Through the occult divination lens of the Turtle Esoterica lineage, wind, rain, thunder, and lightning are merely superficial qi, while mountains and rivers embody true qi.
Because the earth is the mother of qi, where there is earth, there is qi; fertile soil births potent qi, potent qi manifests robust veins, and robust veins usher in flourishing prosperity.
Thus, when majestic peaks and sweeping rivers converge, true qi pools to form great veins, the world's qi veins.
Upon carefully observing these qi veins, Calamitas discovered that across every territory of this realm, the vast churning, circulating, and gathering of yin qi was strikingly orderly.
So orderly that it felt as though some entity had treated this world as a chessboard, deliberately arranging and grooming its paths.
And the place where she stood happened to be the converging node, or rather, a critical coordinate, where hundreds of sweeping torrents of yin qi surged and flowed.
Calamitas naturally wouldn't consider herself to be that node.
Which meant the true node could only be... the cracked, nearly exploding black Dragon Ball resting in her palm.
"So, is all of this just that so-called Qi Refiner... pulling the strings?"
Calamitas couldn't help but suddenly recall the records from those ancient texts, ever since the era of ancient nations, no one in this realm had been able to shatter the void and ascend; moreover, the successive emergence of ghostly apparitions and the appearance of Qi Refiners had both begun in that very epoch.
Furthermore, regarding this yin qi 'node' resting in her palm, Calamitas faintly sensed that across the vast expanse of this world, there didn't seem to be just one, but many.
"Overthinking is useless, let's refine this one first... Hmm, this dragon-spawn stillborn embryo has accumulated such thick, foul, stagnant filth that it feels ready to detonate. Better hurl it further away to see how it plays out."
With that said, she raised the fractured Dragon Ball, narrowed her eyes to aim at the barren wilderness two hundred miles away, and threw it with full force.
BOOM!
Accompanied by the thunderous detonation of air within a thousand-meter radius, this pitch-black Dragon Ball pierced through layer after layer of the atmosphere in an instant, crossing a distance of over two hundred miles to slam violently into a solitary, towering mountain peak.
At the exact moment of impact, the Dragon Ball violently exploded. Amidst the spray of shattered rock and flying grit, the near thousand-meter-tall peak was snapped entirely in two.
Simultaneously, from within that tiny bead burst an immense, grayish-black oval mass of pus comparable to a mountain range, densely covered in countless slender tentacles, completely engulfing the severed peak below.
"What dense death energy."
By this time, Calamitas had also left the palace ruins and arrived at this desolate expanse.
Looking at that excessively massive, pitch-black globule of pus four or five miles away, she remarked with appreciation: "This death qi is simply more ferocious than ten thousand ten-thousand-year-old evil ghosts combined."
Perhaps sensing Calamitas's presence, the immense globule pulsed through waves of expansion and contraction, sprouting thousands upon thousands of eyes of various sizes across its surface.
This was no figure of speech; these pupils were actively radiating thousands of bizarre, malignant pulses into the surroundings, continuously warping and polluting the environment, driving its corruption toward a grim, otherworldly ghost domain.
This corruption unfolded at breakneck speed, so swiftly that had mortals been present, their flesh would have mutated into corpse-abominations while their detached souls warped into malignant specters in the blink of an eye.
However, Calamitas didn't care in the slightest about such so-called pollution.
After all, to her, the 'dosage' of these warped frequencies was simply too minuscule to even register as toxic.
Thus, Calamitas took fearless step after step toward this colossal mass of black pus blanketing the fractured mountain ridge.
"Heaven above, Earth below; Earth's Dark Zenith pools into baleful essence, the Nine Yins of the terrain settle into turbidity; when turbid blight condenses, discarding dawn for dusk, death severs life, Strike!"
Chanting the esoteric formula, Calamitas's arms formed distinct, arcane mudras. Snapping her hands together to unify the dual seals, she thrust them toward the boiling, surging black titan-pus atop the fractured crest in the distance.
HUMMM!
Instantly, all creation froze, and all ambient energies stilled.
Solely that boundless yin qi, death qi, baleful qi, and turbid qi coalesced into roaring torrents rushing in from the four corners of the world, materializing as invisible chains that pierced through the black titan-pus, dragging it aloft and locking it suspended thousands of meters in the sky.
Just like that, Calamitas forged the malevolent blight within the orb into the array's eye, anchoring its foundation with the four primordial blights, Yin, Mortis, Slaughter, and Turbidity, and officially commenced the ghost refinement.
...
Meanwhile, over fifty-five thousand miles away across the boundless ocean...
SWOOSH!
CRASH!
The howling ocean wind whipped up endless plumes of sea mist, refracting the sunlight to spawn brilliant, cascading rainbows.
Beneath layered tiers of prism radiance, the vast waters heaved unpredictably; towering walls of ocean surged skyward, churning azure foam like an unstoppable legion charging across the horizon, a spectacle of raw grandeur.
Right where the roaring crests met the endless expanse of the heavens, two figures in billowing monastic vestments hovered in serene suspension, a man and a woman.
The male cultivator wore cloud-grey flowing robes and a crested coronet, his weathered face tranquil, framed by a long, pristine white beard that radiated an aura of transcendent detachment.
The female cultivator was robed in deep verdant silk, her features strikingly gorgeous; an ornate crescent jade ornament rested upon her brow, while snow-white hair was pinned into an immaculate monastic topknot, giving her an ethereal yet dangerously seductive presence.
"Master Inanis."
She looked toward the elder, her tone cool and detached. "You've guarded this realm for three centuries. Are you certain no anomalies ever slipped past you?"
The elder known as Daoist Inanis replied with measured calm: "Lady Serenitas, every incident of note across these three hundred years has been inscribed within the Realm-Striding Missive. You may review it at your leisure once your watch begins."
"Very well." Lady Serenitas inclined her head with a subtle nod. "I shall examine it."
With that, both produced a seal artifact resembling an imperial jade seal; matching seal face to seal face, they stamped them together amidst a flare of ambient luminescence.
"Good. From this moment forth, the custody of this world falls to your shoulders, and my tenure reaches its completion."
Master Inanis exhaled with lingering relief. "It is time for me to... depart this sphere and return to Caelum-Arcanum."
"Go on, head back."
Lady Serenitas gave a lazy flick of her pale hand, her lips curling into a frigid smirk. "Old friend, these three centuries must have bored you to death, haven't they?"
"Indeed so."
Master Inanis shook his head with a rueful chuckle. "Who could have known guarding this backwater would be so utterly tedious? Ah well, see you in three hundred years."
With a sweep of his flowing sleeves, he prepared to ascend into the deep expanse of the boundless firmament.
Above hung an open portal woven from pure, shimmering jade radiance.
Yet at that very moment, the worldwide circulation of yin qi abruptly stalled, thrown into chaotic disarray.
Both Lady Serenitas and Master Inanis stiffened, shock and disbelief surfacing in their eyes.
"What in the world is happening..."
Lady Serenitas's delicate brows locked tight as she manifested a bowl-shaped jade basin from thin air; glaring into the disc, her pupils shrank in pure shock: "A primary yin node was actually destroyed?! That... that's impossible!"
Her eyes flared with fury as she spun toward the innocent-looking Master Inanis, snapping: "You old crook, how on earth did you manage your watch for three centuries?! Why does this happen the exact second I clock in?!"
Master Inanis's astonishment lasted for only a fraction of a second before he smoothly composed himself:
"Fellow Daoist Serenitas, our shift handover was officially stamped and finalized moments ago. Technically speaking, this anomaly occurred under your watch and has zero to do with me. Any disaster that befalls this realm now rests squarely on your shoulders."
Turning away, Master Inanis made a break for the heavens above.
"Hold it right there!"
Lady Serenitas snatched his sleeve, hissing in anger: "You don't get to just wipe your hands clean and walk away! You owe me an explanation!"
Without a word, Master Inanis violently whipped his sleeve, effortlessly shoving her back as his voice turned stone-cold:
"Daoist Serenitas, cease this pointless harassment and go deal with the breach. Track down which node failed before the higher-ups investigate, because if punishment comes down, it falls on your head, not mine."
With that, he clasped his hands behind his back and drifted unhurried toward the endless sky.
Reaching the jade portal, Master Inanis looked down at Lady Serenitas, whose face was frozen like permafrost, and added with an airy chuckle:
"Oh, by the way, if you're bitter about it, feel free to file a formal complaint through a Realm-Striding Missive, or sue me directly. Doesn't bother me. Farewell!"
Stepping into the gateway, he vanished as the portal dissolved into shimmering nothingness.
In an instant, only Lady Serenitas remained, isolated between boundless ocean and empty sky.
"Rotten old bastard!"
Her exquisite face turned murderous as she spat in disgust: "Utterly revolting!"
Her expression hardening, Lady Serenitas manifested a jade chakram radiating shimmering crystalline light from thin air.
Slender fingers flicked into an intricate incantation seal, pointing directly at the ring:
"Tri-form Celestial Pivot, unfurl the ring, forge the blade."
CLANG!
In a flash, the jade ring, scarcely the size of a human palm, morphed into an ethereal shortsword half a meter long, lacking both guard and hilt, flickering like a semi-tangible streak of azure luminescence.
"Phantom blade into shroud, bind and encase my form."
At Lady Serenitas's low murmur, the hazy blade dissolved into a swirl of crystalline azure mist, cloaking her entire figure.
As body and blade fused into a singular state between real and ethereal, she transformed into a razor-sharp beam of azure sword qi, over a foot wide and a meter long, radiating an aura of lethal keenness.
With a resonant metallic hum, the sword ray crossed a hundred miles in a blink, vanishing soundlessly into the horizon where ocean met sky.
...
Fifteen minutes later...
At the site of the colossal crater.
On the crater's desolate rim atop the severed mountain peak, the pitch-black titan-pus had shrunk by nearly half.
Pulsing violently, the blackened mass seeped continuous gouts of deep greenish venom from hundreds of surface fissures.
A mere speck would instantly mutate an ordinary human into a mindless, ferocious ghoul.
Yet just as Calamitas was fully absorbed in refining the specter, an azure beam of sword qi ripped through the horizon from dozens of miles away, thrusting straight for her skull.
In that razor-thin fraction of a heartbeat.
Facing away from the incoming projectile, Calamitas's eyes narrowed.
With a mere thought, she vacuumed the massive entity miles away straight into her internal spatial ring.
Her silhouette blurred, evading the lethal trajectory by a hair's breadth.
In the exact same split-second, trailing violent sonic booms, she launched herself ten thousand meters straight into the high heavens.
Without uttering a single word, she unleashed four or five consecutive Raging Rivers slamming downward against the pursuing azure sword ray with a catastrophic rumble.
Immediately after, she kicked off the atmosphere with terrifying force.
Amidst continuous explosive thunderclaps, she crossed tens to hundreds of miles in a flash, vanishing past the edge of the horizon.
Below, the pursuing azure sword ray didn't even flinch against the carpet-bombing barrage of Raging Rivers.
Flaring with brilliant jade radiance, it effortlessly rippled out four or five crystalline sword arcs that curved with the fluid grace of spring willows.
Dancing languidly before spinning outward with a piercing whistle, they intercepted and neutralized every single one of Calamitas's incoming strikes in a precise one-to-one counter.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!!!
Their attacks violently clashed high in the azure vault.
Ripping through hundreds of sunlit cloudbanks, the collisions detonated with deafening, heaven-splitting shockwaves.
Far below, the desolate earth shuddered, hurling shattered boulders skyward as seismic waves churned the soil.
Meanwhile, the sword qi embodiment of Lady Serenitas tore through the boundless sky like azure lightning, likewise vanishing into the farthest reaches of the firmament.
A dozen seconds later.
Over a thousand miles away, twin blurs of crimson and azure streaked like cloud-piercing thunderbolts, blasting through an endless sea of clouds at blinding speed.
Even at these extreme speeds, neither side stayed idle.
Spanning a hundred-mile gap, both unleashed a relentless, catastrophic barrage of exchanges upon each other.
With every passing second, the cadence of their strikes grew faster and exponentially more lethal.
Stray sword rays and fractured shockwaves from their clash rained down in erratic squalls, pulverizing everything across the vast world below, towns, hamlets, thousand-meter mountains, ancient forests, and sprawling megacities, slashing them into ribbons and turning them into fine powder.
SWOOSH-SWOOSH-SWOOSH-SWOOSH!
Caught beneath this torrential descent of millions of razor-sharp shockwaves and lethal sword rays.
Impregnable fortress walls and supreme martial masters alike were no sturdier than sea foam, utterly defenseless, disintegrated into debris and obliterated into dust in the span of a single heartbeat.
Nor was this devastation confined to a single province or realm.
Every territory crossed by Calamitas and Lady Serenitas was scarred beyond recognition by the shockwaves of their clash, reduced to smoking expanses of pulverized rubble.
Mountain ranges across thousands of miles splintered beneath torrential sword rays; roaring rivers were forced into reverse by the seismic violence.
The sheer scale of their warfare had entirely transcended the comprehension of mortal minds.
The collateral casualties wrought by this divine dogfight had already mounted into the millions.
Wailing resonated across the skies above an ocean of apocalyptic desolation.
BOOM!!
Under the cloudless azure vault, Calamitas surged at absolute maximum velocity, wreathed in cascading halos of friction fire generated against the atmosphere.
Each explosive stride shattered a thousand meters of airspace, scattering clouds and crossing over two hundred miles in an instant to reach the distant horizon.
This was her current terminal speed, Mach 300.
Yet even at such a breakneck pace, the colossal, translucent azure sword ray behind her remained locked on her tail, maintaining an unyielding hundred-mile tether.
"And despite moving that fast, her aerodynamic footprint is practically nonexistent, as if atmospheric drag doesn't even apply to her."
Calamitas analyzed mid-flight: "Her energy output is ridiculously condensed, outmatching the White Empress's True Qi in purity by over a thousand times.
"Coupled with her insane reaction time and maneuverability, techniques like Raging Rivers and Overturning Mountains are essentially useless against her.
"Heh. A Sword Immortal, is it?
"So this is a Cultivator. Truly impressive."
Indeed, from the very first instant of the ambush, Calamitas had already deduced it.
An unknown adversary capable of pursuing her with such overwhelming pressure could only be a true Cultivator.
And the only reason Calamitas feigned weakness and kept retreating was to observe up close, testing whether she could instantly reverse-engineer their method of cultivation.
"Replicating their fundamental source of power, like true essence and spiritual mana, purely through external observation is too inefficient for now. Hmm... I'll have to rip the core cultivation manual straight out of her hands."
Blasting forward a hundred miles in a blink, Calamitas calculated silently: "Still, replicating her hyper-fluid, superhuman sword arts and Sword Light Division techniques using White Empress True Qi won't be difficult at all.
"Which means... now that I've reverse-engineered your cultivation swordplay and confirmed I can't glean your foundational manual just by watching, there's no longer any reason to let you stay cocky."
With those thoughts, Calamitas cycled her technique and instantly unleashed the Holy Fist Third Slaying: Severing Firmament.
Anchored in White Empress True Qi and treating the vast atmosphere as her canvas, this technique seized control of the qi veins across thousands of miles of sky. It birthed millions of wild lightning strikes imbued with the fundamental laws of the Thunder Dao, designed to paralyze and freeze the target's momentum before dragging them into an endless Thunder Hell to be pulverized into ash by cataclysmic heavenly bolts.
HUMMM!
The White Empress descends, annihilating the celestial vault.
Beneath tens of thousands of miles of clear sky.
The atmosphere boiled like a hyper-heated cauldron as pristine white clouds blackened into murky soot, rapidly coalescing into millions of colossal thunderheads that loomed like suspended mountain ranges.
BOOM!
CRACK-CRACKLE-BANG!
As the storm clouds formed, deafening sonic thunder rolled across the realm like an unstoppable stampede of ten thousand warhorses.
"Hmm?"
Trailing tightly behind in sword-ray form, Lady Serenitas narrowed her perception in suspicion: "Why are the realm's atmospheric qi veins warping to spawn thunderclouds of this magnitude? Could that nameless demonic beast be channeling some kind of arcane sorcery?"
In Lady Serenitas's eyes, a brute this ferocious could never be human; she had to be some horned, furred abominable demon transformed into humanoid shape.
How else could a mere mortal shatter a primary yin node?
How else could she have survived this long under her relentless pursuit?
Though she had no idea what fortuitous encounter this beast had stumbled upon to fight her to a standstill.
Yet Lady Serenitas remained absolute in her arrogance, confident she could still sever the beast's neck and reduce it to a headless carcass.
"A wretched mongrel beast, nothing more. No matter how much demonic qi, true qi, battle aura, spiritual mana, or trash energy you amass, against my refined true essence, you're nothing but clay chickens and pottery dogs, utterly pathetic."
Mid-sneer, as Lady Serenitas rocketed forward in relentless pursuit, a blinding bolt of lightning ten meters thick ripped through the heavy cloudbanks from ten thousand meters above, searing across the vault to strike her dead-on.
CRACKLE-BANG!!
Amidst the erupting plasma, Lady Serenitas and her blade were frozen solid in mid-air, stripped of all mobility.
"Wh-what? This realm's lightning..."
She stammered in disbelief: "How could it carry such overwhelming paralysis? No... this is... this is the True Thunder of our Caelum-Arcanum realm?! Impossible!"
Lady Serenitas had no clue that while these storm clouds originated from this mortal sphere, their architect, Calamitas, had infused them with her own supreme comprehension of the Heavenly Tribulation Lightning Dao.
Under the conceptual, mind-over-matter spacetime cosmology of the Desolate Ancient Swarm, this single act stripped the lightning of its mortal impurities, exuding the cataclysmic authority of higher-dimensional heavenly thunder.
Exactly what she recognized as Caelum-Arcanum's True Thunder.
The instant Lady Serenitas was pinned in stasis, millions of towering storm clouds detonated in unison, vomiting out millions of wild violet lightning bolts like venomous hydras that struck her from every conceivable vector, raining merciless devastation from above.
BOOM!!!
The heavens buckled, and the earth groaned.
Lady Serenitas plunged straight into a nightmarish, raging Thunder Hell.
The raw kinetic and conceptual fury violently tore her apart from her blade, shattering her Sword-Body Unification state back into flesh and bone.
"Aaargh! You vile, filthy beast!"
Enveloped inside the blinding plasma sphere, the female cultivator shrieked in convulsive agony: "Summoning actual True Thunder?! This defies all cosmic logic!"
CRACK-CRACKLE-BANG!!!
Dense braids of endless falling lightning bound her and her flying sword into a colossal, blazing orb of plasma, hurling her from the sky like a fallen star straight toward the boundless earth below.
BOOM!!!
Under the apocalyptic kinetic impact, the vast continental plate heaved like a violent sea, throwing up hundred-meter-tall tsunamis of pulverized earth that crashed outward to drown the surrounding mountains and rivers.
Ten thousand meters up in the heavens, Calamitas arrested her momentum, drifting suspended amidst the sea of tempestuous storm clouds as she cast a cold, towering gaze down into the blackened chasm yawning below like a meteorite crater.
At the bottom of the semi-molten crater spanning thousands of meters across, the female cultivator lay gasping in agony, her robes shredded, her body marred with patchy burns, yet exposing enough pale skin to maintain a tragic, alluring silhouette.
"Ten thousand bolts and you're still breathing?"
Calamitas chuckled in amusement. "No matter. We'll just make it ten thousand more. Thirty thousand. A hundred thousand."
Right at that moment...
"No! Please, stop!"
From the bottom of the scorched pit, Lady Serenitas forced her trembling neck up toward the thunder-choked sky, pleading in a wretched whimper: "Please... spare my life... I am willing to..."
"Hahaha."
Listening to the desperate pleas drifting from the earth, Calamitas merely sneered in chilling amusement. Raising a massive palm to command the violent thunderheads churning above, she snapped her arm down and pointed directly into the chasm, barking:
"STRIKE!"
In that heartbeat, the boundless storm clouds spanning the firmament submitted like a pack of tamed beasts beneath Calamitas's singular will.
"No... no..."
In the charred pit, Lady Serenitas watched ten thousand bolts of True Thunder hurtling down like falling stars, her tear-filled eyes widening in absolute horror: "I beg you, spare—"
Before her words could finish, millions of catastrophic lightning bolts shredded the sky, descending with an apocalyptic roar that drowned out the entire continent.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!!!
CRACK-CRACKLE-BANG!!!
The cataclysmic barrage knew no pause.
In that blinding inferno, common mortals and Innate Zenith masters alike were reduced to fragile specks of dust, vaporized without ceremony into pure nothingness.
Only when the final cataclysmic bolt burned through its fury did the trembling of the world's four quarters slowly subside into silence.
Ground zero for the bombardment, Lady Serenitas had been reduced to a grotesque, blackened husk devoid of all life, her charred remnants scattered across the ruined earth without a shred of beauty remaining.
No, the earth itself was gone.
Leaving behind only a vast, vitrified wasteland of smoking black scars, utterly extinguished of all life.
This boundless wasteland birthed by Calamitas spanned several thousand miles across, encompassing nearly fifty percent of the entire Great Min dynasty's territory.
It was beyond counting how many millions of mortals had been wiped out beneath this apocalyptic thunder tempest.
SWOOSH!
A flare of crimson light cut through the gloom as Calamitas materialized at the edge of the wasteland, scanning the four directions with cold detachment, as if searching for something.
Her eyes flared with interest; with a flick of her hand, she telekinetically wrenched a withered, blackened skull attached to half a spinal column from the wreckage.
This charred relic was Lady Serenitas's sole surviving remain.
"Splendid. Truly splendid."
Dangling the half-spine by her fingers and lazily twirling the charred skull around, Calamitas let out a dark chuckle: "A skull that endured ten thousand lightning strikes and expired in absolute, exquisite agony... what a supreme refinement catalyst."
With that, she extracted the massive globule of black titan-pus from her spatial ring, hurled it several miles away, and resumed her ghost refinement once more.