After hurling the pitch-black titan-pus ten miles away.
Calamitas gripped Lady Serenitas's withered spinal column, idly twirling the charred skull around with a whistling whoosh, intending to toss it into the titan-pus as well.
Right before throwing it, she paused:
"Right, need to gouge out her memories first. Don't want them burned away during the refinement process."
With that, Calamitas thrust a massive finger into Lady Serenitas's charred cranium with a sharp CRACK.
As for whether any memories actually remained inside...
Naturally, they did.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Calamitas had always possessed absolute confidence in her micro-level mastery over her own power.
Even after bombarding Lady Serenitas with a hundred thousand catastrophic lightning bolts, she was one hundred percent certain she had preserved the woman's soul in a relatively intact state.
Only her conscious ego was shattered to the brink of extinction.
Thus, Calamitas effortlessly dredged every scrap of Lady Serenitas's memories straight out of her feeble, fractured soul.
Only after plucking the memories clean did she hurl the charred skull and spine into the pulsing black titan-pus.
Then, she turned her undivided focus to commencing the formal ghost-forging ritual.
HUMMM
Instantly, boundless torrents of Yin, Mortis, Slaughter, and Turbidity surged violently from every quarter of the world, like millions of invisible spectral serpents sinking their fangs into the black mass, hauling it thousands of meters into the high heavens.
The array immediately began burning off the immense volume of extraneous impurities diluting the pus, hyper-condensing the terrifyingly potent ghost qi churning at its core.
GURGLE-GLUG-GURGLE
Under the refinement of the quad-blight array, thick torrents of pitch-black, iridescent fluid spewed continuously from the entity's surface, slamming into the earth below.
SIZZLE-HISS-SIZZLE!!!
As the dark fluids crashed down, they instantly dissolved massive swathes of scorched earth into caustic sludge, eating relentlessly downward into the subterranean mantle.
...
Time trickled past.
As the refinement progressed, Calamitas made a realization.
If she wanted to forge a genuinely apex calamity specter, it would be much safer to round up several tens of thousands of stray spirits to serve as "seasoning" to pack into the stillborn Dragon Egg.
Calamitas reflected calmly: "Looks like I really do need to go hunt down a batch of ghosts."
With that thought, her towering frame gave a subtle tremor. Manifesting over a thousand phantom avatars woven purely from White Empress True Qi out of thin air, she launched them in all directions, east, south, west, north, blasting into the sky across the world without a second of hesitation.
Each of these True Qi avatars commanded the combat prowess of an Innate Zenith master, more than sufficient to steamroll every apparition, demon, and monster dwelling under the heavens.
More crucially, because these avatars were woven from intangible, weightless True Qi, their travel speed exceeded ordinary Innate Zeniths by more than tenfold.
They hunted wherever they pleased, and not a single faction in this entire realm possessed the power to impede them.
As for the supply of spectral quarry, to be frank, while the Great Min dynasty was essentially wiped out due to Calamitas's rampage.
According to imperial cartography and historical archives.
This world's continental plates combined with its vast oceans spanned at least a hundred thousand miles across.
Overall, the aggregate population of both the living and the demonic was extraordinarily abundant.
Calamitas had zero reason to stress over mundane trivialities like running out of ghosts to capture.
Meanwhile, as her thousand phantom avatars scoured the continents rounding up tens of thousands of apparitions.
To kill time while the refinement ran its course, Calamitas casually sifted through Lady Serenitas's fractured memories.
Within over a millennium of recorded experiences, the cultivator known as 'Lady Serenitas' had indeed hailed from the so-called 'Upper Realm.'
The official designation of that Upper Realm was the [Caelum-Arcanum World].
A quintessential high-tier cultivation cosmos.
A boundless, endless expanse brimming with pure Ether, teeming with innumerable mortal empires, billions upon trillions of living souls, and godlike immortals striding across the high firmament.
Yet Lady Serenitas's actual station within that cosmos was laughable: situated in a regional province known as the [Archaic Blade Dominion], inside an industrial sect-conglomerate named the [Godforge Guild], she was merely a low-ranking, Grade-C contracted wage slave.
So utterly mundane that her flying sword, the Tri-form Celestial Pivot, was just a cheap, mass-produced commodity rolled off the Godforge Guild's assembly lines.
Her equipment aside.
Lady Serenitas's foundational cultivation manual was nothing more than the "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture", a dime-a-dozen wind-attribute sword codex sold across the markets of Caelum-Arcanum.
In other words, this divine terror who could effortlessly stomp lower-realm dynasties into dust and slaughter hundreds of millions of mortals was, in reality, nothing more than a broke, expendable bottom-feeder with zero wealth or authority in the Upper Realm.
That alone showcased the horrifying chasm separating the two dimensions.
And as an expendable low-tier worker of the [Godforge Guild], Lady Serenitas's sole assignment in this mortal world of Great Min was to follow corporate orders and stand guard over the [Deca-Dragon Sepulcher Grand Array].
As for the length of her watch, it was a mandatory shift of a full three hundred years.
According to Lady Serenitas's memories, the so-called Deca-Dragon Sepulcher Grand Array utilized this entire mortal world as its foundational canvas, anchoring its matrix eyes with ten corrupted [Abyssal Dragon Eggs] buried in undisclosed locations.
Channeling through labyrinthine conduits, the formation drastically spiked the world's ambient yin concentration, silently and exponentially breeding supernatural monstrosities while ratcheting up the apocalyptic chaos inflicted upon the mortal realms.
In doing so, it forced the world's mortal populace to steadily and efficiently "manufacture" industrial quantities of negative energy: the Five Spectral Calamities, Dread, Agony, Grief, Trauma, and Mortis, alongside the Five Mortal Tribulations, Pestilence, Famine, Frailty, Savagery, and Ruin.
Harnessing these ten varieties of synthesized calamity miasma, the Deca-Dragon Sepulcher Grand Array weaponized the world itself as an alchemical crucible, reverse-refining the ten Abyssal Dragon Eggs.
Over an incubation cycle spanning three thousand years.
The matrix was engineered to transmute those ten embryonic cores into a Primordial Soul-grade Ghost Dao artifact designated the [Deca-Nether Purgatory Scroll].
An armament belonging to the Primordial Soul echelon, a realm of power held by immortals an entire tier above Lady Serenitas.
"Ten Abyssal Dragon Eggs?"
Calamitas stroked her chin, a vicious smirk playing on her lips. "Meaning aside from this one, there are nine more out there? If I smelt all ten dragon eggs into a single calamity entity... wouldn't that make it monumentally stronger?"
With a subtle shift of intent, she transmitted an updated mandate across the world to her thousand roaming avatars: beyond harvesting specters, their primary directive was to hunt down the remaining Abyssal Dragon Eggs.
For their tracking protocol, they utilized the current Dragon Egg as an anchor, weaving karmic fate-resonance with planetary yin circulation metrics into a unified scanning array.
Having delegated the task, Calamitas sighed with detached amusement: "So that's the trick. The perpetual swarm of apparitions and the bloodthirsty malice driving mortal minds were deliberately engineered by Upper Realm immortals through this macro-matrix."
Her curiosity piqued, she mused: "Still... what exactly is this so-called Primordial Soul echelon?"
Intrigued, Calamitas prioritized excavating the fragmentary archives within Lady Serenitas's memories regarding the cultivation hierarchy of the Caelum-Arcanum World.
It took mere fractions of a second to synthesize the data, leading Calamitas to a realization...
The foundational cultivation framework of the Caelum-Arcanum World was distilled into just four supreme realms:
Essence Refining, Spirit Transformation, Void Reversion, and Dao Convergence.
Lady Serenitas had merely lingered at the pinnacle of Essence Refining.
In this mortal realm, such an echelon commanded reverence as an apex Qi Refiner.
Yet back in the Upper Realm of Caelum-Arcanum, she was reduced to the humble moniker of a lowly... novice Qi Refiner.
Naturally, as an expendable novice, Lady Serenitas possessed only surface-level knowledge of the transcendent tiers above her.
She only knew that cultivators who attained Spirit Transformation were revered as Primordial Soul Sovereigns.
And that even a novice who had barely stepped into that realm, the absolute weakest Primordial Soul Sovereign, outclassed a peak Qi Refiner by millions, if not hundreds of millions of times in raw output.
A single unrestrained strike from such an entity possessed the apocalyptic scale to flatten this entire hundred-thousand-mile mortal sphere, continents and oceans alike.
In terms of planetary-destruction scaling, cross-referencing this with the String Swarm, it already scaled squarely against a low-tier Milky Way Overlord.
As for those who transcended into the Void Reversion realm.
Lady Serenitas had only heard whisperings that they were exalted as Void Monarchs.
While those anchoring the final echelon of Dao Convergence were venerated as Dao Sages.
Right at that moment, Calamitas's gaze flickered with sudden inspiration:
"Wait a minute... I can hijack the Deca-Dragon Sepulcher Grand Array itself to siphon all ten calamity miasmas of this world directly into my ghost refinement!"
With that revelation, she shelved Lady Serenitas's memories to deconstruct and optimize her ghost-forging matrix.
A few hours slipped past in this manner.
The thousand True Qi avatars dispatched across the four corners of the world returned in succession, each reeking of dense, chilling miasma after a bountiful harvest.
Tens of thousands of malignant spirits harvested from mass graves, execution scaffolds, desolate crags, haunted forests, dry wells, abandoned mines, and condemned ruins were dumped into the black titan-pus like dumplings tossed into boiling broth.
Most crucially, the remaining nine Abyssal Dragon Eggs had been excavated from ocean trenches, glacial peaks, archaic sacrificial shrines, sealed vaults, and the skulls of slumbering titan-beasts, delivered directly into Calamitas's grasp.
Suspended cross-legged in the sky, her crimson mane dancing wildly like an arch-demon from the primordial void, Calamitas furrowed her brow as she ran into a critical bottleneck.
"Solitary Yin cannot burgeon, solitary Yang cannot spawn..."
Her fingers danced with lethal agility as she ran arcane predictive calculations: "Life and death are not isolated absolutes; they exist in dialectical symbiosis, cycling through ebb, flow, and transmutation.
"To forge an unprecedented, apex-tier calamity phantom, I need an overwhelming deluge of surging, volcanic vitality to balance the crucible.
"While death energy here is suffocatingly dense, ambient vitality is practically non-existent.
"I need to relocate my crucible to a ground zero overflowing with both massive volume and supreme quality of Life Qi."
Floating down to the scorched earth, she clasped her hands behind her back in deliberation:
"Hmm... If it were purely about raw volume, I could casually pick any metropolis and refine a million mortals into fertilizer.
"But this catalyst demands unblemished, hyper-dense pedigree. That makes it slightly more tedious."
Calamitas paced back and forth, muttering as she ran through possibilities.
Suddenly...
"Wait, of course!"
...
The cultural and political epicenter of the Sing Song dynasty, the Imperial Capital of Bian'an, lay nestled across a boundless, fertile plain flanked by lush mountains and winding waterways.
Intersected by sweeping river systems, grand arched bridges, and bustling canal traffic.
Bian'an reigned supreme as a glamorous nexus of commerce where merchant guilds gathered in decadent opulence.
Its vibrant, pulsing prosperity had unfolded over centuries like an intoxicating masterpiece of living silk, mesmerizing every traveler who stepped within its borders.
Broad, pristine avenues formed an immaculate urban matrix across the earth, humming with the vibrant clamor and boundless vitality of a sprawling mortal civilization.
The imperial palace complex nestled at the dead center of Bian'an stood as the crowning pinnacle of architectural majesty.
Its gilded eaves and masterfully carved statues projected the supreme dignity and opulence of the Sing Song imperial lineage.
Gazing down from the celestial vault, the manicured gardens winding through the palace grounds unfolded with breathtaking beauty.
Jade lotus pools, sculpted pavilions, and exotic flora adorned the courtyards, resembling an earthly paradise conjured into reality.
"What a picturesque tapestry of peaceful prosperity~"
Looking down upon the bustling spectacle of Bian'an from the stratosphere, Calamitas offered a cold, venomous smile: "Which means its annihilation will be positively breathtaking."
With a casual flick of her wrist, she released the mountain-sized blob of pitch-black titan-pus straight out of her spatial ring into the void.
Sending it plummeting like an executioner's guillotine toward the gilded rooftops of the Sing Song palace.
Unlike its deceptive terminal velocity, the mass began expanding aggressively the moment it left the ring, billowing outward in all directions to ensure the entire metropolis would be devoured the second it touched down.
Down below, the vibrant crowds of Bian'an noticed almost simultaneously that the midday sky had suddenly plummeted into pitch darkness.
Engulfed beneath a sky-swallowing shadow, millions across the capital looked up in blank bewilderment, their eyes scanning the heavens.
What greeted them was an apocalyptic horror: a murky, blackened titan-mass as colossal as a suspended mountain range blotting out half the vault, descending with cataclysmic malice straight toward their city.
In a split-second, the suffocating malice radiating from the descending abyssal entity sent thousands of frail citizens into violent convulsions, collapsing unconscious onto the stone pavers.
A terrified few suffered instant cardiac and spiritual failure, dropping dead on the spot from sheer dread.
Panic exploded; citizens cast aside their wares and fled in chaotic, screaming stampedes, abandoning everything in a frantic bid for survival.
Yet they quickly discovered that regardless of where they bolted, the creeping blackness in the sky expanded faster, sealing off every avenue and alleyway beneath an inescapable dome of gloom.
Barring a handful of elite martial artists, the vast majority barely scrambled a few paces before collapsing to their knees, staring paralyzed in horror as the sky-wide turbidity dropped relentlessly upon them.
What took moments to describe occurred in the blink of an eye.
Having ballooned to a hundred miles in diameter, the pitch-black titan-pus crashed down, smothering the entirety of Bian'an beneath its suffocating mass.
BOOM!!!
The continental crust heaved violently.
Every trace of the city's ancient splendor and vibrant light was extinguished in an instant, swallowed whole into dim, suffocating silence.
Standing high in the stratosphere and witnessing the apocalyptic ruin of the Sing Song capital below, Calamitas wasted not a fraction of a second. She immediately fed the other nine Abyssal Dragon Eggs into the colossal egg-mass, initiating the ultimate culmination of the ghost-forging ritual,
Incinerate National Destiny, Devour the Masses, Forge the Ghost-God.
"Yin and Yang inverted, life and death transposed, dual categories of ten tribulations, heavenly blights and earthly scourges..."
As Calamitas's deep, eerie incantations echoed across the heavens, the sky spanning every city of the Sing Song empire began weeping a suffocating downpour of pitch-black rain.
Each needle-thin thread of this "rain" was, in reality, a microscopic spectral tentacle projected across space by the titan-pus through the refinement matrix.
Any living creature brushed by these black rain-tendrils, beast or mortal, froze instantly; with a sickening wet slough, their bodies collapsed into puddles of putrid, liquefied flesh, staining the earth with gore.
Simultaneously, their dazed, bewildered souls followed invisible karmic conduits, surging across hundreds, thousands, and tens of thousands of miles like spirits plunging into the River of the Dead, siphoned straight into the black titan-pus in the Sing Song capital.
As the black deluge poured unabated, the ten tribulations, Dread, Agony, Grief, Trauma, Mortis, Pestilence, Famine, Frailty, Savagery, and Ruin, erupted across the millions of miles comprising the Sing Song realm.
Unleashing torrential rivers of calamity miasma that coiled like invisible titan-serpents across the firmament, surging straight into the black titan-pus.
This vicious, malevolent downpour scourged not only living flesh, but eroded fortress battlements, grand pavilions, and humble residences into rotting husks, as though a millennium of weathering had decayed them in minutes.
Within hours, the entire Sing Song territory plummeted into a tomb-like stillness, punctuated only by fading death rattles as ten thousand miles of sovereign land turned into a necropolis of silence.
And hovering above the ten-thousand-mile expanse of the Sing Song empire, the ethereal, hazy manifestation of the dynasty's National Destiny was, in that very moment, completely swallowed and smothered beneath an endless tide of black pus.
ROAR!!
This colossal beast embodying Sing Song's national destiny fought with desperate fury against the black pus that symbolized all worldly malice, lashing out with claws and fangs, but it changed nothing.
In the end, it was ruthlessly and ravenously smothered and devoured whole by the black tide.
Several hours drifted past until twilight crept over the horizon.
The once bustling, glorious capital of Bian'an was completely digested into nothingness by the pitch-black titan-pus, leaving behind only a hundred-mile-wide abyss radiating chilling miasma.
Beyond it, across ten thousand miles, scores of cities were reduced to scorched expanses of rotting earth and collapsed architecture, utterly void of human life.
The Sing Song empire had fallen.
Stimulated by the torrential baptism of boundless vitality, the black titan-pus, churning with wild, metamorphosing spectral energy, had crystallized into a coarse, petrified black sphere spanning over a hundred miles across.
This colossal orb was the egg of the newborn calamity phantom.
"Finally... completed."
Floating a hundred miles away in the stratosphere and savoring the apocalyptic spectral qi radiating from the orb, Calamitas couldn't help but chuckle: "Not easy at all. Blending the national destiny of Sing Song with the souls of hundreds of millions of mortals... to finally gestate this world-ending horror."
Even as she spoke with a faint smile, an ear-piercing, deafening ghost screech erupted from deep within the black egg.
ROAR!!!
Though the shriek was as harrowing as hundreds of millions of voices wailing in chorus, Calamitas could distinctly hear an overwhelming current of affection and devotion buried within it.
An adoration directed solely toward Calamitas herself.
"Good. Very good."
Her expression was warmly gentle, though her grin split open to expose rows of razor-sharp fangs: "Come out, little darling."
As if answering the summons, the colossal egg shuddered violently, spiderwebbing with millions of glowing fractures with a series of sharp detonations.
CRACK! CRACK!
The shell burst open. Amidst the gushing spray of murky black blood, a colossal head lunged out from within the shattered egg.
No, it wasn't a human head.
It was the face of a ghost-god!
A mountain-sized visage, deathly pale, emaciated, half-flesh and half-bone, with tangled hair and eyes blazing with sinister luminescence, eerily bearing a striking resemblance to Lady Serenitas!
The instant it laid eyes on Calamitas, its maw unhinged to an impossible angle; throwing its skull back toward the sky, it let loose an agonizingly bloodcurdling screech:
"YAAARGHHH!!"
Unshackled by the eggshell, the discordant, piercing shrieks defied the speed of sound, blanketing a thousand-mile perimeter in a single heartbeat.
Every living organism within that radius, whether river aquatic life startled from the depths, birds roosting in remote cliffs, or the handful of martial masters concealed deep within subterranean bunkers.
Had their souls extinguished and their physical forms liquefied in an instant, reduced to boiling pools of grayish-black gore.
Right after, the colossal phantom with its tangled black hair rapidly crawled out from the shattered egg with sharp CRACKS, unveiling a pitch-black serpentine dragon body, five thousand meters thick and fifty thousand meters long, bristling with hundreds of demonic talons.
Fully revealed, its form was that of a colossal, ghost-faced Evil Dragon.
"YAAARGHHH!"
The titanic Dragon unleashed another harrowing, elongated screech. Whipping its ten-thousand-meter tangle of ghostly hair and lashing its tail, it surged into the sky with savage, cataclysmic momentum.
Simultaneously, with its emergence, the dimming sun beyond the distant horizon rapidly blurred and vanished.
In its stead, a blood moon seemingly forged from bone and gore hung suspended in the celestial void.
In a heartbeat, a ten-thousand-mile territory was swallowed by an ocean of eternal night.
Manifesting in the darkened firmament, the crimson orb continuously wept endless gore upon the vast earth below, pouring down a torrential deluge of blood.
Calamitas recognized this as the Evil Dragon's innate authority, the Stygian Nether-Domain.
Under the influence of this domain, the ten-thousand-mile territory centered on the ghost-faced Dragon would be locked in an eternal, sunless state of horrifying midnight.
Moreover, barring Calamitas as its sovereign master and existences of supreme cultivation, any fragile lifeform within this domain, mortal or beast, would instantly invert from life to death upon contact with the blood rain, their forms and souls corrupted, mutating into vicious spectral thralls.
Automatically bound as loyal denizens of the ghost-faced Dragon, they would answer its every command or serve as its cattle, consumed and devoured without offering the slightest resistance.
Within this Stygian Nether-Domain, the Evil Dragon could forge an inexhaustible, multi-layered mega-labyrinth of spectral disorientation in a single thought-moment.
Trapped within this maze, even ten or a hundred copies of Lady Serenitas would wander blindly like severed flies, permanently sealed away.
More terrifying still, at the Dragon's command, ghost fire capable of incinerating any tangible physical matter could manifest out of thin air anywhere within the domain.
A mere spark of this white-phosphorus-like balefire would burn through skin and bone until only an ethereal soul remained, transmuting victims into spectral thralls remotely enslaved to the Dragon's will without the slightest defiance.
Beyond these lethal authorities, the Dragon maintained a direct symbiotic resonance with all ambient yin energy across the world.
So long as a singular fragment of its form survived, it could ravenously drink in the realm's yin qi to regenerate its full body in a flash.
A sovereign law: as long as Yin persists, the Evil Dragon shall never perish.
Furthermore, the Dragon wielded cataclysmic kinetic force.
With a single violent coil of its serpentine bulk, it could uproot ten towering mountain ranges and fling them tens of thousands of miles across the horizon.
To cap it off, the sinister spectral eyes embedded in its skeletal visage could fire corrosive particle-beam strikes that blanketed a perimeter of tens of thousands of miles.
In a strict sense of pure destructive firepower, this Dragon vastly surpassed even its own architect, Calamitas.
Yet bound beneath the absolute spiritual dominion of Calamitas, the cataclysmic entity obediently descended to the earth, lowering its titan-visage in total submission.
"Very good."
Gazing at the mountain-range-sized behemoth coiled submissively before her, Calamitas smiled with cool satisfaction: "You qualify to be my oversized toy."
Indeed, in her eyes, this world-ending dragon forged from the concentrated malice of mortal existence was merely a gargantuan plaything.
Raw power was secondary; what mattered most... was entertainment.
"ROAR!"
Right at that moment, the Dragon abruptly twisted its neck, flaring its gargantuan eyes with malevolent light as it locked its gaze onto the southwest horizon.
"Oh?" Calamitas mused with mild surprise. "You detected twelve powerful signatures appearing in this realm? Forty-eight thousand miles away?"
"ROAR!" The Evil Dragon nodded before letting out another low roar.
"Hmm, their energy signatures roughly mirror Lady Serenitas."
Calamitas calculated: "Understood. This must be the 'response team' dispatched by the Godforge Guild from the Caelum-Arcanum World. In that case... go bring them all back to me. Their physical bodies don't matter, but their souls must be intact. Oh, and try to preserve their artifacts."
"ROAR!"
Acknowledging the command with a deafening bellow, the Evil Dragon rocketed into the sky. Sprawling across the firmament like a soaring mountain range, it cleaved through the clouds trailing storms of spectral wind and blood rain, hurtling southwest with earth-shaking momentum.
...
In the southwest, forty-eight thousand miles away...
HUMMM
High in the boundless sky amidst glowing evening clouds, an ethereal gateway unrolled out of thin air.
From within stepped a task force of twelve figures, their ornate monastic vestments shimmering with crystalline luminescence.
The moment the last operative crossed the threshold, the shimmering portal collapsed and dissolved into nonexistence.
Glancing indifferently at the vanished gateway, the lead cultivator turned to face the other eleven and spoke with bureaucratic detachment:
"Everyone. According to an incident report filed by Grade-C contractor Master Inanis, inside Sector Code [A2BC3754], registered as the Phase 26 [Deca-Dragon Sepulcher] Artifact Facility, a primary yin node has suffered catastrophic failure.
"Therefore, our mission parameters are to locate and restore the damaged node, while serving the Internal Affairs Bureau's official disciplinary reprimand upon this sector's Phase 8 rotating sentinel, Lady Serenitas."