A Million Evacuated
In the distance, some skyscrapers had escaped the first wave of power outages.
Their enormous commercial billboards still ran, and cameras high above the streets faithfully recorded the battlefield.
Many civilians who had escaped death and taken shelter at the edge of the ruins held up their phones.
After a brief outage, the network recovered enough to transmit a trickle of data.
Dozens of cameras streamed the writhing, swelling mass of disgusting flesh to the internet from different angles.
Xingfuli Apartment, Room 703.
Su Xiaoxiao sat at her computer, her hands blurring over the mechanical keyboard.
Messages in the fan club's main chat raced up her screen at hundreds per second.
"That pile of flesh is disgusting! Monsters can mutate a second time?"
"I can barely breathe just watching through a screen. Why is Lady Ziwei standing so close?"
"Was her deboning tactic a huge mistake? Now she's created something even harder to fight!"
"We're doomed. An ordinary Star Mark Demon Hunter would be killed instantly by that thing!"
Su Xiaoxiao's eyes reddened with anger as she read the criticism.
She hammered at her keyboard and shouted in the fan chat.
"You don't know a damn thing! You completely missed what Lady Ziwei was trying to do!"
"Lady Ziwei is bearing the filth of this disaster for us!"
"Think about how big that Deep-Space Giant Whale was!"
"If she hadn't cut it apart and stripped its bones in midair, its entire body would have hit the ground!"
"It wouldn't just have left a big crater! The entire West District would have suffered a magnitude-ten earthquake!"
A barrage of messages poured from Su Xiaoxiao's account, "Dark Dragon Pitch-Black Flame Envoy."
"She chose the bloodiest, dirtiest close-quarters work to keep civilians from being crushed to death!"
"She deliberately guided the falling chunks of flesh together, too!"
"She wanted to destroy every source of contamination in one place and keep the poison gas from spreading into residential areas!"
After that strained explanation and its wild elevation of Ziwei's motives, the fan chat fell silent for three seconds.
Then an unprecedented wave of excitement swept across the internet.
The fans suddenly understood.
"Of course! Dark Dragon's analysis is spot on!"
"We misjudged Lady Ziwei! That wasn't the work of a brutal butcher!"
"It was a sacred dissection technique designed to minimize the shock wave!"
"I'm crying. Lady Ziwei took on all that bloodshed herself just to spare this city!"
While tearful messages flooded the internet,
at the center of the West District ruins,
Ziwei held her dark-gold Great Scythe and stared coldly at the mutated flesh spewing poison gas.
"A second phase?"
She couldn't see the online comments.
But saving the world was nowhere near the top of her mind.
"Master! That lump of flesh is climbing back toward two thousand on the Magic Power Scale!"
Kabi flew frantically through the air, clutching his head.
"It's even corroded the sewage pipes beneath the ruins! That's disgusting!"
Ziwei's brows knotted, her revulsion plain on her face.
"Disgusting isn't the problem."
Her cool voice carried sharp irritation.
"The problem is that thing's covering all the other mid-tier Abyssal Core fragments on the ground."
When the Bone Colossus Owl and the Deep-Space Giant Whale had appeared, they had killed plenty of low- and mid-tier Monster underlings in the process.
E-rank and F-rank Abyssal Core fragments littered the ground.
"They're worth at least a few thousand altogether. How am I supposed to collect my loot with that thing sprawled on top of them?"
Kabi's little hands froze in midair.
"You... You're staring at a terrifying source of poisonous calamity, and all you can think about is how it's keeping you from picking up a few thousand bucks' worth of scraps?"
Such pure greed for money.
Even a companion spirit of the Will of the World couldn't understand her fixation.
"We're running out of time. Maintaining the Barrier takes enormous mental effort."
Ziwei ignored Kabi's jab.
"The two girls can't hold on much longer. I'll finish this in one strike."
She gripped the long dark-gold shaft with both hands.
Then she poured every last bit of Purple-Gold Magic Power she had into the dark-gold Great Scythe.
The flood of magic power passed the threshold of fifteen hundred on the scale.
A blinding purple-gold flare burst from the enormous blade.
It shone brighter than the midday sun.
Ziwei lightly tapped the ground with her toes.
Breaking free of gravity, she rose straight into the air.
She looked down at the roaring flesh below, parted her red lips, and spoke an outrageously dramatic yet devastating incantation.
"When moonlight and gold shine as one, I who sit upon the throne grant you your final harvest!"
"Gold—Grave!"
"Golden Cemetery!"
Holding the scythe in both hands, she made no flourish.
She swung it in a simple horizontal slash through the air.
Purple-gold energy erupted from the tip of the Great Scythe.
There was no violent explosion, no deafening roar of divine light.
Only a curtain of pure purple-gold light fanned out and swept downward.
The slash burned the entire sky above the West District red as dusk.
It wasn't the bloody red of a Monster.
It was the radiant twilight of gold mingled with violet clouds.
The purple light washed over everything.
In an instant, the writhing mountain of mutated flesh below, along with the poison-warped air around it, was vaporized.
Not a scrap of char or a trace of ash remained.
Only glittering motes, like fragments of stars, drifted slowly down on the evening breeze.
Everything else was gone.
Except for the dense high-tier Abyssal Cores and the mid- and low-tier fragments, which could not be destroyed so easily.
They remained exactly where they had been.
Where the flesh had stood, a perfectly level circular pit a kilometer across had appeared.
It was a full five meters deep.
Even the underground water pipes and foundation rebar had been sliced as smooth as mirrors.
Every survivor in the Star Sea Chamber,
including the Scarface Captain, who had just regained consciousness, and the special-operations agents sitting amid the surrounding ruins,
as well as countless fervent fans watching from the other side of their screens,
looked up.
Bathed in that dazzling, sacred light, they shed tears of awe and reverence.
"Th-this is magic...!"
The Scarface Captain dropped the Ship-Splitting Blade in his hand.
The tough man fell to both knees on the charred, ruined asphalt.
Tears mixed with dirt streamed down his cheeks.
"Our magic power is a firefly beside the sun compared to hers."
"So when she cut that whale into chunks, she really was trying to reduce the casualties in this city."
Countless agents covered their faces and sobbed beneath the curtain of light.
The entire city was moved by the Magical Girl's mercy and greatness.
But
Ziwei, hovering in the air, had no time for the weeping adults below.
"Just in time. The glow hasn't faded yet."
Ziwei took control of the pulling force left by Golden Cemetery.
She reached out with her left hand and made a quick grab at empty air.
That last strike had not only vaporized the flesh; it had cleared the ruins from the ground as well.
Now every scattered Abyssal Core and crystal lay exposed in plain sight.
"Come."
The powerful pull became a precise whirlwind.
Every valuable Abyssal Core, every glittering crystal fragment, and even several rare bones bearing Monster traits
were quietly swept skyward under the glow of Golden Cemetery.
Without missing a single piece, she stuffed them all into the Storage Magic Device at her waist.
"Release the Barrier. Mint, Cherry, activate return retrieval."
Ziwei pressed her communication Beacon and gave her final order.
Once she had collected the last scrap on the ground worth so much as a copper coin,
she wasted no more time.
Drawn by the Beacon's magic circle, her body became a brilliant streak of purple-gold light and shot straight into the sky.
She left the kneeling agents behind and vanished into the vast night.
All that remained in the ruins was a smooth pit five meters deep, empty of everything worth taking.
Before the livestream, countless fans were still caught up in the miracle.
Where did my cool, invincible Lady Ziwei go?
Suddenly, a viewer near the top of the chat posted a comment.
"Wait... where did all those glowing rare drops at the bottom of the pit go?"
"Holy shit, did Lady Ziwei scoop them all up on her way out?!"