The Million-Person Evacuation

In the distance, the skyscrapers that had escaped the first wave of power outages still stood lit.

Their enormous commercial billboards were still running, and cameras mounted high above faithfully recorded the battlefield.

Many civilians who had barely escaped death huddled at the edge of the ruins, holding up their phones.

After a brief outage, the network had finally recovered enough to transmit basic data.

Dozens of cameras streamed the revolting mass of flesh, writhing and swelling with the power to destroy everything around it, from different angles.

Happiness Lane Apartments, Room 703.

Su Xiaoxiao sat at her computer, her hands blurring over the mechanical keyboard.

On her screen, messages in the fan club's main group were racing by at hundreds per second.

"That mass of flesh is disgusting! Monsters can mutate a second time?"

"I can feel myself suffocating through the screen. Why is Lady Ziwei so close to it?"

"Wasn't that deboning tactic a huge mistake? Now she's created an even harder monster to deal with!"

"We're done for! That thing would kill an ordinary Star Mark-level demon hunter in an instant!"

Su Xiaoxiao read the accusations, her eyes reddening with anger.

She hammered at her keyboard and shouted in the fan group.

"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 calamity for us!"

"Think about how huge that Deep-Space Giant Whale was!"

"If she hadn't dismembered and deboned it in midair, and its whole body had hit the ground—"

"It wouldn't have just left a giant crater! The entire West District would have suffered a magnitude-ten earthquake!"

Su Xiaoxiao's main account, "Dark Dragon Pitch-Black Flame Envoy," fired off message after message.

"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 so the poison gas wouldn't spread into residential areas!"

After that desperate explanation, laden with extravagant praise, the fan group fell silent for three seconds.

Then an unprecedented frenzy swept across the internet.

The fans finally understood.

"That's it! Dark Dragon's analysis is spot-on!"

"We misjudged Lady Ziwei! She wasn't being a brutal butcher at all!"

"It was a sacred dissection technique to minimize the physical shock wave!"

"Waaah, Lady Ziwei really... I'm crying! She took all that bloodshed upon 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 mass of flesh spewing poison gas.

"A second phase?"

She couldn't see the online comments.

But saving the world was far from what was on her mind.

"Master! That lump of meat's Magic Power Scale is climbing back toward two thousand!"

Kabi darted around in midair, clutching her head in panic.

"It's even corroded and melted the sewage pipes under the ruins! It's so gross!"

Ziwei's brows knotted, her disgust plain to see.

"Gross isn't the point."

Her cool voice carried a sharp edge of irritation.

"The point is, that thing is covering all the other mid-tier Abyssal Core fragments scattered on the ground."

When the Bone Colossus Owl and Deep-Space Giant Whale had appeared, they had crushed plenty of low- and mid-tier attendant monsters in the process.

The ground was littered with E- and F-rank Abyssal Core fragments.

"Together, those are worth a fair bit. How am I supposed to collect my loot with that thing sprawled over 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 stopping you from picking up a few tens of thousands' worth of scraps?"

What single-minded greed.

Even a companion spirit of the Will of the World couldn't understand that obsession.

"We're running out of time. Maintaining the Barrier takes a great deal of mental energy."

Ziwei ignored Kabi's jab.

"The two girls can't hold out much longer. I'll finish this in one go."

She gripped the dark-gold haft with both hands.

Then she poured every last bit of Purple-Gold Magic Power within her into the dark-gold Great Scythe.

The immense surge of power passed the threshold of fifteen hundred units on the Magic Power Scale.

The enormous blade blazed with a searing purple-gold flare.

It shone brighter than the midday sun.

Ziwei lightly tapped the ground with her toes.

Her body broke free of gravity and rose into the air.

Looking down at the roaring mass below, she parted her red lips and spoke an outrageously theatrical incantation of unmatched power.

"When moonlight and gold shine as one, I who sit upon the throne grant you a final harvest!"

"Gold—Grave!"

"Golden Cemetery!"

She held the scythe in both hands, her movement utterly plain.

Suspended in midair, she swung it in a level horizontal slash.

Purple-gold energy erupted from the tip of the Great Scythe.

There was no violent explosion, no deafening roar of divine light.

Only a veil of pure purple-gold light swept downward in a widening fan.

The entire sky over the West District burned red like dusk under that single slash.

It was not the bloody glow of a monster.

It was the brilliant twilight of gold woven with violet clouds.

Violet light swept through.

In an instant, the writhing mountain of mutated flesh and the poisoned air around it

were vaporized without a trace.

No char remained. Not even ash.

Only glittering motes like fragments of stars drifted slowly down on the evening breeze.

Everything else had vanished.

Everything except the high-grade Abyssal Cores and low- to mid-grade fragments, too dense to destroy so easily.

They remained where they were, completely intact.

In their place was a perfectly level, circular crater a kilometer across.

It was a full five meters deep.

Even the underground water pipes and foundation rebar had been sliced as smooth as mirrors.

Every survivor inside the Star Sea Chamber watched.

So did Scarface Captain, who had just regained consciousness, and the special-operations agents slumped amid the surrounding ruins.

So did the countless fervent fans watching from the other side of their screens.

Everyone looked up.

In that dazzling, sacred light, tears of awe and reverence streamed down their faces.

"This... this is magic...!"

Scarface Captain let the ship-cutting blade in his hand fall.

The hardened man dropped to both knees on the charred, ruined asphalt.

Tears mixed with dirt ran down his cheeks.

"Our magic power is a firefly beside the sun compared to hers."

"So she really did cut that whale into pieces to reduce the casualties in this city."

Countless agents covered their faces and wept beneath the veil of light.

The entire city was moved by the Magical Girl's mercy and greatness.

But

Ziwei, still in midair, had no time for the weeping adults below.

"Just in time. The light hasn't faded yet."

Ziwei controlled the residual pulling force of Golden Cemetery's magic.

She reached out with her left hand and made a quick grab at empty air.

Her last attack had not only vaporized the flesh; it had cleared the ruins from the ground as well.

Now every scattered Abyssal Core and core crystal lay in plain sight.

"Come."

The powerful pull became a precise whirlwind.

Every valuable Abyssal Core, every glittering crystal fragment, and even a few rare bones bearing monster traits

They were all quietly swept into the air amid Golden Cemetery's magical glow.

Not a single piece escaped the Storage Magic Device at her waist.

"Barrier down. Mint, Cherry, activate the return-pull function."

Ziwei pressed her communications beacon and gave her final order.

Once she had collected the last scrap on the ground worth a copper coin,

she wasted no more time.

Drawn by the beacon's magic array, her body became a brilliant streak of purple-gold light and shot straight into the sky.

She left the agents kneeling in reverence behind and vanished into the depths of the night.

All that remained in the ruins was a smooth, empty crater five meters deep. Not a scrap had been left behind.

In front of the livestream, countless fans were still lost in the wonder of the miracle.

Where had my aloof, invincible Lady Ziwei gone?

Suddenly, a viewer at the front of the chat posted a comment.

"Wait... where are all those glowing rare drops at the bottom of the crater?"

"Holy shit, did Lady Ziwei scoop them all up on her way out?!"