Calamity

Biodata

Power Progression

Disasters have both numerical levels and a separate path of advancement through blessings, faction-building, and allegiance 20. Later accounts distinguish this follower hierarchy from growth through a Calamity's own Origin, the absorption of power throughout the universe, and sacrifices of living beings 600 670.

• True Calamities stand behind the Crowned Ones as the ultimate rulers, whether tangible or formless. The explanation does not establish that every disaster can eventually become one 20.
• Wind-Thunder Cantor is a documented Blessed One, formed from disaster remains recast with level-six liquid shaping metal. It later prays to Tempest Fiend for authority, but no advancement to Priest is confirmed during that encounter. Subsequent appearances identify Wind-Thunder as the Wind and Thunder Lord and then the Wind and Thunder King; much later, it is recognized for comprehending Origin Power at a young age 17 18 20 24 80 175 629.
• Human participation is possible: Little Whale offers to make Ye Buyu a Blessed One of Whale of Wailing. She refuses 30.
• Combat benchmark: according to Little Whale, even the lowest-level Blessed One requires fourth-tier Awakened strength for an opponent to stand a chance 20.
• Man-Made Calamities: Little Whale explains that they are at their peak when born, unlike conceptual Calamities that develop from smaller manifestations of a disaster. Their consciousness originates in human obsessions 224.
• Origin-based growth: high-level Calamities can grow by comprehending their Origins and absorbing power drifting through the universe over long periods. Sacrificing living beings offers a faster alternative, particularly for those unable to comprehend their Origins 600 670.
• Competition within a path: killing another being on the same path can enable further growth. Changes in the strongest representative of a path can also affect other Calamities following it, as illustrated by speculation about the sudden strengthening of frost-path Calamities 612.

Nature and Classification

Broad and Specific Usage

• Broad usage: “Calamity” describes numerous dangerous anomalies, including mutated animals, forest entities, humanoid hordes, and apparently mechanical creatures 10 13 35.
• Specific usage: Little Whale distinguishes ordinary disasters and their evolved followers from the true Calamities ruling behind them 20.
• Human Disaster / Man-Made Calamity: identifies disasters caused by humans. Streetlamp and Void Order are explicit examples. Later explanations distinguish Man-Made Calamities more precisely by their human-derived consciousness and birth from obsessions 1 5 17 224.
• Natural Disaster: the opening account uses this designation for exceptionally dangerous anomalies 1.
• Contaminated objects and transformed people: not every creature broadly called a Calamity is an independently born conceptual ruler. Ye Buyu explicitly distinguishes objects mutated by Calamity Power from Calamities transformed from humans when selecting subjects for restoration experiments 343.
• Uncertain classifications: Madness questions whether she should count as natural or man-made, having formed from the crystallized madness of the Calamities—or deities—who died in an ancient war 647.

Origins and Cosmological Scope

Calamities possess their own consciousnesses and embody particular disasters. Their initial manifestation may be small, but human interference or their own development can eventually turn them into full Calamities. Even when human activity contributes to their emergence, the consciousness of such a Calamity is not necessarily derived from humans. Man-Made Calamities, by contrast, arise from human obsessions and inherit consciousness from humans 224.

The border abyss is therefore not their ultimate cosmological point of origin. Ye Buyu learns that the world is a vast interstellar universe in which the destruction and assimilation of planets has generated further Calamities and regions such as the Third Zone. Little Whale emphatically corrects her initial assumption that merely “most” planets have been destroyed to “all,” in its explanation of the world's condition 224.

• Destroyed worlds: Little Whale states that behind every large-scale Calamity lies a world that has already been destroyed 224.
• Planetary consciousness: a planet's consciousness can be affected and become a Calamity, while the suffering created by human actions can produce a Man-Made Calamity. Both willing perpetrators and oppressed sacrificial victims can contribute to new Calamities 540.
• The Three Calamities: Earthshaker identifies earth, water, and wind as the domains of the first Calamities born in the universe. They were closely connected to humanity, but their essential nature had little to do with humans 175.
• Deliberate creation: Kou Ying's variant of Plan 003 provides the remnant souls with a means of becoming a Man-Made Calamity. Their collective desire for revenge takes form as Those Without a Home 135 136.
• Mixed origins: Ritual Flame arises from the unwilling consciousness of a sacrificed planet together with the unwillingness of its sacrificial victims 641.
• Preservation rather than destruction: History-Eater is deliberately anticipated as a means of preserving civilization. Survivors gather historical records so that a future Calamity can consume them, remember their contents, and carry their legacy forward 642 745.

Behavior

The living world's common understanding is that Calamities disregard reason, rules, and morality, destroying indiscriminately. Streetlamp illustrates the danger: although it targets exploitative companies, its attack also kills innocent bystanders 1.

Later encounters show that this reputation does not mean every Calamity lacks intelligence. A giant wooden figure learns to block Ye Buyu's bullets with another creature, while the Wind-Thunder Cantor withdraws and decides to grow stronger before confronting Great Xia's examinees again 28 36.

• Conflict among disasters: Calamities fight and devour one another; higher-level creatures may regard lower-level ones as insignificant 16 28 36.
• Hostility toward humans: during the Points Competition, examinees note that Calamities normally prioritize killing humans even when they also fight among themselves 36.
• Faction rivalry: Rift Lord and Tsunami Lord belong to different Calamities and are expected to be enemies. Their cooperation therefore attracts the Social Security Bureau's attention 28.
• Emotion and personal judgment: Wind and Thunder King rejects allegiance based solely on being a Calamity. Disgusted by other Calamities' response to Earthshaker's death, it chooses cooperation with the Present World because it considers that course right 229.
• No unified civilization: Wind and Thunder King characterizes the Calamities as divided remnants and poisons of ruined civilizations rather than a civilization with a shared future. This is its assessment of their society, not proof that cooperation between individual Calamities is impossible 229.
• Pragmatism and fear: some Calamities avoid obviously dangerous opponents, flee conflicts between stronger entities, surrender, or negotiate. Passing Calamities do not all attack Hold Up the Heavens' disguised travelers; some keep their distance or ignore them 501 505 530 567.
• Individual dignity: a frost-path Calamity facing Wan Lan chooses attempted self-destruction over what she believes will be enslavement 613.
• Unreliable cooperation: Wan Lan exploits the poor coordination of five level-thirteen Calamities, whose defensive abilities interfere with one another during battle 618.

Identity, Instinct, and Coexistence

Becoming a Calamity can distort or endanger an individual's original identity. Mu Bingge's examination of Abyssal Erosion's succession reveals a predecessor who accepted that fate to shelter survivors, despite the later Calamity behaving as an invader. This leads Mu Bingge to question whether transformation strips away the original will; the account presents this as a troubling question rather than a universal rule 244. Li Yong's surviving memories likewise show him gradually becoming a Calamity under Calamity Power, forgetting his distant past, and distorting his own name 491.

Other Calamities retain or develop desires opposed to their destructive nature. Darkness describes the Calamities born during the Great Decline as inherently contradictory: they embody disasters yet may long for the opposite outcome. Madness explicitly treats refusal to follow her destructive mission as resistance to instinct and an affirmation of her own existence 632 648.

• Inherited guilt: several ancient Calamities believe that beings born from extinction can never be accepted by living beings. Their names, powers, and apparent missions urge disaster, while their memories of suffering and desire to exist pull them in another direction 662.
• Human acceptance: after humans save them in the struggle against Sinful Karma, the injured Calamities are deeply moved. Lou Guanshan argues that the forces behind their births can have protective as well as destructive sides 662.
• Practical coexistence: Wind-Thunder states that multiple Calamities coexist with people in its homeland and that some are popular. End of the World personnel also openly accept friendship with Calamities while distinguishing friendly visitors from attackers 625 629.
• An unresolved material conflict: living beings obtain advancement materials by killing Calamities, while sacrificing living beings is the fastest route to power for many Calamities. Thought-Madness acknowledges that coexistence has been achieved locally but warns that this underlying contradiction remains 600 670.
• Opposition to forced conversion: Sinful Karma seeks to turn everyone into Calamities because it regards coexistence as impossible. The Calamities who oppose it instead gamble on a future outside the repeating cycle of suffering 670.

Zone Classification

Forms and Perception

• Disguised nature: most Calamities conceal what they really are. Their remains reveal clues that Awakened can use to identify their original nature and reconstruct an area's history 14.
• Ye Buyu's perception: she can see through outward appearances to aspects of their underlying nature, sometimes mistaking a dangerous anomaly for an ordinary object 4 6.
• Forest Monster: described by her teacher as an entity that imitates familiar people, but seen by Ye Buyu as an obvious tree 10.
• Forest animals: Ye Buyu recognizes a rabbit and squirrel before their remains provide identifying clues to Su Wuwei 13 14.
• Zombie horde: other examinees see zombies; Ye Buyu sees wooden figures 35 36.
• Apparent magical beast: an enormous sleeping creature is eventually identified as an abandoned interstellar warship. Ye Buyu initially sees a mountain with protruding metal 13 20.
• Aura-erasing camouflage: Perception Controller can divide, proliferate, and attach itself to objects ranging from rice grains to mechanical devices. Once attached, it can erase its Calamity Aura and appear ordinary 208.
• Deliberate human disguise: Ye Buyu suppresses her ordinary power and mobilizes the Calamity Power inside her, becoming indistinguishable from a Calamity to Wan Lan's senses. Hold Up the Heavens uses Calamity identities in establishing Evergreen 348 351.
• Chosen nonhuman forms: later-generation Streetlamp and Trickery explain that they can assume human forms but prefer object forms because these better support pursuit of their Origins and contact with people seeking change 671.

Abilities and Effects

Calamity Aura and Corruption

• Calamity aura can remain on weapons and harvested materials, exposing users and carriers to corruption 32 47.
• Qiu Zhi checks exposed testers for dizziness, nausea, anxiety, irritability, restlessness, and unstable power 33.
• Prolonged exposure during combat can threaten mental stability; the Points Competition's safeguards teleport participants out if they lose control 36.
• Healing can clear accumulated aura. Ye Buyu removes it while restoring Mu Bingge's depleted energy 37.
• Little Whale protects Ye Buyu from most aura and mental intrusion, though it identifies level-ten Calamities as a potential exception 9 33.
• Corruption can affect souls as well as bodies. Souls killed in the Third Zone can become unable to return because of Calamity Aura contamination; the River of Forgetfulness's expanding coverage later awakens such souls in the Abyss 133.
• Humans can possess Calamity Power without all exercising the same degree of control. Donald's use of it produces a violent transformation, while other competitors manifest tree, water, and decay-related Calamity powers 156 157.
• The power of Pollution corrodes an opponent's power through contact. Its followers deliberately conceal it and experiment on abducted ordinary people, turning them into Calamities 284.

Persistence and Reconstruction

• Calamities are difficult to destroy completely. Tempest Fiend's scattered power survives long after its defeat 17 28.
• Its Thunder Pool and Wind Core absorb nearby disasters, recovering power through consumption 16 17.
• Tempest Fiend's surviving forces spend two centuries attempting its resurrection. Present World precautions and competition among Calamities repeatedly prevent success 28.
• The Calamities in the Land of Exile repeatedly revive under Pollution's power. Pollution cannot initially eradicate them with its own power, although human artillery succeeds in killing some and removing their ability to revive 291.
• Abyssal Erosion has successive bearers. Memories suggest an inheritance connecting multiple destroyed worlds and preserving fragments of earlier bearers' experiences 244.
• Streetlamp and Trickery possess a distinct form of reproduction: the end of a previous generation's soul gives rise to a new individual, who experiences a new life in a new era. Their later incarnations distinguish themselves from the first-generation beings known to Hold Up the Heavens 671.

Psychic and Environmental Attacks

• Whale of Wailing spreads overwhelming grief through souls in the River of Forgetfulness, destabilizing the energy supply that sustains the Sun 2.
• The psychic Calamity beneath Corrosion Swamp attacks Ye Buyu through an apparent nightmare. She reports that one of its eyes alone exceeds ten meters across 49.
• Wind-Thunder Cantor draws on Tempest Fiend's authority to summon a Lightning Scepter and launch a massive lightning attack 24.
• Powerful Calamities can project their presence remotely. The confrontation outside Dead Island gathers projections of almost every known level-ten Calamity, together with an unfamiliar being suspected to be level eleven 127.
• Cycle restarts encounters, leaving opponents with missing energy and a sense of déjà vu. Stagnation arrests movements and attacks while allowing those caught to remain conscious. Together, they merge their Origin Worlds to restrain their opponents 572 573.
• Delusion opens gateways that bring Calamities into a fortified human settlement, enabling an invasion from multiple directions 567.

Origin and Sacrifice

A Calamity's Origin is the source of its power. Advanced abilities can express the concept embodied by the individual rather than merely a physical attack element 359 573.

• Origin Worlds: Stagnation and Cycle manifest their respective wishes to preserve a perfect moment and restore lost happiness through repetition, combining those powers into a shared confinement 573.
• Sacrificial growth: Calamities sacrifice souls and living populations to strengthen themselves. During the Great Decline, sacrifices range from cities and countries to entire continents and planets 504 641.
• Devouring rivals: Calamities also consume other Calamities for power. Factions once attempted to conquer the Ancient Castle in the belief that devouring the being inside would elevate them further 400.
• Limits imposed by resistance: Madness explains that conflict between her thoughts, mission, and Origin made her weak despite her underlying power 647.
• Concepts need not determine conduct: Wind-Thunder declares that it pursues no Obsession and follows its heart, while Madness rejects the claim that embodying madness obliges her to destroy the world 629 648.

Remains and Materials

• Identification: remains can reveal a Calamity's underlying nature after death 14.
• Retained abilities: materials surrendered by the Thunder Monster and Wind Scythe preserve wind and lightning properties that surprise Su Wuwei 15.
• Equipment manufacture: Qiu Zhi experiments with retaining calamity aura to increase weapon power; removing it improves safety but can reduce strength 32 33.
• Advancement materials: Ye Buyu uses a level-four wind-and-lightning remnant while preparing to advance. Little Whale suppresses its corrosive effects 22.
• Corrupt Corpse Crocodile tears: crystals used to amplify weapon and equipment attributes. Their lingering aura must be cleared when collecting multiple specimens 47.
• Nonlethal extraction: a crocodile forced to pay Ye Buyu's healing cost produces a larger tear than those previously collected through killing. Hao Liang questions whether this method yields better materials 48.
• Soul-path advancement: purified Calamity materials can support Rank Advancement for practitioners of Soul's New Path, whose renewable Soul Power differs from the Origin consumed by Soul Self-Destruction 156.
• Cores: a Calamity Master's core is valuable enough that a King-level Calamity attempts to seize one to obtain Calamity Master power 298.
• Postmortem transformation: defeated Calamities can dissolve into materials or leave concentrated remnants. A level-thirteen Calamity killed by Note becomes a crystal, while Lou Guanshan's defeated opponents slowly dissolve into materials 568 618.
• Captive farming: during the Peak Epoch, profiteers raise Calamities, feed living beings to them, and slaughter them for valuable materials. War states that almost all high-level Calamity materials circulating on the market came through this system 670.
• Escalation of exploitation: the practice begins with death-row prisoners, expands to other prisoners, and eventually includes innocent people framed to supply the industry. The resulting network of shared interests helps prevent intervention 744 745.

Countermeasures

Containment and Monitoring

• The military and Social Security Bureau concentrate prevention and containment efforts in Red-Label zones 5.
• Bureau headquarters regularly monitors Lord-class movements 28.
• After Streetlamp's attack, the Doomsday Tower directs the Urban Construction Bureau to handle the scene and the Social Security Bureau to retrieve the victims' souls 1.
• Soul Scanners and Soul Shields are activated to prevent Perception Controller's divided bodies from infiltrating a battleship under ordinary-object disguises 208.
• The Present World monitors Evergreen rather than immediately accepting its claims, while the Void Cultists likewise debate whether the new Calamity faction is a trap 351.

Ye Buyu's Healing

• Ordinary healing transfers energy and can restore either humans or Calamities. Ye Buyu's ability instead attempts to restore Calamities to their original forms, removing some of their Calamity power 11.
• Her Compulsory Cost forces healed Calamities to surrender payment: Forest Monster severs an arm, while Shadow Wall gives up gel-like material 10.
• Payment can take the form of an action rather than an item. She makes Wind-Thunder Cantor throw her out of its storm and compels a giant wooden figure to attack surrounding Calamities 17 18 36.
• Intelligent targets can adapt: the giant figure intercepts a subsequent healing bullet with a smaller creature 36.
• Restoration of transformed humans requires different testing from the treatment of contaminated objects. Seeking to restore Kou Ying and Su Wuwei, Ye Buyu experiments on human-derived Calamities and claims after seventeen or eighteen attempts to have found a method of restoring human bodies 343.
• Later, members of the Lishu survivors witness her group turn several children already tainted with Calamity Power back into humans, demonstrating restoration beyond simple removal of aura from equipment 504.
• Her healing can operate across a large battlefield: marked Calamities lose power while ordinary people regain vitality, allowing her companions to locate and finish surviving enemies 534.

Noncombat Resolution

• Ye Buyu drives away Headless Corpse by guiding Mu Bingge to throw its head through a basketball hoop. Mu Bingge notes that they had previously killed it outright rather than making it retreat 8.
• Wind and Thunder King offers intelligence, covert target selection, and attacks on Calamity leaders in exchange for secrecy. Wan Lan tests its intentions before joining it in operations in the Third Zone 229 231.
• Wind-Thunder later secures Plague's agreement to cooperate through discussion of coexistence and an invitation to visit its homeland 629.
• End of the World personnel offer friendship to Calamities at Scavengers Outposts while retaliating against ambushes and other hostile acts, applying a distinction between conduct and species 625 626.

Armed and Soul-Based Resistance

• Soul Creation: the completed learnable pathway gives previously powerless souls a means of fighting. At Dead Island, defense troops armed with Soul Creations drive back Calamities in close combat 127 129.
• Soul Self-Destruction: Ye Buyu proposes that its commotion can expose hidden Calamities and warn other people, denying attackers the secrecy of an unnoticed killing 124.
• Fortress weaponry: a fortified settlement's weapons kill a level-eleven Calamity, showing that sufficiently advanced equipment can overcome threats that expect ordinary human defenses to be helpless 567.
• Psychic destruction: Note traps a level-thirteen Calamity in a dream and destroys its Mindscape, killing it before the surrounding invaders can intervene 568.
• Divine Miracles: the Time crystal is crucial to Hold Up the Heavens' defeat of the level-thirteen Dead Skeleton. Their actions in the Ancient Castle's past also inflict wounds on it in the present 432 435 487.

Notable Calamities and Factions

Impact on the Apocalypse

• Calamities also serve as exploration and assessment targets: Awakened gather their remains to investigate the apocalypse, while the Points Competition awards points for killing them and exchanging collected materials 14 16 34.
• Their destruction of civilizations produces a reinforcing cycle: conquered worlds generate further Calamities, survivors may transform to resist or survive, and invaders use remaining populations as sacrifices or livestock 224 504 540.
• Not all Calamities support the destruction of the Present World. Wind-Thunder, Those Without a Home, Little White, and the ancient opponents of Sinful Karma provide examples of Calamities fighting beside living beings 229 300 340 648.

Historical Destruction and Manufactured Calamities

The Peak Epoch demonstrates that Calamities' proliferation cannot be attributed solely to spontaneous disaster. At its height, the alliance centered on Floating City had reduced them to a scattered minority. Nevertheless, the demand for advancement materials encouraged living beings to create and farm Calamities rather than eradicate them 575 670.

The industry began by feeding prisoners to Calamities and expanded into the persecution of innocents. Its profits bound much of society to the practice, while confidence in technology and military strength encouraged the belief that any resulting disaster could be controlled. Later accounts identify this exploitation as part of the roots of the Peak Epoch's collapse 670 744 745.

Sinful Karma's destruction of the central trading system precipitated widespread economic collapse and the Great Decline. The resulting wars, starvation, sacrifices, ruined governments, and psychological suffering gave rise to further Calamities, including Plague, Withering, Monarch, Ritual Flame, and others embodying the age's disasters 629 641 745.

Conquest, Assimilation, and Cultural Loss

Calamity conquest can extend beyond physical annihilation into the destruction of a civilization's memory. In Lishu, invaders keep humans as sacrificial livestock while encouraging them to accept Calamity Power. Improved living conditions and promises of power gradually lead some inhabitants to embrace transformation, while repeated repression erodes resistance, writing, and historical knowledge 504.

Other civilizations actively collaborate for personal gain. The elves assist in Cangyuan's destruction so that they can become Calamities, using slaves and the resources of satellite planets to acquire power more quickly than through ordinary Awakened advancement 535 536.

Resistance can likewise produce Calamities. Lishu's defenders transform to attack the invaders and protect the surviving children, while the dying victims of Fallen Pleasure choose to leave their collective hopes in a new orange Streetlamp. These cases establish that transformation may preserve a commitment to civilization rather than necessarily signify voluntary allegiance to its destroyers 504 559.