The lead cultivator continued:
"Furthermore, pursuant to Internal Affairs regulations, the full invoice of Spirit Vouchers incurred during this repair operation, irrespective of the final sum, shall be billed directly and exclusively to the project sentinel, Lady Serenitas..."
Before the words could clear his throat, an apocalyptic, indescribably vile wave of boundless evil qi erupted out of nowhere, smothering the entire sector of the sky and drowning all twelve cultivators beneath its suffocating weight.
"What the hell is this?!"
The lead cultivator and his eleven subordinates froze dead in their tracks.
Whipping their heads up in sheer disbelief, they stared toward the farthest reaches of the horizon where the titanic wave of malice was flooding from.
There, a cataclysmic, suffocating tide of pitch-black spectral winds tore through the void, surging straight toward their position.
Dripping with pure malice.
From within that ocean-like tidal wave of howling gale echoed layered, soul-rending cackles and sinister whispers:
"Kekekekekeke..."
"Kill, kill, slaughter them all..."
"Hehehehe..."
"Krak-krak-krak..."
As if an apex Ghost Sovereign had clawed its way out from the Nether Stygian depths, leading hundreds of millions of demonic spawn back into the mortal realm to drown all creation in blood.
A spectacle of pure, bone-chilling horror.
Simultaneously, as the apocalyptic gale crested, the twelve cultivators realized in stunned shock that the sunset ten thousand miles to the west had abruptly blinked out of existence.
The dim twilight vanished, plunging the world without warning into pitch-black, eternal midnight.
"What kind of abomination is this?! How could it be... so impossibly ferocious?!" the squad leader gasped in shock and fury.
"Th-this aura..."
Beside him, an elder cultivator with a flowing beard stammered in terror: "It has completely eclipsed the Essence Refining realm! How could an entity of this caliber emerge in a lower realm?!"
"It's bordering on the Primordial Soul echelon,"
a bald cultivator on the right observed grimly. "Though it's not quite there yet."
"Shut up!"
The squad leader snapped sharply. "Regardless of whether this monstrosity has hit the Primordial Soul rank, it's blatantly clear we can't take it head-on.
Our priority is to fire off a Realm-Striding Missive to file an emergency report, wait for the extraction gate to open, and bug out at maximum speed.
Until then, every man for himself. Run!"
"So... we just run? We're not even going to test the waters?" the bald cultivator asked.
"Test your grandmother's ashes!"
The leader glared back, barking in rage: "You make a few hundred Spirit Vouchers a month, why the hell are you risking your life?!"
With that, he whipped out a dark azure Sword Pellet, snapping his fingers through incantation mudras as he chanted:
"Celestial Tempering of Dark Smelt, unfurl the sphere, forge the blade; phantom blade into shroud, bind and encase my form."
HUMMM!
In an instant, the hazy Sword Pellet transformed into a meter-long beam of dark, bone-chilling sword qi. Resonating with a violent hum, it fused seamlessly with the lead cultivator.
Immediately after, his physical form dematerialized into an elusive streak of flickering light, crossing a hundred miles in the blink of an eye and vanishing into the pitch-black night sky.
Seeing this, the other eleven cultivators decisively produced Sword Pellets of various hues, orange, purple, emerald, umber, cerulean, silver, gold, and hastily formed incantation mudras, chanting in unison:
"Dragonscale Form II / Violet Lightning Form III / Jade Moon Form IX... Unfurl the pellet, forge the blade; phantom blade into shroud, bind and encase my form!"
HUMMM!
HUMMM!
HUMMM!
In that fractional instant, the eleven cultivators likewise underwent radical transfiguration, turning into eleven iridescent beams of sword light that rocketed after their fleeing squad leader.
SWOOSH! SWOOSH! SWOOSH!
Yet after pushing full throttle for thousands of miles in a single breath, the twelve sword rays made a chilling realization... they were still hopelessly engulfed within the perimeter of that boundless yin miasma.
Moreover, the farther they fled at maximum velocity, the deeper and more malevolent the churning miasma around them became, carrying an endless chorus of muffled snickering, mocking chuckles, and the wet grinding of teeth.
It was as if their flight vector, while ostensibly fleeing the abomination, was in physical reality hurtling them directly into its jaws.
The squad leader was the first to notice the paradox.
Bringing his breakneck momentum to a dead halt, his expression darkened as he channeled true energy, calculating karmic vectors with rapid finger divination.
The other eleven sword rays braked simultaneously, hovering around him in tight formation.
Each cultivator stared with mounting dread and confusion into the roiling torrents of surging yin energy that hemmed them in.
"Damn it! The fundamental coordinates of this entire world have been inverted by an overwhelming surge of Yin force, completely scrambling directional causality."
Completing his divination, the squad leader's face paled to ash. "We have already... fallen into a massive space-time labyrinth."
"Then... what do we do now?"
the bald cultivator stammered in panic. "Where... where can we even run?"
"Our only play right now is to pinpoint an operational flaw in this domain's matrix, and then..."
The squad leader declared grimly, "Pool the collective true energy of all twelve of us, concentrate our firepower upon that structural defect, and blast our way out of this hell..."
The moment his words trailed off, a gargantuan blood moon slowly crested into the gloomy firmament, spewing a torrential cascade of crimson gore down onto the earth with a violent roar.
Simultaneously, a boundless, soul-crushing deluge of spectral terror crashed down upon the vast night sky a hundred miles away.
CRASH! SPLASH!
Drenched in the suffocating blood rain, the twelve cultivators stared in petrified stupor at the titanic Dragon materializing across the hundred-mile horizon.
"That's... Lady Serenitas's face!"
The squad leader stammered in wild disbelief: "How... how did she become this monstrosity?! What in the world happened to this realm?!"
ROAR!
A hundred miles away, the Evil Dragon howled to the heavens. With a cataclysmic whip of its serpentine tail, it lunged with earth-shattering momentum straight toward the twelve frantically backpedaling cultivators.
...
Fifty thousand miles away, amidst the pulverized ruins of the Sing Song empire.
Suspended cross-legged in the stratosphere, Calamitas waited serenely for barely half a cup of tea's time before witnessing that colossal blood moon rise once more across the horizon.
An unmistakable omen signaling the Dragon's triumphant return.
She chuckled casually: "Quite efficient. Cleaned up that squad in no time."
Echoing Calamitas's leisurely praise, the Dragon cleaved through thousands of miles of surging clouds, descending before her with majestic, primordial malice.
Letting out a guttural rumble, the Evil Dragon parted its ten-thousand-meter tangle of coarse, dark hair. It dislodged twelve mangled, bloody corpses, alongside seven or eight luminescent Sword Pellets and five or six multicolored, palm-sized Void Pouches, levitating them smoothly toward Calamitas.
"Hmm, not bad."
Calamitas nodded in approval. "Though their physical vitality is thoroughly wiped and their corpses are grotesque, their souls remain pristinely intact.
"Even their flying swords and artifacts weren't totally demolished. Good work. Your trigger control is coming along nicely."
With that, she reached out with an intangible grasp, telekinetically plucking the weakened souls straight out from the twelve battered carcasses.
The cluster of Sword Pellets and Void Pouches drifted in tandem with the hazy, translucent souls, coming to rest suspended directly before Calamitas.
"Sword Pellets, huh..."
Calamitas unraveled threads of memory from the twelve floating soul-clusters with effortless calm, casually plucking a ping-pong-ball-sized pellet radiating an amber glow from the floating pile to examine it up close.
According to Lady Serenitas's memories, practitioners within the Caelum-Arcanum World overwhelmingly favored and popularized the use of flying swords.
Flying swords wielded by Caelum-Arcanum cultivators possess neither hilt nor crossguard; they are never gripped by mortal hands, but commanded purely through psychic intent.
In combat or high-speed transit, a Caelum-Arcanum cultivator initiates a process known as [Pellet-to-Blade Unfurling], expanding an elemental Sword Pellet into a semi-tangible [Qi Blade].
They then execute [Enshrouding Fusion], seamlessly binding their physical flesh and conscious soul into the unfurled [Qi Blade].
This so-called [Enshrouding Fusion] is an advanced Sword-Body Unification art that embodies the dual concepts of total integration and protective cocooning.
Under the protection of this arcane technique, a cultivator suspended in the semi-tangible, semi-ethereal state of [Qi Blade Enshroudment] is essentially immune to conventional kinetic and physical trauma.
Most low-tier energetic attacks are rendered equally obsolete against them.
Barring an extreme magnitude of cataclysmic energy output, even a high-yield thermonuclear warhead detonating point-blank would fail to singe a Caelum-Arcanum cultivator's true form.
Offensively, their lethal lethality stems primarily from dividing the root Qi Blade into millions of fractured sword rays.
Either executing intricate sword forms with isolated beams, or coordinating swarms of millions of sword lights into cataclysmic tactical formations.
Subjecting their adversaries to hyper-velocity cleaves, high-frequency thrusts, multi-vector crossfire, and saturation carpet-bombing.
This tactical doctrine gave off distinct beyond-visual-range modern warfare vibes.
Namely: turtle the host body inside an impenetrable shield, then deploy an autonomous swarm of "combat drones" or "funnels", the fractured sword lights, to wage war.
Unless the remote drone-swarms were annihilated, the pilot's true form never needed to risk frontline engagement.
"Wood-attribute flying sword: Arboreal Root Form II."
Calamitas discarded the amber Sword Pellet and casually snatched up a cerulean bead, glancing at it: "Cryo-attribute: Frost Spike Form V."
Next, she examined a silver and a gilded Sword Pellet in succession: "Hydro-attribute: Mist Phantom Form VIII; Luminescence-attribute: Daybreak Form III.
"Tsk. Why are these all generic bargain-bin commodities? Isn't there a single flying sword that's even remotely high-tier?"
Calamitas gleaned from Lady Serenitas's memories that, just like the Tri-form Celestial Pivot, any blade carrying a designation like "Form Whatever" in its telemetry was essentially a budget-grade mass-produced commodity from the Godforge Guild.
Fully functional, sure, but expecting a luxury user experience was pure fantasy.
"Oh? Celestial Dark Smelt, hybrid attribute."
Inspecting the pitch-black Sword Pellet in her palm, Calamitas raised a brow in mild surprise: "There's actually a custom-built flying sword here."
So-called custom editions were bespoke flying swords commissioned by Caelum-Arcanum cultivators at exorbitant cost from master artificers.
Whether in metallurgical composition or raw acceleration, they outperformed off-the-shelf commodities by one or several tiers.
Naturally, their price tags were equally astronomical.
"Not bad. I'll keep this one for myself; the rest can be fenced off once I hit Caelum-Arcanum."
With that, Calamitas tossed the Sword Pellet, Celestial Dark Smelt, casually into her internal spatial ring.
Then, she began speed-browsing the extracted memories of the twelve slain cultivators.
In her data extraction, she prioritized isolating the foundational cultivation codices they had practiced.
Earlier, while browsing Lady Serenitas's memories, Calamitas had already acquired her technique, the wind-attribute "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture".
This codex was among the oldest and most widely circulated cultivation methods across the Archaic Blade Dominion of the Caelum-Arcanum World.
Mediocre lethality, a low developmental ceiling, but comparatively straightforward to cultivate.
FLIP! RUSTLE! FLIP!
Inside Calamitas's consciousness, spectral pages fluttered like an accelerated datastream.
In mere moments, the cultivation codices of all twelve cultivators had been completely filtered and archived.
Unsurprisingly, every single manual practiced by these operatives... was just as generic and bargain-bin as the "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture".
Across all twelve operatives, there were only four distinct cultivation methods in total.
One of which was Lady Serenitas's own "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture".
"Such pathetic overlap in skill trees. Heh, truly an expendable crew of bottom-feeders."
"Doesn't matter. Garbage manuals don't scare me, having zero data to work with would."
Calamitas chuckled darkly: "Give me a single spark, and I can incinerate the infinite cosmos."
Indeed, for Calamitas, so long as she possessed a working cultivation codex.
Even the crudest, lowest-tier off-the-shelf junk, she had absolute confidence in deducing and optimizing it to transcendent perfection.
Immediately, Calamitas mentally flipped open the first codex, the "Seventy-Two Cloud-Overturning Swords", a hydro-attribute sword scripture.
Spending mere fractions of a second parsing the entire technique thoroughly and at lightning speed, she instantly internalized its foundational tenets:
Namely, practicing this art allows one to draw upon Hydro-element Qi across the world, condensing it into sword light, diffusing light into vapor, and coalescing vapor into clouds, forming Hydro Sword Clouds.
These sword clouds maneuvered at the cultivator's whim; they could saturate wide perimeters with carpet-bombing sword waves or subdue targets with needle-point micro-precision, hyped as a "first-rate offensive lethal art."
"First-rate offensive art... Heh."
Calamitas dismissed such self-congratulatory marketing as utter bullshit.
Immediately following, Calamitas initiated a systemic data-read of "Starfall Sword Codex" (Earth-attribute), "Heavenly Blaze Fourteen Stances" (Fire-attribute), and the earliest manual she had looted, the wind-attribute "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture".
To be frank, although Calamitas had held this manual for quite some time, she had never actually sat down to read it from start to finish.
Because from the very bottom of her heart, she had looked down on such budget-grade, mass-produced junk.
Yet as she formally processed the scripture line by line, Calamitas found herself growing increasingly baffled, and profoundly unsettled.
Her shock didn't stem from the manual being exceptionally lethal, but rather... the deeper she parsed the text, the more uncomfortably familiar it became.
No, it wasn't Calamitas who was familiar with it.
It was her true form, Seraphine, who recognized it.
"Strip away all the superficial arts and techniques from this "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture", and its foundational bedrock..."
Calamitas muttered with a furrowed brow, "Is unmistakably Aether's "Tome of the Wind Sword"." (See Chapter 94)
Indeed, forms may shift through myriad variations, but the core essence never changes.
At its very root, this "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture" was fundamentally the exact method practiced by the swordsman Aether of the Aethelgard Dynasty, who had descended millions of years ago into the depths of the Realm of Phantasm corresponding to the String Swarm's Prime space-time: the "Tome of the Wind Sword".
[The Book of Wind Sword primarily focuses on illusion, the Book of Fire Sword primarily concerns life-taking, the Book of Mountain Sword primarily concerns might, the Book of Forest Sword primarily concerns vitality, the Book of Thunder Sword primarily concerns dominance, and the Book of Yin Sword primarily concerns mystery.
Moreover, each volume can directly lead to the War Immortal Secret Realm.]
These were the cryptic lines left behind by Aether within that ancient testament.
Lines detailing the true genesis of his cultivation manual, the "Tome of the Wind Sword", the foundational Daoist intent and quintessential core of the Sword Sect's myriad arts.
Back then, owing to the cultural chasm between East and West, neither Mycenae nor Beverly could fully decipher the complete contents of the "Tome of the Wind Sword".
Yet years later, peering back across the currents of time through Mycenae's excavated memories, Calamitas's true body, Seraphine, had completely and effortlessly comprehended that ancient canon.
Calamitas remembered it with absolute clarity.
Unlike the "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture" currently floating in her thoughts.
The evolutionary path mapped out in the "Tome of the Wind Sword" wasn't the immortal Qi Refining Dao of the Caelum-Arcanum World at all, but an entirely foreign paradigm known as the Path of Battle Qi.
In direct contrast: cultivating "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture" required advancing through nine tiers of Qi Refining to achieve perfection in Essence Refining; upon leaping through the bottleneck of Spirit Transformation, one emerged as a Primordial Soul Sovereign.
Yet cultivating the "Tome of the Wind Sword" charted a trajectory across Nine Ranks of Battle Qi; upon reaching absolute perfection and transcending into the higher domain, one ascended as a so-called War Immortal.
"So, branching from the exact same foundational lineage, how did they ultimately diverge into... two entirely different existences?"
Calamitas narrowed her eyes in contemplation. "This... is bizarre beyond measure."
Driven by suspicion, she immediately dissected every shred of memory from Lady Serenitas and the twelve cultivators, combing through each data-thread down to the microscopic detail.
This time, Calamitas didn't merely skim; she conducted an exhaustive, deliberate search targeting any and all correlating data points.
Solely to unravel the enigma buried beneath.
"Wait... Sword Sect... Archaic Blade..."
Parsing the data, Calamitas murmured in quiet suspicion: "Could this Archaic Blade Dominion where these cultivators dwell share a direct lineage with that Sword Sect of the Aethelgard Dynasty?"
Their memories provided no conclusive answer.
They only knew that their native territory had been christened the 'Archaic Blade Dominion' since primeval antiquity, unchanged across recorded history.
The "Azure Rainbow Sword Scripture", a codex theoretically capable of reaching the Primordial Soul echelon, had already existed for uncounted tens of thousands of years when their earliest ancestors walked that earth, practiced by millions of cultivators before them.
Everything was taken as immutable reality; as bottom-tier laborers generation after generation within the cultivation hierarchy, deeper institutional knowledge was simply beyond their pay grade.
Calamitas's bid to extract a direct answer hit an absolute dead end.
She could only hypothesize: perhaps the Sword Sect had been wiped out eons ago, and with millions of years having lapsed since Aether's era, modern Caelum-Arcanum had long expunged all institutional memory of its existence.
Shrugging off the inquiry, Calamitas shifted her focus to another puzzle piece.
She clearly recalled that Aether's testament recorded the six canonical tomes, Wind, Fire, Mountain, Forest, Thunder, and Yin, were compiled by the Sword Sect synthesizing tens of thousands of peerless sword disciplines.
Their codification occurred precisely during the golden age when the Sword Sect held dominion across the Aethelgard Dynasty's Hundred Territories.
As for this designation of [Territory], it remained a fundamental geographic metric within the Caelum-Arcanum World.
The distinction lay in its staggering, mind-boggling scale.
Based on the knowledge, lore, and perception accumulated by these dozen-odd cultivators across centuries, a single territory such as the Archaic Blade Dominion spanned a territorial vastness measuring in the tens of quintillions.
Converted into the astrophysical metrics of the String Swarm, it spanned a continuous diameter of several million light-years.
Nor was this like the typical space-times of the String Swarm, dominated by empty vacuum and sparse planetary voids.
Rather, it was a solid, continental mega-expanse packed with landmasses, oceans, and soaring mountain systems, modeled upon a boundless, firmament-domed celestial plane.
A tangible, physical continent of unbroken mass.
Theoretically speaking, even if one crammed every single celestial body within the entire Laniakea Supercluster into that single territory, it wouldn't fill a ten-thousandth of its volume.
The dimensional disparity between the two, upon closer inspection, scaled to an unfathomable magnitude.
Naturally, the former was a continuum governed by materialist spacetime, whereas the latter leaned entirely toward an idealist, conceptual spacetime.
The two paradigms could not be juxtaposed through simplistic, brute-force comparisons.
In a cosmological architecture like the Desolate Ancient, where the sub-atomic bedrock of all reality was woven and crystallized from boundless Origin Qi into a multi-spacetime Singularity Swarm, one obviously could not apply the conventional astrophysical parameters of the String Swarm.
In short, such a terrifyingly boundless geographic expanse dictated that bottom-tier cultivators like Lady Serenitas, and virtually every generation of their ancestors before them, spent their entire lifespans without ever stepping foot into another territory.
Even at a peak Qi Refiner's cruising velocity of several hundred miles per second, flying continuously for hundreds of incarnations or ten thousand lifetimes would fail to reach the border perimeter of a single Dominion.
Yet that enigmatic Aethelgard Dynasty had once subjugated a collective expanse spanning the Hundred Territories.
These Hundred Territories encompassed a surface territory measuring in the hundreds of quintillions.
In other words, the territorial diameter of the Aethelgard Dynasty scaled to a staggering span of tens of millions of light-years across.
Yet what proved exponentially more eerie was that across the collective millennia of memories belonging to Lady Serenitas and the other cultivators, there was zero trace of any data regarding the 'Aethelgard Dynasty.'
Not a single syllable.
It was as though within the Caelum-Arcanum World, more specifically, within the Archaic Blade Dominion, the so-called Aethelgard Dynasty had never existed at all.
"Could the Aethelgard Dynasty have crumbled into oblivion shortly after Aether's departure?"
Calamitas theorized: "And did the denizens of the Caelum-Arcanum World suffer from collective historical amnesia, refusing to archive anything that passed into extinction?"
Still... that didn't fully add up.
A mere eighty million years or so had lapsed, how could not even a scrap of residue remain? Especially within a high-tier spacetime like Caelum-Arcanum, where cultivators commanded vastly extended natural lifespans.
Over eighty million years?
Precisely. Because Calamitas and her true body maintained perpetual, synchronized telepathic resonance, calculating the relative temporal dilation between them was child's play.
The temporal drift rate across this mortal realm and the Caelum-Arcanum World was roughly twenty times faster than the primary spacetime anchoring her true form.
According to Seraphine's own telemetry, among the staggering Googol of Divine Projections dispersed across every Singularity Swarm, virtually none operated on an identical temporal baseline with her true self.
The closest match was none other than the Desolate Ancient Swarm.
The projection exhibiting the most radical temporal divergence anchored an esoteric reality known as the [Curvomain Swarm], a bizarre continuum governed by a cosmological framework mirroring rules-based anomalous horrors and the labyrinthine architecture of the Backrooms.
For every 10^52 years traversed by that specific Divine Projection, her true body experienced merely a single day.
For that very reason, the Divine Projection within the [Curvomain Swarm] boasted the absolute fastest rate of harvesting Source Rules among all iterations.
Long before Calamitas even set foot in Black Soil Town, that solitary Divine Projection had already endured for hundreds of quintillions of years.
Under the weight of such an astronomical accumulation of time, she had not only flawlessly executed the harvest of the Source Rule.
Starting out as a mere insignificant mortal, she had clawed her way to becoming a High Divine Entity transcending both the True Frontrooms and the True Backrooms, the Demon King of Perpetual Motion.
Yet because 99.999...99% of Seraphine's Divine Projections across the cosmos had yet to complete their respective Source Rule harvests.
That particular Demon King of Perpetual Motion had not extracted herself from the Curved Domain Swarm to return to the String Swarm.
She was still over there burning, slaughtering, and pillaging... wait, no, roaming the mortal plane, graciously delivering sentient beings from suffering, and charitably guiding mortal sheep toward self-actualization.
In reality, let alone between two Swarms separated by infinite chasms of void.
Even between divergent parallel spacetimes within the same Singularity cluster, the passage of time exhibited stark variances.
Even within the scattered cosmic sectors of a single Static 3D Great Boundary, chronological drift rates differed perceptibly.
Yet for an entity like Calamitas's true self, Seraphine, a higher-dimensional existence evolved to an apex threshold bordering on absolute immortality, such microscopic discrepancies were essentially negligible.
Backed by her Greater Divinity and an imperishable cognitive will, harmonizing the asynchronous timelines of so many projections was effortless.
"Wait. Something still doesn't add up."
Seated atop the Dragon's colossal skull, Calamitas mused in suspicion: "Strictly speaking, Aether was merely a 3D organism barely bordering on the Half-Sage tier. What right or miraculous fluke enabled him to cross the boundless Creeping Sea, traversing from the Desolate Ancient Swarm all the way into the String Swarm?"
Indeed. A lower-dimensional bug incapable of even busting an observable universe couldn't qualify to access a High-Tier Creeping Sea Channel, let alone navigate a mid-tier tributary. How could he possibly cross the Creeping Sea to invade an entirely foreign Swarm?
More damning still: an entity birthed and formed within the Desolate Ancient Swarm, constructed fundamentally from [Origin Qi], should have, upon entering a spacetime continuum like the String Swarm where all reality is anchored in subatomic elementary particles, suffered immediate ontological collapse, his body and soul eradicated in the very first nanosecond.
What conceivable anchor allowed him to survive such an existential implosion?
It defied all logical reasoning.
"Truly bizarre beyond measure."
Calamitas stroked her coarse chin. "Could another 6D Observer have orchestrated all this?"
Yet to her knowledge, even 6D entities at the echelon of String Gods and String Ancestors were utterly incapable of ferrying a fragile lower-dimensional organism across the Creeping Sea into an alien Swarm while ensuring its safe survival.
In reality, the instant it breached the perimeter of its native Swarm, that frail lower-dimensional bug would suffer catastrophic ontological dissolution, its form and soul extinguished into absolute void.
It wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance of reaching an alien Swarm alive.
"So... did an Eternal-tier entity... intervene?"
Calamitas could only extrapolate along this hypothetical vector.
Because even she had no concrete grasp of the true cosmological authority wielded by an Eternal, or whether such an ontological bypass was within their grasp.
"Whatever. These answers will surface eventually."
Severing these currently fruitless deliberations with a flick of her will, Calamitas turned her undivided focus to a far more pragmatic bottleneck.
That bottleneck being... Spirit Roots.
Synthesizing the collective memories and technical lore of those dozen-odd cultivators, Calamitas confirmed a critical rule of reality:
Namely, to tread the path of immortal cultivation in the Caelum-Arcanum World, or to harness ambient Ether to transfigure physical form and soul within the spacetimes of the Desolate Ancient Swarm, one strictly required a Spirit Root.
Without a Spirit Root, one could at best clumsily absorb Ether solely into raw bodily tissue, or rely on force-feeding oneself spiritual flora and fauna.
But such crude methods could never crystallize personal Dao Intent within form and soul, nor synthesize the true essence and true energy infused with that intent, rendering the establishment of a Dao Foundation and the ascension of true Qi Refining completely out of reach.
This was radically different from the String Swarm, where most organisms could absorb Ether, actively or passively, to evolve; this bottleneck appeared to be an idiosyncratic law unique to the Desolate Ancient Swarm.
As for its underlying mechanics, Calamitas could currently only hypothesize that Ether within the Desolate Ancient Swarm was categorized as a sub-derivative of [Origin Qi], a foundational building block of the cosmos.
Without the "admission ticket" that was a Spirit Root, one was consigned to live out a mundane mortal life, or grind away as a miserable Body Refiner, sweating, bleeding, and expiring with an abysmal lifespan.
Although she had no doubt that within an expanse as colossal as the Desolate Ancient Swarm, there surely existed spacetimes where the path of Body Cultivation reigned supreme.
At least within the Caelum-Arcanum World, the mainstream path of Qi Refining and immortal cultivation was far more compatible with her goals.
She had descended into the Desolate Ancient Swarm to harvest the Source Rule; naturally, she sought the path of least resistance to execute her objective.
Consequently, there was zero reason for Calamitas to force her way down an obscure Body Cultivation path characterized by scarce intel and virtually non-existent practitioners.
Arbitrarily ratcheting up mission difficulty for no tangible upside was completely brain-dead.
It was like romance: when someone clearly has zero interest in you, but you insist on being a simping dog until you delude yourself into thinking it's romantic.
Isn't that just pure cuck behavior?
Unfortunately, Calamitas happened to lack a Spirit Root entirely.
Then again, that didn't matter in the slightest.
She was dead certain there had to be a way to engineer a Spirit Root for herself.
While siphoning the memories of those cultivators earlier, Calamitas had simultaneously subjected their physical remains and soul matrices to exhaustive anatomical dissections across every macroscopic and microscopic layer.
As a result, she had deduced precisely what the hell a Spirit Root actually was.
Put simply: a Spirit Root is an ethereal organ embedded within the deep structural architecture of the soul.
Just as not everyone hits a nine-figure lottery jackpot on a single ticket, this phantom organ was by no means standard biological issue.
Synthesizing the records of those dozen-odd cultivators, even within the Caelum-Arcanum World, the odds of a mortal manifesting a Spirit Root at birth were microscopic, roughly one in a hundred million, if not rarer.
Furthermore, the spontaneous generation of a Spirit Root had zero causal link to ambient Ether density; environments saturated with high-density Ether did not yield statistically higher birth rates of root-bearers.
In short, the manifestation of a Spirit Root followed zero observable governing laws, it was pure, unfiltered RNG.
Moreover, Spirit Roots were stratified into seven strict echelons, each exhibiting exponential chasms in Ether-absorption velocity.
For instance, taking the lowest tier, the Impure Spirit Root, and calibrating its baseline absorption rate at '1'.
The next tier up, the Low-grade Spirit Root, commanded an absorption velocity of '10'.
Those dozen-plus cultivators, Lady Serenitas included, were universally anchored at this Low-grade tier.
Advancing further, a Mid-grade Spirit Root clocked an absorption rate of '100'.
A High-grade Spirit Root hit '1,000'.
A Supreme-grade Spirit Root registered at '10,000'.
An Earth Spirit Root soared to '100,000'.
While the apex Heaven Spirit Root maxed out at a staggering '1,000,000'.
Theoretically, a single year of cultivation for a Heaven Spirit Root prodigy was mathematically equivalent to one million years of agonizing grind for an Impure Spirit Root peasant.