The enormous ice orb, like a divine moon descending from the sky, appeared out of nowhere.
The mere cold air it emitted froze the water molecules in the air into large swathes of ice mist.
The entire ice orb, trailing a dazzling tail of ice mist, plummeted towards the Black Qilin below.
"Awoo roar—!!!"
The Black Qilin's roar erupted again, its cry shaking the heavens and the firmament.
Suddenly, an ancient beast with a body comparable to a mountain instantly appeared: iron claws, black scales, a dragon's head, and an elk's body.
It was undoubtedly the Black Qilin.
Seeing the Black Qilin suddenly transform into a mountain-sized giant, Rin, instead of being surprised, laughed and said:
"After I felt your body weight was off, I noticed something: you could crush my ice but didn't collapse the ground.
That means you tampered with the ground...
And when you just knocked me flying, my halberd slid across the ground without leaving a single mark, it was even harder than orichalcum.
Your ability is...
Density Control!"
Controlling the density of a target, compressing or dispersing it while maintaining its total mass, this was the Black Qilin's ability as a Danger Beast, extremely rare, yet also extremely powerful.
The Black Qilin's normal body size should be as vast as a mountain, as it appeared now.
However, through its ability of density compression, while its body shrunk countless times, the density of its bones, muscles, and even scales also multiplied and amplified countless times.
The hardness of one scale became equivalent to thousands of scales compressed into one.
The already diamond-hard Qilin scales were magnified a thousandfold in hardness, which is why Rin's lake light of no regret couldn't even scratch its scales.
And as it reduced its volume, the area of effect of the force it exerted also shrunk.
A needle can easily pierce a cloth, but a stone cannot; this is due to the area of force application.
The smaller the area of force application for the same force, the greater the intensity of the force.
The Black Qilin compressed its heaven-rending, earth-shattering power into a single nail, and then struck Rin with it!
In other words, at the very beginning of the battle, it didn't appear because it went to modify the ground.
It had always been lurking in the deepest part of the Forest of Dangerous Species, compressing its body in this way, and to fight in such an extreme compressed state, it had to modify the battleground...
Rin murmured to herself.
Because Rin's demons extract had the effect of adapting to and immunizing against all ability influences, coupled with End Magic's analysis of all mysteries, the Black Qilin's abnormality could not affect Rin, not even the frost of the Essence of the Demon that Rin materialized with End Magic.
It seemed like Rin was helpless against it, but in reality, the Black Qilin was far more frustrated than Rin.
Otherwise, how could it have been sent into the sky by an ice mountain?
Directly diluting the density of the frost to disintegrate it would have prevented it from ever falling into such a predicament.
The current situation was that Rin forced the Black Qilin to release its ability and revert to its original state.
Completely unable to exert force in the air, if the Black Qilin remained in its original extremely compressed bull-like size, it would be like a nail, the first point of impact for the ice meteor.
If it were normal ground, the soil would instantly collapse under such an impact, forming a massive meteorite crater, and while the impact force would be great, the ground would bear the brunt of it.
But now, this ground had been modified by it to the extent that even a meteorite impact wouldn't create a crater.
If at this moment the Black Qilin's entire body were to endure the impact of a several-thousand-ton ice orb falling from a thousand meters high, to put it bluntly, it would be directly smashed to smithereens!
Floating in mid-air with no leverage, even if it possessed divine power that could break Rin's armor, without the art of levitation, it couldn't be used.
The Black Qilin's only way to avoid death was to release its ability and revert to its original state.
After reverting to its original form in mid-air, the Black Qilin's four limbs directly touched the ground, and the immense shockwave it generated shattered and lifted countless fragments of ice covering the ground, which flew up.
The crystal-clear ice shards shimmered under the sunlight.
The Black Qilin's four limbs were as thick as palace pillars, and upon landing, it was three hundred meters tall.
When the Black Qilin stood up on its hind legs, it resembled a world-devouring demonic beast, opening and raising its forelimbs to push the ice orb in the near sky away from itself.
"Boom—!!!"
And at this moment, the giant ice star meteorite suddenly exploded with a roar, the sky-obscuring ice star instantly disintegrated and exploded in mid-air!
It ignited a dazzling, dreamlike, brilliant ice ring in the sky, and ice dust and debris sparkled like stars under the sunlight.
Of course, only Rin, the creator of the ice star, could create such a dreamlike scene.
The moment the Black Qilin released its ability and revealed its true form, the mission of this ice star was already complete.
Next was Rin's true killing blow!
Facing the dazzling sunlight, the Black Qilin only saw the small female human in the sky with her hands moving up and down in front of her chest, palms facing each other.
An invisible energy gathered directly between Rin's palms.
This was an inexpressible coldness; it froze something deeper than the surface of the world!
Profound Mystery: Mahapratima!
The invisible and colorless cold current delved deeper into the world, truly freezing the flowing river of time!
In an instant, the flow of time throughout the entire world was completely frozen in Rin's hands.
Birds were suspended in mid-air, neither continuing to flap their wings and fly nor falling from the sky.
All things drifting in space fell into stillness; everything paused in this instant.
Mahapratima originally referred to the lowest of the eight layers of extremely cold hell in Buddhist terminology, where suffering beings would experience extreme cold, their skin and flesh freezing and cracking, their entire bodies splitting open like a great red lotus.
Named after this, the ultimate profound mystery of Demon God's Descent - Essence of the Devil, was a divine secret technique that completely froze and fixed the space-time of the entire world outside of oneself!
If this were in the Type-Moon World, such a thing would be utterly impossible, even the Fifth Magic, which controls the threads of time, could absolutely not achieve it.
With Rin's magic power, in her full-power state, she could freeze the world for twenty-five seconds.
Within these twenty-five seconds, it was Rin's self-time, completely detached from the world.
In other words, Rin had an extra twenty-five seconds compared to the entire world; she could do anything to this completely static world within these twenty-five seconds.
Her feet stomped with all her might on the ice block frozen in mid-air behind her!
In an instant, Rin shot towards the mountain-sized Black Qilin like an arrow released from a bowstring!
The sword light of the lake light of no regret flashed, and the cold blade, like moonlight illuminating a lake, streaked like a phantom lightning bolt, piercing into the Black Qilin's scales!
The sword's edge shattered the beast scales, and the blade of the lake light of no regret indeed cut into the Black Qilin's flesh.
Rin smiled knowingly.
It works!
Instantly, the blade, like thunder and lightning, cut open the Black Qilin's body.
Rin, holding the lake light of no regret, performed a magnificent sword dance on the Black Qilin's body.
The moonlight-on-water sword light created a dreamlike afterimage on the Black Qilin's body.
The cut surface of the muscle tissue was as smooth as a mirror, yet not a single drop of blood flowed out, because the blood's time was also frozen.
Rin, holding the demonic sword, danced like a black dragon, circling and tracing every part of the Black Qilin's body.
She circled its torso, neck, and limbs repeatedly, finally stepping from its neck over its jaw, entering the Black Qilin's wide-open maw, crossing its sharp, gleaming fangs that were even sharper than blades, and stepping on its barbed tongue to strike a sword thrust at the Black Qilin's upper jawbone!
"Pfft!"
Rin's figure broke through from beneath the Black Qilin's skull.
Although Rin's state was not perfect when casting Mahapratimoksha, spatial freezing was a heaven-defying, forbidden technique that could reverse life and death situations in a millisecond.
Rin turned in mid-air, looking down at the Black Qilin, which remained standing upright below, and with a slight smile, she deactivated the Demon God Dragon Armor: Knight of the Lake, then raised her right hand, her two fingers, carved like warm, soft jade, lightly snapped with a crisp sound.
"Snap."
"Puff puff puff puff puff puff puff puff puff puff...!"
"Owooo—!!!"
The sword marks on the Black Qilin's body, like canals filled with water after excavation, gushed blood, and the beast's blood, black as ink, quickly stained the icy surface of Rin's Extreme Ice Domain; brain matter and fresh blood simultaneously splattered from the fractured holes through its skull and upper jaw.
The Black Qilin's pained cries were filled with unwillingness and disbelief; its sole remaining eye held a look of utter surprise and incomprehension.
To it, it had only just deactivated its ability, returned to its original form, and was preparing to push away the giant ice ball in the sky, yet in the very next instant, it had already suffered fatal heavy injuries.
It simply could not understand what had happened.
Rin drew yatsufusa from her waist and threw it towards the giant beast, which was collapsing like a mountain; yatsufusa spun in the air before its blade finally plunged into the muscle of the Black Qilin's severed wound.
"You're mine!"
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