The person reached up and pulled back their cloak. The face that was revealed looked just like the one the powerful tar person had, except it was in a mangled state. Earlier, as it was made entirely of tar, perfectly smooth, and hidden until he lit it on fire, it had been hard to see much. Now, with a better look, that tar person seemed an ideal version of this old woman. She had heavy wrinkles, and a terrifying set of scars, that when combined made her look like she had jowls. One of her eyes had a cataract while the other was clear and strong, looking far younger than the rest of her. She was also quite gaunt, almost like a skeleton with a ruined and stretched skin mask on it.

She let him stare for a moment, and then she waved her hand over her face and it darkened. A thin layer of tar smoothed out her wrinkles and filled in the gaunt spaces, and suddenly she looked just like the tar person from before, excepting of course she wasn’t made out of that dark liquid. Instead, she’d donned a set of cosmetics that had a dark tint to it. The woman flashed a harrowing smile at him before she spoke, her voice not harsh like her face might suggest, but instead smooth like honey.

“My dear boy, why did you have to greet me so rudely? If you didn’t like what I was doing, why didn’t you just stop by and let me know? You should have at least let me get a good look at you before breaking all my stuff.”

She clucked her tongue at him and shook her head like a disapproving parent. Sage suppressed a shudder from crawling up his spine. This strange woman was talking like he was a relative that had screwed up, and not the enemy that had just destroyed her whole operation and leveled an army against her. She even gestured at the Formations that were currently penning them in from two sides, “Silly child, why did you go to all this trouble to meet me? All you had to do was walk up and show your ability!”

Sage smiled at the old woman, “I had my suspicions as soon as I saw that tar of yours. It seems you’ve confirmed it now.”

She laughed, “Oh ho, you finally realize it! Its my fault for not showing off my skills enough lately. I’ll just have to leave a better trail this time and remind everyone of my name. I haven’t had a real suitor in so long. I wonder how far my fame will spread if I take out a few villages again.”

“Again? You’re a truly vile creature. Do you not value human life?”

“Haha, of course I do! I deal in human life! I know exactly how much each life is worth. How else could I profit the most from them? I sell the most valuable ones for money and consume the rest. It was quite a pain setting up this base, but now you’ve gone and ruined it all. It was so much easier to have a small and steady flow of flesh, but now I’ll have to go and wipe out a village every few years to feed my cultivation just like in the old days.”

“You’re even worse than I imagined. It will be doing the world a favor to get rid of you.”

“Come now, don’t be so crabby. They’re just mortals. There’s millions of them. Killing ten thousand or so is nothing much. You’ll get used to it. Especially after I teach you my ‘Life Shadow Consumption’. If we’re powerful, why do we have to spend our whole lives in cultivating? Then we won’t have any time left to enjoy ourselves. What’s the joy in living a thousand years when you spend 999 of them locked in cultivation?”

“Even as horrible as you are, I have to thank you.”

“Haha, good! You’ve changed your mind, I knew you would! It’s not everyday you meet someone else who can fuse with a Heavenly Material. Good lad.”

“You’ve taught me quite a bit about how to effectively wield my Blue Icesilver, but it’s time for you to die.”

The old woman with the fake face frowned, “Very funny. Come now, put away that shell and I’ll let you out. We can get to know each other better and you can call off all your dogs outside.”

Sage didn’t speak with the old witch anymore, instead taking a deep breath and releasing a gout of flames into the small tunnel they were talking down. With her ‘help’ it channeled the flames directly into her face. He’d been about to perform the move about a dozen times, but each time he saw with Foresight that she would block it. Only after that particular statement and response did she seem to be off guard enough for it to succeed. Sage had no idea why, but that’s when he saw it working so he didn’t let the opportunity pass him by.

This time, the flames were not a normal red or orange. They were stark white. Blindingly bright fire smashed against her face and splashed onto the rest of her body. The bubble of crude oil that surrounded him lost cohesion and splashed to the ground. The shell of Blue Icesilver hit the ground even as the white flames spewed out of it with terrifying magnitude. The flames rapidly spread to all the spilled oil in the area while the old woman screamed. Sage reshaped the Blue Icesilver into a large flat panel and smashed it down on the nearby spatters of flame to douse them.

Even while screaming and lit on fire, the woman waved a hand and the black oil lifted up from the ground, reforming into a pillar of black tar and swinging towards Sage. Sage held up his hand and a cyan colored sphere appeared. It released a yellow light and the flowing oil slowed down. No longer a rampaging tidal rush, it now seemed more like a slow colossus, treading inexplicably towards him. It still contained the same fearsome might, but Sage merely dodged to the side and released more of the yellow light from his hand. The ground beneath the old woman split apart and she fell into a crevice. He waved his hand and the crevice closed back up, crushing the old woman’s legs like they were in a stone vice.

She let out another screech, “Impossible! How can you have two Heavenly Materials of different elements!”

Sage didn’t answer her and instead released another gout of white flames, blasting her with the blindingly bright energy. The four tendrils of Blue Icesilver behind him wrapped together and combined into a single large pseudopod, lifting into the air and smashing down towards the old woman. The end of it hardened and shaped itself into a plate covered in spikes, like a giant tenderizing hammer. She was already buried up to the knee in the ground, her legs crushed by the rocks under her, so that hammer falling down looked like it was going to drive a very unusual nail into the ground.

Sage thought it was over already, but he suddenly dashed backwards at high speed, cutting off the tendril of Blue Icesilver to get more speed and using that yellow light from earlier to form a huge wall of stone between him and the old woman. There was a massive explosion from behind him, and the stone wall cracked.

Without Foresight that would have been the end of me!

He rolled and regained his footing in time to see the yard thick wall of rock had now crumbled into gravel and the old woman was standing in a crater. The white flames had all been completely extinguished and her ‘makeup’ was completely gone. Instead, her scarred and wrinkled face now carried a few burn marks and her one good eye started to change. She had a nearly black iris, a very very dark shade of brown, but at this point that black iris and pupil started to form a small white skull.

I’m hardly one to talk, but that is not normal!

“How dare you! Nobody can harm Hei Bai the Necromancer and live!”