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The air still trembled with the fierce echo of flames and the dry crackle of colliding spheres. Mei, gasping, spun, dodged, counterattacked — each movement a perfect extension of her fury and precision. Her flames danced in complex patterns, weaving a deadly dance that had, until now, kept Vernasha at bay. But something had changed.
Vernasha no longer smiled merely in admiration. Her eyes, now sharp as blades, had perceived a fissure in the impenetrable defense: Mei's perfect circle, however magnificent, could not contain everything. There was a limit — and the purple spheres of pure energy could, finally, find a gap.
— So that's it… — murmured Vernasha, her voice laden with the calm that precedes a storm. — You cannot hold everything within your perfectionism. Interesting. Let us test how far your perfection truly extends.
With a dry crack that split the very air, the space around the two distorted violently. The crimson colors of the fire domain vanished like diluted paint, and the floor of liquid flames dissolved into ashes blown by a nonexistent wind. Mei tried to react, her instincts screaming at maximum alert, but it was too late: Vernasha raised her hands with the terrible elegance of a maestro preparing her instrument and, in one fluid and inevitable motion, tore them both from reality.
The world reconstituted itself in a sigh.
The sky opened into an infinite abyss of shimmering stars — not the comforting stars of night, but points of cold, distant light, like indifferent eyes watching from an endless void. Beneath their feet, a floor of shallow red water, so smooth it perfectly reflected the stellar vault above, creating the illusion that they floated at the center of a cosmic sphere. The surface seemed calm, almost placid, but beneath it reverberated an invisible pressure, dense and oppressive — the pure weight of Vernasha's dimensional authority.
And then it began to rain.
From the starry sky, purple spheres began to fall. First one, then ten, then hundreds, thousands — a relentless infinity. Each sphere pulsed with a primitive energy capable of disintegrating matter, unraveling souls, and erasing concepts. This was not an attack; it was a judgment.
Mei landed heavily, sending concentric ripples across the liquid surface, while Vernasha floated a few meters above, serene and imposing, controlling each sphere with minimal gestures of her fingers. She seemed less a warrior and more an architect weaving the universe's own destruction.
— It seems you have finally found your limit, Empress — Vernasha's voice echoed through the infinite space, carrying a resonance that made the water tremble. — This is my true domain: Caelum Sanguinis, the Blood Sky. Here, there is no fire for you to command. Only space… and inevitability. Let us see if you can remain whole when the very cosmos conspires to shatter you.
The starry sky burned with the violet glow of the spheres, now falling in a coordinated deluge of absolute destruction. Mei felt the weight of the situation settle in her gut, colder and more real than any wound — millions of points of annihilation converging from every possible and impossible angle, and she knew, with the mortal certainty of an experienced warrior, that the slightest contact would mean her instant disintegration.
I cannot block them all.
The thought cut through her mind like a blade.
I cannot evade them all.
Her perfect circle, her impeccable dance — they were tools for a world with rules. Here, the rules were Vernasha.
She stopped.
Her feet sank slightly into the red water, which now felt warmer, almost alive. She closed her eyes. The roar of the spheres in the air diminished, muffled by a sudden inward focus. Inside her, the core of fire — that personal sun that had always burned in her chest — pulsed once, strong, like a heart beating for the last time before a leap.
The world slowed. Not by magic or technique, but by the pure expansion of her perception. The rain of purple spheres was no longer a chaotic storm; it was a flow, a pattern, a choreography of destruction she could see. Each sphere reflected not just light, but Vernasha's intention — a slight bias in its trajectory here, a greater concentration of energy there, the subtle expectation that Mei would retreat to a specific point…
Mei opened her energy circle, but not outward. She internalized it, expanding it within her own consciousness. She felt the flow of every air particle, the vibration of every water droplet, the curve of space-time under the weight of the spheres. She moved, but her feet did not lift from the ground. It was her mind that slid, anticipating collisions by thousandths of a second, twisting her body into angles that defied anatomy, making spheres pass centimeters from her skin, cutting strands of hair, heating the air around her.
But space was running out. The spheres she deflected did not disappear; they accumulated, ricocheted off the edges of the domain, and returned. The water around her churned with the impact of those she could not avoid. A physical pressure began to crush her inner circle — the weight of millions of futures where she was struck.
Evading is not enough. Blocking is not enough. Destroying them would consume more energy than I have.
The heat within her grew, an instinctive response to the danger. Her flames, once dancing, now writhed like cornered animals.
What am I?
The question arose not as doubt, but as desperate inquiry.
I am flesh. I am bones. I am blood that can be spilled. I am a surface that can be touched. I am a weight that can be crushed.
A purple sphere grazed her arm. It did not touch her directly — her defensive aura dissipated part of the energy — but the sensation was of absolute cold followed by sharp pain, as if her very existence were being erased at that point. The skin turned pale, numb. A warning.
Flesh can be wounded. Matter can be broken. To survive here… I cannot be matter.
The revelation did not come as a flash, but as a slow, inevitable dawn.
Fire… true fire… has no form. It has no weight. It cannot be touched. You can pass your hand through a flame. You do not hold heat, you feel it. You do not contain light, you witness it.
Her body began to vibrate.
First, it was a tremor almost imperceptible, an internal resonance. Then, the molecules of her flesh seemed to sing, a high-pitched hum rising in pitch. The heat within her did not explode outward — it imploded, collapsing into a single point, infinitely dense and hot, at the center of her being. Her skin began to glow, not with the light of flames she projected, but with an internal luminescence, white-yellow, pulsing in sync with the solar core in her chest.
I am not the body that contains the fire. I am the fire that temporarily inhabits a body.
Vernasha, floating above, saw the change. Her smile froze. — What…?
The purple spheres kept falling. One of them, larger and faster than the others, headed directly for the center of Mei's chest — a sure strike, impossible to evade.
Mei opened her eyes.
They were no longer human eyes. They were two small suns, white and pupil-less, bathing her face in a supernatural light.
She looked at the approaching sphere. And understood.
Not with her mind. With her being.
At the exact instant before impact, when the purple energy was already distorting the air before her and the heat of friction burned her clothes…
Mei ceased to exist.
Not as a trick. Not as teleportation. Not as an illusion.
She transcended.
Every atom, every subatomic particle, every spark of consciousness that composed "Mei Nuhay" unraveled from its material arrangement. Flesh became energy. Bones became light. Blood became pure heat. There was no sound, no explosion — only a smooth transition, like the moment water becomes vapor, invisible yet present.
Where a woman had stood, now there was a phenomenon.
A scattered crimson glow, like particles of incandescent ash floating in the air. It had no defined shape, no edges, no center. It was a field, an atmosphere, a presence.
The purple sphere passed straight through, traversing the glow like a projectile through mist. There was no collision. No transfer of energy. The sphere continued its trajectory and exploded in the distance, on the stellar "ground," without having touched anything.
Vernasha blinked, slowly, deliberately, as if clearing an illusion from her eyes.
— This… — her voice came out hoarse, incredulous. — Is this serious?
Another sphere fell, then another, then a dozen. All passed through the crimson glow without resistance. The flaming particles undulated with their passage, like seaweed under a current, but were unaffected. They were not matter to be affected.
Mei, or what remained of her, thought. But her thoughts were no longer words. They were pure sensations. They were memories of heat, the geometry of fire, the joy of combustion. She perceived the world not with eyes, but with the perception of temperature: Vernasha was a cold point of concentrated will; the spheres were gusts of frozen kinetic energy; the entire domain was a fabric of resonant possibilities.
I am the air that burns.
I am the space between impacts.
I am the instant before destruction.
Untouchable. Unreachable. Incineratingly free.
The purple deluge continued. Vernasha, her expression now tense, concentrated, making the spheres fall in more complex patterns, in concentric waves, in whirlwinds that filled every cubic centimeter of space.
Nothing.
Mei's particles simply existed between everything. They were less than gas, more than idea. The physics of the spheres — mass, velocity, energy — did not apply to her, because she had abandoned the realm where those laws were sovereign.
For long minutes that felt like eons, the Blood Sky was the stage for a paradox: the most absolute expression of destructive power failing before the simplest renunciation of form.
Until, finally, the sky emptied.
The last sphere fell and dissipated in silence.
The domain stood still, only the soft glow of the false stars and the slight tremor of the red water.
Vernasha descended slowly, her feet touching the liquid surface with a subtle sound of rippling. She breathed in a controlled rhythm, but her eyes, widened, fixed on the center of the empty space where Mei should have been.
There, floating a few centimeters above the water, was a single ember.
Small, no larger than a coin. It pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm, like a heart. Each pulsation emitted a visible ring of heat, making the water below tremble and evaporate into fine spirals of golden vapor.
Vernasha approached, cautious. The heat was intense, but not aggressive — it was the heat of something alive, deep, essential.
— So this is how it ends? — she whispered, her voice almost lost in the vastness. — You… unmade your entire body. Transcended matter. But an ember… an ember is still a point. An ember is still something. You will be this forever?
As if hearing her, the ember shuddered.
An intense flare burst from its core, so bright Vernasha had to cover her eyes. The air around vibrated, not with sound, but with the sensation of reconstruction — as if space were folding, molding, remembering a form that should be there.
From within the light, a silhouette began to form.
First, dancing contours made of liquid fire. Then, a more defined structure: the line of a shoulder, the curve of a spine, the extension of an arm. The process was not of flesh being born, but of concept taking form. Reality was once again accepting the existence of "Mei Nuhay," but on her own terms.
When the figure was complete, Vernasha held her breath.
This was not the Mei she knew. Not the Empress of Flames with her uniform and her human determination.
It was a golden entity.
A feminine silhouette made entirely of condensed sunlight and flames so dense they seemed solid. There were no facial details — only the suggestion of a face, where two white suns shone with serene intelligence. Her "body" was translucent in parts, revealing a core of pure white in her chest, pulsing with the same cadence as the previous ember. Hair of plasma undulated like an aurora caught in slow motion. She was not standing on the water — she floated a few centimeters above it, and where her feet almost touched the surface, the water did not evaporate; it transformed into golden vapor rising in hypnotic spirals.
The roar was low, continuous, the sound of a cosmic furnace. The air around her distorted with the heat, making Vernasha's image tremble like a reflection on hot asphalt.
Mei looked at her own hands — or what were her hands: forms outlined by radiant energy. She turned them, observing. Understanding did not come as a thought, but as knowledge infused into every particle of her being.
I did not have to return.
I chose to return.
But I did not return to what I was.
I returned to what I always was, beneath the flesh.
She closed her fist.
The world fell silent.
The red water within a hundred-meter radius evaporated instantly, not with a violent hiss, but with a deep sigh, as if the domain were holding its breath. What remained was a bed of black, vitrified sand, cracking instantly into geometric patterns under the radiant heat. The air above her glowed, ionized, full of golden particles floating like solar pollen.
This was no longer Vernasha's Caelum Sanguinis.
It was the antechamber of a new sun.
Vernasha took a step back, then another. The heat licked her skin, not burning, but questioning the very integrity of her form. She felt something rare: a coldness in her stomach. Not fear of dying, but the reverential awe of one who witnesses the birth of something that redefines all scales.
Mei's sun-eyes turned to her.
When she spoke, the voice did not come from a mouth. It came from everywhere at once, a resonance that vibrated in the air, in the sand, in Vernasha's own body. It was grave, multiple, laden with the echo of ancient furnaces and the silent brilliance of stars.
— Thank you, Vernasha.
The words crossed the dimension like a gentle earthquake. Each syllable was a perceptible wave of heat.
— For showing me the prison I myself inhabited.
Mei extended her hand — a simple, almost gentle gesture. The air before her compressed, then cracked, like glass under extreme pressure. A spark danced in her palm, then another, then a thousand, weaving themselves into a glyph of pure fire, a primordial script that did not signify a word, but a state of being.
— This is the final form. The end of the illusion. The beginning of truth.
The glyph pulsed, merging with her hand.
— Nuhay.
The name was not spoken. It was recognized by the universe.
A primordial beat echoed, deep and profound, like the first instant after the Big Bang — the sound of creation accepting a new archetype. Fire, soul, consciousness, and will fused into a single principle: Nuhay.
Before her, Vernasha no longer saw an opponent, an empress, a rival.
She saw an emerging deity.
A sun that had acquired consciousness.
The logical apex of all life that chooses to burn brighter, even if it means consuming its own vessel.
And Vernasha, the Lady of the Domain, the weaver of dimensions, she who played with realities as others play with dolls… trembled.
Not from cold.
From ecstasy. From terror. From an admiration so profound it bordered on devotion.
Before the goddess Nuhay.
The domain began to die.
The sky of stars cracked, first with fissures fine as spiderwebs, then with violent tears that revealed the void behind. The floor of vitrified sand liquefied and then vaporized. The reality around Mei could not withstand her simple presence; it unraveled, not by attack, but by incompatibility. She was a concept of superior density leaking into a universe of inferior rules.
The air split with a dry snap — not the sound of Mei moving, but the sound of space being denied.
She disappeared.
Vernasha moved by pure instinct, a reflex cultivated over millennia of dimensional combat. Her body twisted into an impossible angle.
And it was then that she understood: Mei was already there. She had not "gone" anywhere. She simply was where she wanted to be, because distance was an illusion for something that existed as an energy field. A flash in human form, standing centimeters from her face.
The blow came.
It was not a punch. It was a conclusion.
The impact had no sound of its own — it stole all sound from the world. Vernasha was flung backward not as a body, but as a rejected concept, dragging through the water that still resisted, evaporating in her wake, leaving a channel of vapor and destruction for kilometers.
But Vernasha was not just anyone. She roared, and the roar held the dual timbre of two fallen goddesses.
— FENRA!
Space folded upon itself. Vernasha's body disintegrated into a streak of pure blue light — the essence of absolute speed, so fast it transcended causal sequence. She did not "go" behind Mei; she became present there, with the past, present, and future of her movement collapsed into a single instant.
Her fist, charged not with energy but with the idea of "impact," pierced the air.
Space accepted the command and created twelve replicas of the same strike, coming from twelve overlapping realities — not illusions, but equally true versions of the same event, converging upon Mei at once.
Mei turned.
And, in turning, she was at all twelve points simultaneously.
She did not divide. She did not multiply. Her field-nature allowed her to interact with all timelines at once. Each replica of Vernasha met an identical counter — a fiery hand that did not block, but canceled the strike at a conceptual level.
The sound that followed was the universe choking, trying to process a contradiction.
Vernasha leapt back, and with her hands, she tore.
Rifts in the air opened, showing glimpses of other dimensions: a forest of singing crystals, an ocean of liquid metal, a desert where the sand was fragments of memory. She crossed one, two, twenty realities, using each as a shortcut, appearing from behind, above, the sides in fractions of a nanosecond.
Mei tore through them like fragile veils.
Her white fire did not need to follow paths. It manifested before Vernasha completed the crossing, striking her at the point of transition, on the threshold between one world and another.
This isn't possible… Vernasha's thought was a mental groan. She is beyond dimensional structure… She does not travel. She is the destination.
Vernasha fell to her knees in the water, which now boiled around her. Blood — her blood, crimson and hot — trickled from her nose, evaporating before touching the ground.
She raised her face, and her eyes were black, without whites, without irises. A well of ancient darkness.
— AZAROTH!
The forbidden essence answered.
From her hands, a black, living liquid began to flow — not a physical fluid, but the materialization of primordial chaos, of the entropy that precedes order. Where it touched the water, it did not evaporate; it rotted, becoming static, immobile, dead. Time in that area simply ceased to flow.
From the black pools, clones emerged.
They were not creatures; they were absences with form. Demons with eyes of empty glass, bodies that seemed made of liquid shadow, and hands that, with a simple touch, induced not biological but existential death. They advanced in silence, an army of anti-life, and sound itself died as they approached.
Mei merely looked.
The clones touched her.
And evaporated.
Not with a bang, but with a sigh of relief, as if they had been freed from a nightmare. The time Azaroth had corrupted did not apply to her, because the fire of Nuhay existed outside the arrow of time — it was the eternal instant of combustion.
Vernasha retreated, her veins now black and prominent under her skin, pulsing with corrupted power. One step back. Then another. Her breathing was a ragged roar.
Then, she gave up on restraint.
Vernasha roared, and the roar made the entire domain shudder like a wounded animal.
Her body began to grow.
Muscles expanded, tearing her clothes. Her skin became darker, almost black, studded with veins that glowed with purple light. Curved horns sprouted from her forehead. Her wings, once elegant, became twisted membranes of shadow and flesh. In seconds, Vernasha stood as tall as a skyscraper, a titanic amalgamation of demon and goddess, her physical presence so massive it distorted gravity around her.
— SO BE IT, EMPRESS! — her voice was the crash of colliding mountains. — THEN LET THE ENTIRE COSMOS COLLAPSE WITH US!
She raised her hands to the cracked sky.
Above her, a sphere began to form.
It was not energy. It was a singularity of concepts: light compressed until it became darkness, time coiled into a loop, chaos and order fused, pure soul distilled into pure power. The sphere grew, swallowing the fragments of the starry sky, becoming a trembling mountain of destructive potential, so massive its own weight began to tear the fabric of the domain.
But Mei did not retreat.
The white fire around her rose like a living aurora, a curtain of plasma touching what remained of the sky. And then, she, too, began to grow.
Not as a monstrous transformation, but as a revelation of scale.
Her golden body expanded smoothly, maintaining its proportions, becoming colossal. She was not a giant; she was a sun in human form. Each of her movements was accompanied by flames that cut the firmament like cosmic swords; each step made the earth (which no longer existed) tremble. When she stopped growing, she was the size of Vernasha — two titans face to face, one of amalgamated chaos, the other of conscious, pure fire.
Vernasha, with a scream that tore pieces from reality, launched the singularity sphere.
It descended like the end of all worlds, a ball of shining darkness that devoured the light around it.
Mei extended her hands and received it.
The impact had no sound. It had absence.
The domain cracked from end to end. The floor disintegrated into elementary particles. The sky shattered like glass. For an instant, everything was white — not light, but the negation of all color, all form, all information.
And in the center of the white, Mei pushed.
The sphere, enveloped in white fire, began to retreat, its structure unraveling, its chaos being transmuted into radiant order.
— NUHAY!
Mei's cry was not of effort. It was a declaration of principle.
The sphere was pushed back against Vernasha.
The demonic titan screamed, trying to contain it, but the fire already enveloped her. Mei advanced through the continuous explosion, her golden body unscathed.
One colossal punch struck Vernasha's face. The sound was that of a continent splitting.
Another punch. Another.
Each blow did not merely cause physical damage; it opened craters of corrupted reality, from which pure energy gushed. Each impact was accompanied by solar waves that burned not the flesh, but the idea of Vernasha, corroding her authority over the domain, her identity as its mistress.
Vernasha tried to counterattack, shadow-claws tearing, disintegration spells woven in the air, dimensional folds creating traps of non-existence.
Nothing worked.
Mei's fire did not merely burn; it learned. Every technique Vernasha used was analyzed, understood in its essence, and then transcended. Mei adapted not by trial and error, but by instant comprehension. And when Vernasha launched a new form of attack, Mei, moments later, returned a purified version, transformed into flame.
They clashed in the void that had been a domain, now a stage of pure cosmic anarchy. Incandescent sand and fragments of dead stars spun in an eternal whirlwind around them.
Light against darkness.
Conscious order against intentional chaos.
Two cosmic principles enacting what could be the final act of an era.
Vernasha, bleeding black energy from wounds that would not close, concentrated everything. All of Fenra's power, all of Azaroth's corruption, all her own millennial will. She united speed, space, chaos, entropy, and desire into a single point, in her clasped hands.
— EVERYTHING… FOR THIS MOMENT!
She launched the final attack. Not a sphere, but a line of absolute destruction, a black ray that did not move — it simply already was at every point between her and Mei, erasing distance, time, the possibility of defense.
Mei advanced.
Straight into the ray.
Her golden body was not erased. It was redefined. The white flames became clearer, purer, more real than the surrounding reality. She traversed the attack not by resisting it, but by being more fundamental than it.
Her fist pierced the demonic chest of Vernasha.
The titanic flesh, harder than dimensional diamond, offered less resistance than paper. The bones that had borne the weight of worlds evaporated under the touch of primordial fire. Vernasha's heart — an organ that beat with the rhythm of a thousand dimensions — pulsed one last time against the incandescent knuckles of Mei.
But Vernasha was not yet defeated.
With a roar that was half pain, half triumph, she seized Mei's fiery arm with both hands. Her black claws clenched around the golden limb, and with a force that made time implode upon itself, she tore.
Mei's arm separated from her body in an explosion of solar plasma.
Vernasha spun in the air, using the momentum to hurl the still-incandescent limb like a cosmic projectile. The arm traversed the void, creating a trail of temporary singularities that collapsed into microscopic black holes before evaporating.
When the dust of reality settled, Vernasha, panting, triumphant, saw.
And her triumph froze into pure ice.
Mei's arm had already regenerated.
There was no process. No growth. One moment it was not there; the next moment, it was. Complete. Perfect. Golden. As if the very concept of "loss" did not apply to her existence. As if she were less a physical being and more a law of nature — and you cannot tear the arm from gravity or entropy.
Space ceased to exist as a useful concept.
Time… merely trembled, unable to record what it saw. The seconds scrambled, the moments overlapped. Past, present, and future danced a chaotic whirlwind around the two presences tearing reality apart by their simple existence.
Vernasha and Mei faced each other — one wounded, breathing heavily, black blood and pure energy flowing from her open chest; the other, intact, serene, a conscious sun illuminating the ruins of a cosmos.
The floor of incandescent sand trembled under their steps, if it could still be called a floor. Fragments of shattered dimensions spun around them, like broken mirrors reflecting infinite versions of the same chaos — infinite Vernashas being pierced, infinite Meis rising unchecked.
— So this is it… Nuhay. — Vernasha's voice came out ragged, the tone oscillating between mortal fascination and a fury that had no fuel left. — You have become… fire itself. Not a user. Not a master. The very principle.
Mei did not respond with words.
Her solar body pulsed once, and a golden wave expanded silently. She was not attacking. She was the attack. Her simple presence was a declaration of war against everything that was not pure fire.
Vernasha charged for the last time.
Not out of hope for victory. Out of devotion to combat.
In a single blink of an eye that lasted an eternity, her body vanished — running at a speed so absurd not even light could follow it. Fenra, the goddess of speed, would have wept with pride to see such a feat.
But Mei… simply moved her head.
And the next instant, she was already there, in front of Vernasha, her flaming fist driving into the titan's abdomen.
Had Vernasha not reinforced her body to the limit and absorbed so much power, she would certainly have been vaporized by that simple direct attack.
The impact did not break bones — it broke laws. Sound died before it was born. The stars still flickering at the edges of the domain went out for good, like candles blown out by a divine wind.
Vernasha flew through rifts in space, her massive body tearing through dimensional layers. She emerged in another dimension — an inverted forest, where the sky was the ground and crystal trees floated like stalactites.
She had barely regained her balance when the crystal world trembled.
Mei traversed the same space not as an intruder, but as a fact. Like a falling star that had decided its trajectory included that specific reality. She tore the dimensional veil not with effort, but with indifference, and struck Vernasha with a knee that made the entire crystal plane collapse into a kaleidoscope of cutting fragments.
Vernasha roared, but the roar was swallowed by the sound of the world dying.
Her wings expanded in a desperate attempt to escape, her body now covered in black marks pulsing like living veins of chaos.
— AZAROTH! LEND ME EVERYTHING! ALL THAT REMAINS!
The darkness answered with a cosmic groan.
A demonic chorus echoed from every shadow, from every fragment of broken reality. Hundreds — no, thousands — of infernal clones emerged from the very dimensional wounds. Demons with empty glass eyes, liquid bodies that defied physics, and hands that made time die with a simple touch. An army of anti-existence, the fallen goddess's last gambit.
They launched themselves at Mei in a silent black wave.
Mei merely looked.
And breathed out.
It was not an attack. It was a negation.
A single expansion of her aura, and all the clones evaporated. They did not explode. They did not scream. They simply ceased to be, like dreams dissipated at dawn. The time Azaroth had tried to corrupt died with them, and in its place, only the eternal now of fire persisted.
The air screamed. The cosmos fled far away, like a frightened child.
Mei's white, pupil-less eyes reflected everything and nothing at once — all realities, none of them.
Vernasha, kneeling in the void, saw the last lines of her domain unraveling. The Blood Sky no longer existed. Only ruin. Only her. And the goddess of fire.
Damn it damn it damn it she's too powerful… Did I… did I miscalculate something? Vernasha thought amidst the cosmic combat. Is she really going to kill me here? Am I going to… after all these centuries of waiting…
Vernasha seemed to sink into despair, but a second later her perspective shifted. She smiled. No… everything is going according to plan…
To be continued…
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