Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Ethan’s pupils snapped tight.

What Valtheron had just done wasn’t a simple gesture of goodwill. He’d handed Ethan the key to his fate—placed it in Ethan’s palm, willingly.

Ethan glanced down at the white crystal, then immediately ran checks with both the system and his own senses.

The result came back fast and brutally clear—there really was a portion of Valtheron’s soul sealed inside. And the crystal itself was fragile to an almost ridiculous degree. This wasn’t a fake. It wasn’t an act.

For a moment, Ethan honestly didn’t know what to say.

A being this strong... trusting him with something this absolute.

He’d barely started to open his mouth when—

A strange, rolling boom erupted in the sky not far away.

The sound came too fast, like the space itself was being forced open from the outside.

In the next instant, a dimensional rift tore across the high heavens. From it, a nearly transparent creature drifted out.

Its outline wouldn’t stay fixed, like it had been stitched together out of flowing space. There was no normal flesh-and-blood structure—yet the power it radiated was violently real.

Worst of all was the space energy clinging to it.

This wasn’t an ordinary spatial ripple. It felt like something that could rip reality open itself.

The moment that aura spread, it sparked fear straight out of the soul.

When Ethan felt it, his whole body stiffened.

Not from cowardice.

From suppression.

The spatial pressure it released locked down an entire region almost instantly. The power inside Ethan—still flowing smoothly a heartbeat ago—was shoved back by force, pinned down so hard he couldn’t freely move even a strand of it.

Valtheron, though, barely changed expression.

He simply lifted his head slightly. Then his power detonated in full.

Violent Primordial Force and a strange, personal power he controlled rose together, rapidly condensing between heaven and earth into a massive sphere of energy. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

A tyrannical pressure pushed outward in layers, swallowing the sky—and the world’s Primordial Core power began streaming toward him again, pouring into his body in an endless flood.

Valtheron narrowed his eyes, like he’d finally seen what this thing truly was.

"I didn’t think this world still had a Void Creature," he murmured, voice dropping. "Looks like Zyraeth handed part of his soul to this thing."

As the words fell, his power surged out without hesitation, crashing down toward the transparent creature.

And almost at the exact same time, another laugh rang out across the sky.

"Ha—ha—ha!"

Ethan’s expression sank instantly.

Because that voice was unmistakable.

Zyraeth.

In the next beat, savage power flared. Strange, warped energy crawled along the Void Creature’s body like a living infection, spreading fast until it blanketed the entire high sky.

"You really thought destroying my flesh meant you could kill me?" Zyraeth’s voice thundered from above, carrying the manic edge of someone who’d crawled out of death’s mouth. "Naive!"

With his words, a gigantic sphere of energy condensed in an instant and slammed downward, swallowing Valtheron whole.

Their powers tangled immediately.

The energy sphere in the sky contracted and expanded over and over, while Valtheron’s Primordial Force and the Void Creature’s spatial power tore at each other, colliding and shredding like grinding gears.

Even the shockwaves alone split the surrounding space into dense, spiderwebbing cracks.

Valtheron didn’t pause for a breath. He condensed a long sword in his hand and shot upward, straight into the storm.

The instant the blade formed, the air around it seemed to split open, like reality had been sliced one layer deeper.

The energy rolling off Valtheron was so intense the whole world seemed to tremble with it.

Watching it, Ethan’s stomach dropped.

He truly hadn’t expected Zyraeth to survive like this.

Fusing part of his soul into a monster like that... in a sense, it really did buy him an extra life.

And what made it worse was how absurdly terrifying that nearly transparent creature was on its own.

Just a trace of its spatial power leaking out could rip open cracks in the sky. The real nightmare, though, was that it could keep absorbing the surrounding power and turning it into its own fuel—endlessly.

If they let it keep going—

This whole world would get dragged into collapse with it.

Ethan forced himself to calm down. Then he opened the system and started a full scan of the thing’s status panel.

Information flooded his vision.

It didn’t take long before he locked onto something that didn’t fit.

There really was a strange aura on it.

It didn’t feel like it belonged solely to Zyraeth, and it didn’t feel like it belonged solely to the Void Creature either. It felt like a seam—an ugly "binding layer" left behind by the forced fusion.

If he could strip that special power away completely—

The fused body would collapse on the spot.

The problem was obvious: the thing’s overall strength was ridiculous. Trying to peel that binding layer off head-on, little by little, was a fantasy.

But the system didn’t stop at "impossible."

Digging deeper, Ethan found the weakness.

In the end, it was still a fusion. If he could attack the fusion point directly—by forcibly stripping away the body at the point of connection—he could sever the link and rip body and soul apart again.

The instant that thought formed, Ethan didn’t hesitate.

He adjusted his breathing once.

Then his power detonated, and he shot into the sky.

White lightning ran wild across his body and his Powered Combat Armor, turning him into a straight lance of thunder.

And then he slammed directly into the transparent creature’s body.

At the same time—

He activated black particulation.

In that instant, Ethan stopped holding a normal physical form. He invaded the creature’s internal structure in a way that was almost unnatural.

It wasn’t just "entering" its body.

It was like a blade made of black particles and white lightning had been driven straight into the deepest part of the fusion.

And Zyraeth—right then—was locked in the most critical part of his fight with Valtheron.

Ethan’s sudden intrusion shattered the balance almost immediately.

A clean, unmistakable fracture ripped open across the creature’s previously stable body. The surrounding spatial power spasmed and surged into chaos.

"What—?!" Zyraeth’s voice warped, and the arrogance and triumph from moments ago got torn to shreds.

"What are you?!"

He could feel it—clearly.

His body was being dismantled.

And not just his flesh.

Even the power inside him was draining away at a terrifying speed.