Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

In the next instant, the dark red energy that had been spilling outward like a flood... started flowing backward.

Gorathul froze.

He blanked for half a beat, then his face twisted as he tried to force the power back under his control.

Too late.

The Infernal Primordial Power he’d released had already been bitten down on by Ethan’s energy vortex. It was locked in place, impossible to rip free.

"No—this is impossible!"

Gorathul finally snapped, his voice pitching sharp and ugly.

"What did you do?! Why can you absorb the power here?!"

He roared, terror and resentment practically bursting out of his eyes. But even as he shouted, he understood one thing with crystal clarity—

He couldn’t drag this out anymore.

So he compressed every last bit of power he had inward.

The next moment, a blood-red energy sphere formed in his palm and he slammed it toward Ethan.

At the same time...

He detonated a dimensional energy sphere inside his own body.

In that instant, Ethan’s expression changed.

He hadn’t expected Gorathul to be insane enough for this.

This wasn’t a counterattack in any normal sense. This was a suicide burn—realizing he couldn’t escape, he decided to ignite himself and drag the whole area into the grave with him.

If he succeeded—

The consequences didn’t bear thinking about.

Ethan didn’t have time to weigh options. He spread all his power at once and forced it down onto the surface of Gorathul’s body.

Sheets of white lightning and fused energy lashed out like countless layers of chains, wrapping him up, sealing him layer after layer.

At the same time, Ethan drove his own energy vortex to its limit.

This wasn’t simple devouring anymore.

It was like he’d jammed a massive extraction pipe straight into the core that was about to explode.

The destructive power Gorathul had just triggered didn’t even get the chance to properly burst outward before the vortex started ripping it out of him, violently siphoning it away.

In the blink of an eye, more than half the energy he’d released was gone.

Gorathul went numb.

His original plan had been simple.

If his power were still at its peak, the detonation would’ve been enough to blow straight through everything here. Then he could peel his soul free in the chaos, find some random place, rebuild a body, and come back.

But now?

Now his strength had been drained by more than half. The blast wouldn’t be nearly enough to destroy this place—and the energy he had left was still leaking away, nonstop. The sensation was horrifying, like he was being hollowed out from the inside.

Gorathul finally panicked for real.

He started thrashing, trying to drag that escaping power back into himself—

And in that exact moment, Ethan’s palm landed on his shoulder.

No extra flourish.

Just a single burst of violent energy, detonating through the point of contact, punching straight through Gorathul’s chest cavity and driving brutally into the weak point the system had marked.

The next instant—

Gorathul’s heart shattered into fragments on the spot.

"You really don’t need to think that hard," Ethan said, voice low, colder than steel.

"Just die."

Gorathul’s eyes flew wide.

First came disbelief—then it stripped down to something raw and animal: pure terror.

He hadn’t thought it could end like this. But even now, he didn’t give up on one last struggle.

At this point, he didn’t care whether his body survived. The remaining power inside him erupted again, and he tore open a spatial rift in midair by sheer force.

At the same time, his entire body entered a state of extreme fragmentation...

Ethan understood at a glance.

He’d seen this kind of thing before.

It was the same old trick: forcibly split soul from flesh, compress the Soulforce into a single mass, then use the chaos to dive into dimensional space and run. After that, you find a place to rebuild and resurrect.

But Ethan wasn’t about to give him that chance.

In the next instant, violent lightning erupted from Ethan in a full-body surge—only this time it didn’t scatter outward.

It all crushed down on the portion of Soulforce Gorathul was trying to peel off.

That spirit power had barely started to lift before it was slammed back into place, forcibly pinned inside the body it was trying to abandon.

Gorathul’s breathing went ragged.

He stared at Ethan like he was looking at something that shouldn’t exist, the fear in his eyes almost solid.

"That’s impossible... My Soulforce is the strongest soul power in this world!"

His voice was trembling now.

"And that part of my body is an independent entity... how can you seal my soul in here?!"

Ethan didn’t explain.

He didn’t need to.

He simply kept driving the white lightning inside him, forcing it to seep deeper and deeper.

Sheets of electricity crawled across Gorathul’s nearly transparent phantom-beast body. Then, like fine needles, they bored inward—grinding down the last remnants of Soulforce bit by bit.

The process wasn’t long.

But for Gorathul, every instant stretched into eternity. The fear, the hatred, the refusal, the despair... all of it slowly drained away until there was nothing left but emptiness.

Not long after, that final thread of Soulforce winked out completely.

The sky went still.

Then Ethan reached out and, from within the transparent phantom-beast, ripped out its energy core by sheer force.

And at the exact moment Gorathul truly died—

The entire sky shuddered violently.

Not a local tremor. It was like the whole world let out a low, muffled groan.

The earth answered with a rumbling hum. In the distance, mountains, ruins, altars, and spatial rifts all showed visible instability at once.

At a glance, it was clear:

This world had begun to collapse.

Ethan frowned.

The energy here was simply too dense.

If he could bring it back to Emerald Castle—hell, even a portion of it—it would be enough to multiply Emerald Castle’s overall strength several times over. With that kind of resource sitting right in front of him, there was no way he could just watch it scatter into nothing.

So he weighed it out quickly in his head.

Then Ethan’s power erupted again.

Overwhelming white lightning spread from him in layered waves, filling the space between heaven and earth. It forcibly constructed a massive stabilization channel—one that connected directly to the dimensional space leading to Emerald Castle.

His judgment was simple.

This world itself was insanely strong.

The reason it had entered collapse wasn’t because its foundation had been erased. It was because the Primal Sovereign Beast and Gorathul had died one after the other, snapping the core that maintained the surface order. What was breaking right now was the outer balance—not the world’s bones.

Which meant—

The world’s overall framework wouldn’t disappear completely.

As long as the structure remained, the energy here wouldn’t just dissipate along with the current destruction.

Once the world stabilized on its own later...

He could lead Emerald Castle’s army back and systematically strip these resources down, piece by piece.