Chapter 217: The Purple Miasma! A Golden Portal in a battlefield
"You are...?" Caelus eyed the man strangely.
"You don’t recognize me?" The man smiled.
"Am I supposed to?" Caelus asked, confused.
"Definitely," he said.
But the moment the word left his mouth, the man flickered, and Caelus’s vision shattered like glass.
The next instant, he realized he was standing in a barren land.
A swirling golden portal already hung over the place.
"Snap out of it, Caelus!" Sylvia’s voice rushed through.
Only now did he grasp his situation.
His ship had crashed into this place, and hordes of darkspawns were rushing at them from every corner.
Caelus saw Lyra and Jason moving to act, but he beat them to it.
His [Fighting Spirit] erupted and shot into the sky. It swelled in size, then drove its claw straight down into the darkspawns, every last one of them already at Crown-Rank.
Boom!
They all exploded in a single move.
[Ding! You eliminated a darkspawn.]
[+29 EXP, 15 Origin Credits.]
[Ding! You eliminated a darkspawn.]
[+29 EXP, 15 Origin Credits.]
[Ding! You eliminated a darkspawn.]
[+29 EXP, 15 Origin Credits.]
[Ding! You eliminated a darkspawn.]
[+29 EXP, 15 Origin Credits.]...
As the level-up notifications rang out, Caelus immediately turned to Sylvia.
"Use your level-up card!" he shouted.
In the same breath, he threw [Ascension Tokens] to Sylvia and Seraphin Lin.
The three of them used theirs at once.
[Ascension Initiated.]
[Rank: Crown I → Crown II]
[Level: 1 (0/200)]
[Your Divine Halo, Fighting Spirit, and Chaos Ring are being recalibrated.]
[+100, +2, +100]
[Region Domain buff of +5 is active.]
[Chaos Faction buff of +11 is active.]
[+218 Combat Score]
[Combat Score: 51.03 (Crown II) → 1.79 (Crown III)]
He recalibrated his mod as well, pushing his combat score to 51.79.
Seraphin Lin, surprisingly, had no mod.
So her combat score now sat below his and Sylvia’s.
More darkspawns poured in.
But before Jason and Lyra could so much as move, Caelus and Sylvia were already gone from where they stood.
Sylvia tore forward at an alarming, immense speed.
"[Blood Threads]." Blood weaved out of her.
It circled nearly a thousand darkspawns in an instant. Her hair fluttered in the wind as she flicked her wrist.
Boom!
The threads flickered as the portal’s light caught them, and the darkspawns fell one by one.
Caelus leapt into the sky, [Origin Lock] activating.
It began spreading at once through the cluster they were in.
"Hey, Seraphin Lin. Do you have the [Rookie God] title?" he shouted.
Seraphin Lin nodded back quickly.
Hearing that, he fired off a party invite.
[Seraphin Lin has joined the party.]
The moment the notification rang, the EXP was split evenly among them.
They began leveling up rapidly.
These monsters were Crown II and Crown I. They drew nothing from the Crown I kills, but the Crown II’s poured in.
Their levels climbed by leaps and bounds.
But why exactly were they fighting here?
For what purpose?
The answer came soon enough, when they found themselves at the summit of a temple, Seraphin Lin, Sylvia, and Caelus all having reached Level 15.
In the center of the temple, a stone floated up and down above an altar, pouring out endless vitality.
"It’s a [Vitality Fusion Stone]." Caelus recognized it at a glance.
Screech!
As he spoke, a darkspawn erupted from behind the altar.
This one was tricky. It was at Crown III.
He merged with his [Fighting Spirit] and put it down.
"I already have a Vitality Fusion Stone." Caelus gestured at it. "You guys should take this one."
Sylvia decided to claim it for herself.
Caelus used [Duplication] on his stone and on Sylvia’s.
’For some reason... I feel like this thing could be the death of this place.’
So he duplicated it anyway.
And what do you know, he landed a 10x duplication on Sylvia’s.
He distributed the copies among them.
Just then, a shadow crept toward them, slow and quiet.
The world began to distort, and a hand shot at Caelus.
He recognized it in an instant. A mental attack.
But he had his [Dragon Matrix]. He could fire one right back.
[Mental Spikes] formed from his mind and shot forward, clashing with the attacker.
A small wave of energy burst from the center, knocking everyone off their feet.
"Not bad." A man with an ice-cold face appeared.
It was Hao Shu.
"Young lad," he said. "Hand over the Vitality Stone."
"Caelus, it’s him! Hao Shu! The one who wiped out my world’s whole population!"
But Jason didn’t even finish his words before he burst into a mist of blood.
"You." Caelus’s eyes turned to ice.
"What did you do that for?" he asked.
He barely knew Jason. But the man was his ticket to the upper expanse. How could he let him die?
"He was being annoying," Hao Shu said indifferently.
"Now. Hand over the stone."
Just then, Lyra appeared.
"You’ll have to go through me first!"
Lyra’s golden barrier erupted around Caelus as she charged in. Hao Shu was taken aback.
The power she gave off... it was without a doubt at the peak of Crown III.
"Men." He shouted the single word, and several more figures appeared.
Every one of them carried power at the peak of Crown III, just like Hao Shu.
Their auras erupted, slamming against Lyra’s.
Just then, the battlefield began to shake, and the purple miasma they’d seen in the wormhole came creeping in.
"It’s here." Hao Shu grinned. "The reset."
"The what?" Caelus frowned.
"You don’t know?" Hao Shu asked, surprised. "Then why did you come to the battlefield at all?"
"If you reached the southern gate, that means you either ascended from here or died. There’s no in between."
"Now. Hand over your Vitality Stone, kid. I’m getting the hell out of this place."
"An envoy already filled me in. This world is ending. Hahahaha. That purple miasma has probably already swept into your planet and killed everyone on it."
"What?!" Now it was Sylvia and Caelus’s turn to be shocked.
’How can that be?’ Their minds raced in terror. ’We only left for a few hours. How could so much change in so little time?’
"You’re lying!" Caelus shouted in anger.
He pulled up the [Origin Domain System], only to find it glitched out.
He forced his way through it anyway, trying to message Brenda.
But her name was already erased.
That meant she was gone.
His heart skipped a beat.
What Hao Shu said was the truth.
He hadn’t known them long. But Chairman Welt, Brenda, Kevin, and the others, like everyone from his world, were people he counted as friends.
How could they be gone?
"What is the meaning of this?" Caelus shouted, terror tearing through him.
"Why is the Abyss devouring everything?"
For the first time ever, he wanted to see Allstar, the one who worked in the shadows and always explained how things really worked.
He began reciting the words.
But Allstar didn’t come.
Just then, Caelus’s body froze.
A knife slid into him, plunging straight through his chest from behind.
"An Ascended Body?" the man behind him raised an eyebrow. "I knew I was right about you, kid."
"Oh well. You can die now." Ken, the leader of Cymatica, spoke with a sneer as he ripped the knife free.
Caelus dropped in an instant.
Ken took the Vitality Fusion Stone and tossed it to Hao Shu.
"How about we work together and leave?"
Hao Shu nodded with a confident smile.
This was the most important piece of their plans.
At that same moment, Sylvia fully snapped.
Rage swallowed her whole. Blood energy burst out of her like a tidal wave as a power deep within her stirred.
"I’ll kill you." Her voice came with no emotion. "I’ll kill every last one of you."
As the words fell, she transformed.
Her vampiric fangs slid out, her eyes turned fully crimson, and a single bat wing erupted from her back.
The two vampire marks she’d awakened through her [Vampire Evolution] flared at once.
For one split moment, the world drowned in a sea of crimson.
Everyone froze at the sight.
And while all of this unfolded, Caelus’s consciousness had already descended somewhere else entirely...
...into the deepest part of the Abyss.
