Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Chapter 1203: Fists in Broken Space

Ethan’s figure kept flickering across the sky as he chased down the Abyssal Empress.

Every time he released that transparent lightning, it struck her shoulder with eerie precision. The spot didn’t look special at all, but whenever it landed, her defenses would visibly lag for a split second—like something inside her stuttered.

During their earlier exchange, Ethan had already scanned the flow of her power with the system.

That shoulder was the weak point in her body.

If he kept hammering the same place, he could disrupt her energy cycle—until her entire body collapsed and shattered.

The Abyssal Empress was getting angrier by the second.

She clearly hadn’t expected Ethan to find her weakness this fast, much less push her this hard. After taking several hits to the shoulder in a row, her aura finally started to churn, messy and unstable.

And at that point, she stopped looking so unbothered.

Just as she prepared to rip open a spatial passage and escape, the blood-red gemstone embedded in her chest suddenly flared.

A blinding crimson light erupted from it.

Violent energy pulsed out in endless waves, swallowing the heavens and the earth in an instant. Immediately after, countless energy vortices appeared around the Abyssal Empress—each one spinning like a forcibly pried-open gateway.

More than ten figures stepped out of those vortices.

Or rather... they weren’t living beings at all.

They were pure energy bodies.

The moment they appeared, they linked their power together, merged seamlessly—then turned into streams of light and poured straight into the Abyssal Empress.

Ethan’s gaze darkened.

In the blink of an eye, the damage on her shoulder recovered completely. The chaotic turbulence in her aura smoothed out, snapping back into stability, and the blood-red gemstone in her chest shone even more viciously.

The next moment, the energy rolling off her doubled in brutality.

Ethan stopped in midair—hard.

The transparent lightning he’d just gathered in his palm didn’t fall. It hovered at his fingertips, crackling with a deep, low snap. The blood-red gemstone on the Abyssal Empress’s chest was still blazing. After those dozen-plus energy bodies flowed into her, the gash Ethan had torn open on her shoulder had already sealed shut.

The aura he’d forced into disorder stabilized again.

The Abyssal Empress spread her arms and tipped her head back slightly, looking up at the sky with a look of pure relief. That injected energy continued to course through her flesh and meridians, driving the pressure around her higher and higher. A moment later, she lowered her head and looked at Ethan again, her eyes returning to that arrogant, all-seeing contempt.

"This brat... in front of me, he’s still nothing but trash that can be crushed."

Her voice dropped from the heavens like a weight, pressing so hard that even the energy currents over the battlefield stalled for an instant.

"Don’t think that just because you’ve fused that much power, you can defeat me."

The Abyssal Empress lifted a hand. Dozens of energy motes of different colors appeared above her palm. They wove together—then, as if tugged by an invisible hook, the blood-red gemstone in her chest pulled them into a single, unified whole.

"Today, I’ll show you what real fusion looks like."

Ethan’s brows knitted.

He’d seen it clearly. Those energy bodies that appeared in the sky—each one carried a terrifying, violent presence. They weren’t the same attribute either. Each held a different elemental force. Stack more than ten of them together, and it was like dozens of elements flooding into the Abyssal Empress at once.

So much power concentrated in one person... the destructive potential was obvious.

But there wasn’t a trace of fear on Ethan’s face.

He reached out again and took out more than a hundred energy cores, then drove them into his body without hesitation.

Boom!

The instant the second batch entered him, Ethan’s already-damaged meridians were forced open again by the rampaging power. A tearing sound rose from deep in his flesh. More hairline cracks spidered across his skin, and scorching energy sprayed out of them—like it wanted to burn him hollow from the inside.

For the first time, shock flickered through the Abyssal Empress’s eyes.

Those first hundred energy cores had already caused irreversible damage to Ethan’s body. And now he was forcing down another hundred.

This wasn’t fighting anymore.

This was him bracing his life against the edge of a blade.

He was suicidal.

Ethan suddenly spat a mouthful of blood.

Before it could fall, it evaporated in the energy flaring off his body. Right after that, the sphere of power forming between his hands swelled to its limit—transparent lightning, the divine dragon’s essence blood, snow-white thunderlight, the fire-red crystal’s power, and the aura of The Infernal Abyss all compressed into it, packed tight.

Then Ethan himself became a streak of light and charged forward, head-on.

The Abyssal Empress blanked for a fraction of a second—then snapped back instantly. She thrust both hands forward. The blood-red gemstone in her chest erupted with concentrated radiance, and dozens of fused energies condensed into a massive sphere in midair.

She hurled it straight at Ethan.

The two energy spheres collided.

BOOM—!

The surrounding space shattered on the spot.

Huge dimensional rifts exploded outward from the point of impact, and savage spatial turbulence spewed from the depths. It was like countless invisible blades, scouring their bodies in a frenzy. Ghost soldiers nearby didn’t even have time to dodge before they were dragged in—and in the blink of an eye, they were sliced into pieces.

If they’d been even a little weaker, that turbulence would’ve torn them into a mist of blood.

But Ethan didn’t retreat.

That fused power had pushed his body to a level it had never reached before. His flesh was covered in cracks, yet it had been forcibly strengthened to an extreme degree. The spatial turbulence raked across his shoulder and arms, carving only shallow cuts—quickly suppressed by the surging power inside him.

The Abyssal Empress wasn’t pushed back by it either.

The two of them kept fighting amid shattered space.

At first, it was sphere against sphere—transparent lightning crashing into fused elements, snow-white thunderlight ripping open blood-red barriers, The Infernal Abyss aura devouring and being devoured. In the end, both of them abandoned long-range attrition and rushed straight into the spatial turbulence, turning it into a close-quarters slaughter with their own bodies.

A fist slammed into a palm.

A knee drove into a waist.

A shoulder check shattered a defense.

Every contact burst into wide ripples of energy. The crackling explosions shook the world itself, and even the distant battlefield faltered under the pressure of the sound, pausing for a heartbeat.

After another brutal collision, both bodies were thrown back at the same time.

Ethan hovered at the edge of the sky, his chest heaving. His flesh was breaking apart everywhere. Many of the wounds were deep enough to show bone, and transparent lightning kept worming out from the gashes, trying to stitch his collapsing body back together by force.

The Abyssal Empress looked nothing like a serene queen anymore.

Her body was covered in injuries. Her shoulder, arms, and waist were split open by thunderlight, and her clothes had been blasted into tatters by the aftershock. The blood-red gemstone on her chest was still bright—but it had dimmed a little compared to before.

Both of them panted.

But Ethan knew it.

His body was at its limit.

If this dragged on... he might really die here.