Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Chapter 1208: Adamant Essence

The contempt on Seraphine’s face didn’t soften by even a fraction.

She didn’t move from where she stood. The edge of her robe fluttered as surging energy lifted it, and her Divine Power spread outward in layered waves. The light wasn’t blinding—if anything, it was restrained—but it carried weight. It pressed down hard enough that the air itself trembled with tiny, strained vibrations.

In the next breath, that radiance gathered above her head, following an invisible outline as it rapidly condensed into a colossal sacred projection.

The projection lowered its head, lifted an arm—

—and slammed down at the space ahead.

The man’s pupils snapped tight. A hint of laziness still lingered on his face, but the moment that sacred shadow fell, he finally understood: Queen Seraphine wasn’t testing him.

From the start, she hadn’t planned to leave him a way out.

He threw both arms up. A torrent of power poured from within him—dark, heavy, steeped in corrosion—rolling between his palms. He forcibly compressed it, stretched it, shaped it, until it condensed into a long, razor-edged spear.

The instant the spear formed, the air around it hissed as it was eaten away. Even the exposed layers of rock along the canyon walls pitted with shallow, corroded scars.

He stabbed the spear straight into the descending sacred projection.

The two forces collided in midair.

For a single beat, everything went quiet.

Then a blinding arc of light erupted from the impact point. The spear’s corrosion tried to climb up from the tip, aiming to tear open the projection’s arm—but the moment it touched Divine Power, it was like black fog ramming into a furnace. Layer by layer it evaporated, leaving behind nothing. Not even a stain.

The man’s expression twisted. The ground under his feet cracked in response.

Ethan didn’t put all his attention on that fight.

He knew his lightning, at this level, wasn’t going to decide the outcome. Charging in blindly would just get him killed—or worse, drag Seraphine down at the wrong moment. What mattered was figuring out what was really wrong with Mournvale Abyss.

He shifted slightly, keeping himself out of the worst of the aftershocks, and released the system to scan everything around him.

As the scan expanded, Ethan’s breathing gradually steadied.

Something about this place was off.

The canyon didn’t look like an ordinary abyss that had simply collapsed downward. Fine, twisted striations ran through the rock between the walls, like the terrain had been torn and pulled for a long time by forces tugging in different directions. The air carried the stench of corrosive energy—something that crawled over skin, trying to drill into flesh.

But underneath that corrosion, there was another presence.

A purer darkness.

And it wasn’t still.

On the system scan, several currents of force shifted position almost constantly. Corrosive energy slid along the stone walls. Dark power seeped out from deep cracks. When the two brushed together, they didn’t immediately devour each other. They tangled, briefly forming a new kind of fluctuation before separating again.

Ethan’s gaze sank.

These forces could fuse on their own.

As that conclusion clicked into place, he took a slow breath, forced the agitation in his lightning power down, and started walking deeper into Mournvale Abyss. The farther he went, the darker the canyon became. The stone under his feet turned colder and colder. In the distance, the shockwaves from Seraphine’s fight still rolled through the air, but down here, the abyss’s low, constant groan swallowed most of it.

Just as he neared the deeper region—

A different kind of aura erupted not far away.

The energy in the sky was shoved aside, as if an invisible hand had ripped a gap through it. A strange figure stepped into that warped space. Its outline wavered, unstable, wrapped in thick corrosion. Black energy streamed over its surface, leaving a sharp, choking trace in the air.

But Ethan caught something else almost immediately.

Mixed into that corruption...

...was Divine Power.

Ethan stopped.

He didn’t attack right away. He stared for an extra second, brows tightening. Corrosive force was pure evil—there was no world where it should coexist with holy aura. Their natures were opposites. When they touched, they should repel each other violently.

Yet on this thing’s body, the two powers didn’t separate.

They circulated together.

This wasn’t some ordinary corrosive creature.

Ethan eased back a step, and his energy surged out with him. Lightning spilled from his body, crawling across the cracked stone at his feet and spreading outward. Arcs shredded the air with a sharp, tearing screech. The power didn’t explode randomly—under his control, it gathered upward fast, condensing between heaven and earth into a massive energy sphere.

Electric light churned across the sphere’s surface. Inside, a heavy force compressed tighter and tighter.

Ethan lifted a hand and shoved forward.

The sphere shot out with a booming howl, ripping along a channel carved open by pressure as it charged straight at the warped figure.

The thing finally reacted.

It clearly hadn’t expected Ethan to attack the moment he understood what he was looking at. It raised one hand, flicked its fingers through the air, and the loose corrosive energy around it surged in—along with that abnormal thread of Divine Power. Even the surrounding darkness was yanked toward it, condensing into a huge phantom shape in front of its body.

The phantom stabilized just in time.

Ethan’s attack slammed into it.

At the moment of contact, the sound inside the canyon was crushed flat—like the world had been muted.

Then the impact detonated.

Lightning exploded outward. Corrosive aura was torn apart by brute force. Divine Power flashed inside the chaos like something that shouldn’t exist there at all. The two sides ground against each other, and the shockwave skated across the ground. Massive chunks of rock were ripped up—then shattered into grit midair by the pressure.

Both canyon walls shook violently. Cracks climbed upward like veins. Even space above twisted, bowing inward for a moment as if the collision had bent it out of shape.

Ethan stood his ground, his clothes snapping in the wind of the backlash. He didn’t retreat—he just stared into the center of the explosion, a flicker of alarm rising in his eyes.

This thing was stronger than he’d expected.

When the turbulence finally thinned, the warped figure was still standing.

The huge phantom defense in front of it had faded, its edges split with tears where Ethan’s lightning had bitten through. The energy around its body had weakened too, no longer pressing down on the entire area the way it had when it first appeared.

And the way it looked at Ethan—

Changed.

That superior, casual scrutiny was gone. In its place was suspicion, confusion... something close to disbelief. It stared at Ethan like it was only now realizing the person in front of it wasn’t a bug it could crush underfoot.

A moment later, a voice pushed out through the churning energy—low, tight.

"Who are you?" it demanded. "How do you have power this strong—and why do you carry the aura of the Infernal Abyss?"

Ethan didn’t answer.

He raised both hands, palms facing each other, and the power inside him rose inch by inch along his arms. Transparent lightning lit between his fingers—thin threads at first, then rapidly thickening into crossing, surging arcs. The electricity had no ordinary color, but it carried a sharper, more cutting vibration. When it sliced through the air, even the drifting corrosive aura around him was jolted aside.

This transparent lightning couldn’t truly purify Mournvale Abyss’s bizarre atmosphere. The corrosion and darkness here had sunk into the canyon itself, clinging to the rock, the fissures, the air—like wet cold that never left. One strike of lightning wouldn’t chase it away.

But to deal with this thing?

It was enough.

Ethan drove both arms forward.

Violent transparent lightning burst from him at once. It advanced along the ground and through the air at the same time. Wherever it passed, loose stone jumped as if kicked. The air screamed in thin, sharp lines.

And something even stranger happened.

Once the lightning surged out, the loose energies around it started leaning in—drawn like they were being pulled by some higher-tier force. Streams of power flooded into that transparent thunderlight, feeding it.

What had begun as an attack erupting from Ethan’s palms—

Swelled, after only a few dozen steps, into a rolling tide of thunder.

The man opposite inhaled too fast, his breathing breaking.

He stared at the expanding transparent lightning, and the last of his arrogance vanished. Ethan wasn’t just releasing power inside Mournvale Abyss—he was making the abyss’s energy lean toward him.

The moment that realization surfaced, the man’s body reacted before his mind finished processing it. He jerked both hands up and slammed every ounce of power he had into the space in front of him.

A heavy barrier formed around him.

It wasn’t a single layer of corrosion. Black aura flowed over the surface, but beneath it was a compressed, murky sheen—layered and layered, like a metal wall hammered over and over by different forces until it became something dense and unyielding.

Right before Ethan’s transparent lightning smashed into it, Ethan’s eyes tightened.

He sensed something that shouldn’t have been here at all.

Adamant Essence.