Chapter 1221: No Rift Remains
Ethan’s gaze snapped to the blood-red gemstone in Baelzareth’s hand.
From the look of it, Baelzareth was about to rip open a spatial corridor and bail.
But Ethan wasn’t letting him go.
The gemstone had only just flared. Space around it was still twisting, dark crimson rings spreading outward—clear signs of a forced exit route being carved open.
Ethan’s eyes went cold.
If Baelzareth escaped now, everything they’d paid to get here would turn into a joke.
Bang!
Ethan’s aura detonated. Transparent lightning burst out of him and flooded into his arms. The air was ripped into a rapid-fire chain of pops, and the rubble at his feet lifted piece by piece—only to be shredded into powder by the lightning backlash.
He raised a hand and crushed all of that power into his palm.
A gigantic lightning sphere condensed in midair. Inside, transparent lightning constantly crossed, tore apart, and reformed. On the outside, abyssal energy he’d forcibly drawn in churned like a black tide. The two forces were compressed together until they boomed with heavy pressure, fine cracks spidering through the surrounding space.
Ethan didn’t give Baelzareth time to finish activating the gem.
He whipped his arm forward and hurled the lightning sphere.
It carried everything Ethan could mobilize in that instant. The moment it left his hand, it ripped through the air along a blinding electric scar and slammed toward Baelzareth. Baelzareth barely managed to lift his arm—
Too late.
The sphere hit, and violent lightning exploded from every direction, wrapping Baelzareth inside it.
Crack-crack-crack—!
Transparent arcs lashed his arms, shoulders, chest, spine, drilling into his defenses one after another. It wasn’t just surface damage. The lightning crawled into the fractured gaps in his energy shield, biting inward again and again, torturing his body from the inside out. His skin charred in wide patches, and the aura around him spiraled out of control.
Baelzareth let out a strangled, furious growl, his body shaking violently inside the lightning cage.
That one-shot release was so brutal it hit Ethan too.
The instant the power left him, his chest felt hollowed out. His limbs went heavy. His breathing shortened.
Weakness hit him like a drop off a cliff.
Ethan forced his breath steady and took a slow step back—without easing his suppression. The last of his remaining power surged outward, wave after wave, sealing space around Baelzareth tighter and tighter. Transparent lightning stretched along the earlier attack path, locking down the air itself.
Baelzareth felt real danger for the first time.
That pressure was already creeping toward his core. If he dragged this out, he wouldn’t just fail to escape—he might not even keep a body intact. His face twisted, and he clenched hard, crushing the blood-red gemstone in his palm into fragments.
The moment it shattered, spatial power converged violently.
Dark crimson light erupted from the shards and tore open a spatial rift in front of him by force. The edge of the crack trembled, chaotic spatial turbulence surging out, briefly pushing Ethan’s lightning aside.
Baelzareth gritted his teeth and lunged for it.
As long as he got inside, he could leave.
But just as he was about to step through—
Ethan appeared in front of him.
So fast all that remained was a thin electric afterimage.
He cut through the still-churning lightning backlash, lifted a finger, and tapped Baelzareth lightly on the forehead.
It was a gentle motion.
But the moment his fingertip landed, Baelzareth’s whole body locked up.
Violent force poured through Ethan’s finger into Baelzareth’s brow, then drove straight down into his body. Energy savage enough to shred flesh and bone rampaged through him, exploding along meridians, cracking through bone, tearing through organs.
Baelzareth’s eyes bulged.
A blood hole burst open in his chest. Then his shoulder. Then his abdomen. Then his back. Transparent lightning sprayed out of each ruptured cavity, every eruption dragging out scorched flesh. In seconds, his body was riddled with holes, swaying helplessly in front of the spatial rift.
"I surrender!"
Baelzareth broke.
There was no dignity left, only panic and raw survival.
"Spare me! I’ll tell you where all the mineral resources are—every location!"
He’d thought after absorbing so much power, he could return and crush everyone easily. He’d assumed Catheryn was exhausted, Emerald Castle was half-bled out, and Ethan was just some outsider who couldn’t possibly threaten him.
Reality had flipped it.
He hadn’t crushed them—Ethan had pushed him to the edge of death.
Baelzareth’s tier was high. Somewhere else, he might’ve been able to suppress Ethan without much trouble.
But the power Ethan was unleashing was the purest Infernal Abyss lightning—laced with that Infernal Primordial edge that countered him from every direction.
Baelzareth kept babbling, trying to trade mines and coordinates for his life.
Ethan didn’t loosen up even a fraction.
Transparent lightning kept erupting.
It tore outward from inside Baelzareth, grinding bone, flesh, and his last scraps of defensive energy into nothing. Behind him, the spatial rift trembled violently—but he never got the chance to step through.
In the next instant, Ethan’s palm power slammed down completely.
Baelzareth’s body was ripped into shredded meat.
Blood and broken energy burst apart in midair, then were scorched into black fragments by the lingering lightning. The spatial rift behind him lost its anchor and began to collapse, dark crimson light caving in layer by layer until it vanished entirely.
When Emerald Castle’s people saw it, the emotion hit like a wave.
The massive threat pressing on everyone’s throats was finally gone. With Baelzareth dead, it meant Mournvale Abyss had truly fallen into Emerald Castle’s hands. Soldiers who still had weapons in hand lifted their heads, shock hardening into something fierce and blazing.
But the war had bled them dry.
Once the adrenaline faded, exhaustion crashed down. Some people dropped to the ground on the spot, weapons slipping from their palms as they slumped and simply... stopped moving.
Ethan sucked in a few rough breaths, then led everyone in a slow retreat out of Mournvale Abyss.
Honestly, he still didn’t know why this abyss kept spawning surprises. But right now, there was only one sensible move—pull the army back first, stabilize, then advance in a controlled sweep and start locking down the mineral deposits buried inside.
He found a spot that was relatively open and sat down.
The energy in his body surged out in a full burst, overflowing him and resonating with the surrounding world. The air around him seemed to answer—subtle, heavy, as if the abyss itself had started breathing in sync with him.
He needed to get familiar with this place as fast as possible.
And he needed to mark out the locations of the mineral resources—fast, and accurately.
In fact, the moment he’d entered, the system had already thrown him a flood of prompts. Most of the locations were clearly labeled on the map interface. The problem was the details—depth, access routes, what was buried behind what—those were still on him to verify with his own eyes.
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