Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory-Chapter 1017: Edge of Nothingness

Ethan didn't answer.

He only lifted his hand and kept compressing that near-transparent lightning. The white had long since bled out of it, leaving only an impossibly thin, impossibly sharp trace of light spinning along the edge of his palm—like a spatial razor forcibly peeled out of the air itself.

A few seconds later, that power condensed into an Energy Disc.

It didn't look big, and it didn't have the usual over-the-top spectacle of an energy weapon. But the instant it left his hand, the air around it seemed to get sliced open invisibly. Even the light warped for a split second along its path.

The next moment—

the Energy Disc slammed dead-center into Khar'vathis's chest.

No violent explosion.

No earthshaking roar.

Just an unbelievably heavy, scalp-crawling sound of penetration echoing in the high sky.

That transparent, disc-shaped lightning blade bypassed surface defenses and flesh like they weren't even there. The moment it made contact, it punched a clean, front-to-back hole straight through the center of his chest.

Khar'vathis's whole body locked up.

Before he could manage even a single reaction, the power inside Ethan fully detonated.

"SKRRCH—"

Those transparent bolts didn't just strike from the outside anymore. They surged through the opening the Energy Disc had carved, flooding into Khar'vathis's body like a tide.

They became countless ultra-fine, paper-thin transparent chains, spreading through him in an instant—flashing, cutting, and stripping along bone, flesh, and energy channels.

It wasn't simple destruction.

It was purification with a stealing edge.

Khar'vathis could feel it clearly—his life, his power, his body were being peeled open layer by layer and taken.

"AAAH—!"

A shriek of agony tore across the sky.

His body began to disintegrate out of control. First his shoulder split, then ribs, chest cavity, arms, and half his torso.

The structures that had been held together by Primordial Force and Infernal Primordial Power alike now shed away like brittle shell that had lost its support.

By the end, he was barely anything—some broken white bones with ragged flesh hanging off them.

The sight was so miserable it felt unreal.

Ethan's eyes didn't move.

He was already readying the final blow, preparing to grind the enemy down completely—soul and all. But in that instant, Khar'vathis's remaining skeleton-and-flesh husk suddenly started trembling violently.

The next second—

it exploded.

Not a normal self-detonation. It was like he lit every last scrap of origin power and bodily remnants at once. Blazing golden light erupted in the sky, instantly covering half the heavens—and blowing apart the transparent lightning that had been binding him.

Ethan's pupils shrank. He retreated fast.

The savage shockwave grazed his body as it swept past, carrying a scorching, razor-sharp stream of origin-chaos that tore several thin cracks open in the air in front of him. When he stabilized and looked up again, he caught a streak of golden light shooting into the sky like a meteor—vanishing in the blink of an eye into a higher, deeper layer of space.

Ethan's face sank.

He knew it.

Khar'vathis had escaped.

What got away was probably only his soul—maybe even a soul on the verge of collapse after a near-fatal wound—but it was still a future threat.

With a being at that level, all it took was one chance to breathe and he could claw his way back.

Even so, Ethan didn't immediately order a pursuit.

He stayed silent for a beat, then turned sharply and threw his command across the entire battlefield.

"Everyone—drain every last bit of energy that's left here. Now."

His voice was cold, decisive.

"Then—withdraw."

The order made more than a few people freeze for a second. But quickly, every Emerald Castle member understood what he meant.

This place couldn't be stayed in anymore.

The Dark Abyss was already weird enough, and from whatever lurked deep underground to the ant tide at the outskirts to Khar'vathis—who clearly didn't belong to any normal local faction—everything here was dangerous, and each new thing was worse than the last. If they kept lingering, nobody could say what nightmare might crawl out next.

Better to pull out with the resources already in hand, recover properly, then come back later and clean it up at their own pace.

So the people of Emerald Castle didn't waste another word.

They spread out fast, packing up everything they could—energy ores, high-density cores, leftover crystals, and any resource that could be carried—and completed a large-scale transfer in the shortest possible time. The whole army moved with frightening efficiency, like raiders who'd long since learned the rhythm of war. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

After they withdrew—

in another dark, dimensional space, a wisp of soul so faint it was almost out floated pitifully through the void.

It was Khar'vathis.

Right now, he was weak to the extreme. The power around him was so thin it was nearly transparent, and his entire soul-body kept warping every so often, like it might disperse completely in the next second.

No exaggeration—if any halfway-decent shockwave swept through him at this moment, it would be enough to erase him on the spot.

He drifted forward with difficulty.

He didn't know how long it took, but eventually that wisp of soul reached a mass of dazzling starlight. The radiance was enormous, almost like a floating star. There was no physical object around it, yet just approaching made worship rise in your bones on pure instinct.

Khar'vathis didn't hesitate. He dropped to his knees with a thud.

"Great Supreme Deity Zyraeth—"

His voice was weak and urgent, carrying a desperate, almost pleading edge.

"As your loyal servant, I beg you… grant me a new body, so that I may continue to serve you!"

For a few seconds, everything was silent.

Then the starlight—once brilliant and pure—began to change. The color deepened little by little, turning into something unnaturally vivid, eerily bright, like some living thing deep inside the light had slowly opened its eyes.

Right after that, a powerful dimensional force rippled outward.

"Vmmmm—"

That force fell onto Khar'vathis with perfect precision.

The next instant, his soul—on the verge of collapse—was stabilized. The fraying edges were yanked back into place by force, and around the soul itself, a new physical body formed out of nothing.

That body's structure was more complete than the one he'd had before—tougher, stronger, and closer to the template of some higher existence.

Khar'vathis lit up with wild joy almost instantly.

Without hesitation, he fused his soul into the new body, then dropped to his knees again before the starlight, bowing so low his forehead nearly pressed against the void.

"Supreme Deity!"

His voice shook with excitement and fanatic devotion.

"Nexaris has been taken by the enemy, and the origin energy there has been seized. Should you… send an army to take it back—"

"This matter does not require your involvement."

Before he could finish, a voice steeped in tyrannical authority drifted out from deep within the starlight.

It wasn't loud, but it felt like it pressed directly onto the soul itself. Khar'vathis's whole body tensed for a beat, and he didn't even dare breathe too hard.

"You will go to Elysion Prime immediately."

The voice continued—calm, and impossible to disobey.

"As the Vanguard Commander of the First Warfront, you will hold the position you belong in."

Khar'vathis froze for a second—then his eyes exploded with a joy he'd never felt before.

"Supreme Deity… m-me? I truly have the qualifications to become the Vanguard Commander there?"

The voice from the starlight fell again.

"You do, now."

After a brief pause, the voice carried a deeper, more commanding finality.

"Go."

Khar'vathis didn't dare waste a moment.

He raised his hand and sliced open a spatial passage in the air. Then he bowed with reverent respect, turned, and leapt inside.

The passage sealed behind him in an instant, leaving only that eerily colored starlight hanging in the darkness, silently radiating an indescribable pressure.

…