Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Morvane’s blood sword froze above Ethan’s head, hovering there—refusing to fall.

The king’s massive body started to tremble.

The power he’d just swallowed stopped growing in a steady climb. Instead, it slammed around inside him from every direction. White lightning tore through the black fog, and purple-red afterglow kept leaking from his chest and abdomen like cracks in a failing seal.

Morvane tried to tighten his grip on the hilt.

His arm wouldn’t respond.

His body had already swollen to its limit. There was nowhere left to put that much energy.

Ethan looked up at him.

It was over. The ending had already been decided.

The next instant, a muffled blast sounded from inside Morvane’s body.

BOOM!

That enormous frame ruptured from within.

The towering blood sword shattered with it.

Morvane broke apart into countless multicolored motes of light, drifting down over the entire island from high above—like rain at last, rain that didn’t carry the stink of death.

The blood rain in the sky stopped with it.

The scarlet clouds began to fade, and the darkness pressing down over the island finally started to loosen and scatter.

Completely drained, Seraphine finally withdrew her Light Force.

The holy barrier covering the sky dissolved into golden particles. She took two unsteady steps back in midair, lost her balance, and fell.

Ethan flashed beneath her in time and caught her against his chest.

Their companions hurried in around them.

Someone supported the injured Andona. Someone checked Seraphina’s dragon heart. And others kept their eyes up, still wary of the lingering presence that hadn’t fully dispersed yet.

Feylora pushed her way to the center of the group.

She pressed both hands to the ground.

A green magic array unfurled beneath her feet, spreading outward across ice and soil. Countless green motes rose from the glowing lines and drifted onto everyone’s bodies.

Wounds started to knit shut.

The bone-deep exhaustion eased, little by little.

Inside Ethan, the fusion released.

The four little ones popped back out into the open.

Lily had burned through too much power. The moment she left Ethan’s body, her eyes fluttered closed and she slipped back into a heavy sleep.

Auri, though, didn’t rest right away.

She looked down at the green light gathered in her hands, then walked up to Ethan and held it out to him.

"Dad!"

Auri opened her palms.

"I think that big tree gave this to me."

A quiet green orb spun above her skin, its life force so pure it felt unreal—no grit, no corruption, nothing mixed in.

"There’s a ton of really pure life energy in here!"

Ethan took the orb.

Then he turned and looked around.

The forest had been utterly demolished in the battle. The ground was split with cracks, littered with dry bones and charred trees. The whole island still carried that long-term, death-soaked pallor—like color had been drained out over years.

Ethan loosened his fingers.

The green orb dropped from his palm and touched the earth gently.

The next moment, a fierce surge of life erupted beneath their feet.

Green breath blasted up through the soil, forming a pillar of light that speared straight into the sky. The glow spread across the island, and everywhere it passed, black sludge faded away, brittle bones crumbled into dust, and cracked ground darkened with fresh moisture again.

From the roots of fallen trees, tender shoots pushed up.

Blades of grass forced their way out through gaps in stone.

Green raced across forests, slopes, and beaches in a relentless tide.

The island wasn’t gray anymore.

And skeletons weren’t scattered everywhere anymore, either.

Overhead, the thick cloud cover was shoved apart from the center by that life force. A long-missed shaft of sunlight slipped through the opening and landed on their faces.

More and more cloud and fog retreated to either side.

The sky brightened.

A sun they hadn’t seen in far too long felt, in that moment, like an old friend.

Feylora’s healing quickly stabilized Seraphina’s injuries.

Green motes flowed along her body, smoothing away the lingering pain around her dragon heart one breath at a time. After a short rest, Seraphina returned to her dragon form, spread her wings, and lifted everyone onto the broad strength of her back.

She rose into the air on the sea wind, flying toward the mainland ahead.

As they gained altitude, the shape of the land below sharpened into focus.

And finally, they saw what lay beyond the coastline.

A desert.

Another desert so vast they couldn’t see its end.

Golden dunes stretched from the shore all the way to the horizon. There was no transition at all—no grassland, no scrub, nothing. Just dry sand pressed right up against blue seawater. Waves slapped the beach, and only a few hundred steps inland, all that remained was fine sand skittering in the wind.

Why would a desert this massive sit right beside the ocean?

Ethan was just about to study it more closely when the space in front of Seraphina changed.

A pitch-black rift split open without warning.

Its edges expanded fast, forming a spatial wormhole big enough for a dragon to pass through. Inside, there was no clear scenery—only layers of rotating gray light.

Seraphina was flying too fast. There was no time to change course.

Her enormous body plunged straight into the wormhole.

Gray light swallowed their vision.

When the world came back into focus, the coast and desert were gone. They were hovering over a gray-black plain.

There was no sunlight here.

The sky above stayed a heavy, oppressive gray, and the ground was pocked with pits of every size. Countless round holes were scattered across the plain—some no bigger than a fist, others wide enough for several people to walk into shoulder to shoulder.

Seraphina dropped lower and landed on a relatively flat stretch.

Once everyone climbed off her back, she shifted back into human form and took her place beside the group.

Ethan walked to the nearest opening.

The holes nearby were almost identical in shape, their rims coated in translucent slime. The liquid crawled slowly down the inner walls, gathering until it reached a point where it finally dripped from the ceiling.

Plop.

The slime fell into the darkness below.

A long time passed.

No sound of it hitting bottom.

Ethan crouched at the edge. A thread of white lightning gathered in his palm.

The arc crawled along the ground into the hole, then probed downward. Wrapped around the lightning was a small energy sphere—insurance. If something dangerous showed itself down there, Ethan wouldn’t need to explain anything.

He’d just blow it up.

White light plunged deeper underground.

Through his energy sense, Ethan watched the interior structure unfold.

This wasn’t a normal passage.

Below was a sprawling network, countless tunnels connecting and crossing at different heights, stacked and interwoven. The overall shape was like a gigantic beehive—every opening leading to something deeper, so dense it was hard to tell what could even count as a "main" route.

The first stretch of tunnel wall wasn’t rock at all.

It was soft and wet, colored a dark, near-blood red. The surface kept contracting, then swelling again in a steady rhythm—like flesh shifting inside some colossal creature.

The energy sphere continued down.

As the white light approached, the fleshy walls twitched faintly. More slime seeped out along the surface. Some sections bulged so hard they looked ready to split.

But deeper down, the material changed abruptly.

The writhing flesh thinned out.

In its place—layer upon layer of heavy steel.

Metal walls were embedded inside the meat-like structure, the seams connected so naturally it made his skin crawl. Dark red tissue wrapped the steel plates, and the steel, in turn, supported the tunnels leading further down. Two completely different structures, intertwined like they’d grown together.

The more Ethan looked, the less sense it made.

Was this some kind of mechanical beast?

Or an organic lifeform?

As the energy sphere dropped farther, something moved behind it.

The flesh walls, which had been rising and falling in a steady pattern, suddenly swelled.

Both sides extended toward the center. Layers of meat folded over layers of meat, sealing off the passage the sphere had just traveled through—completely.

Ethan’s connection to the sphere snapped.

On the surface, he stared at the hole in silence for a moment.

The sphere hadn’t exploded.

That was the only thing he could be sure of.

As for why his senses had vanished—

Maybe it had been cut off.

Or maybe something had eaten it.

Morvane had just shown them that kind of trick. At this point, another thing that could swallow energy wasn’t exactly unimaginable.

Everyone looked at Ethan, curiosity burning in their eyes, waiting for him to tell them what he’d found.