Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Seraphina immediately did a headcount.

Only after she confirmed everyone who’d entered the inner space had made it back did the tension finally ease out of her body—just a little.

Elowen was already hovering above the Vaelstorm Ruins.

She looked down at the tornadoes still raging, then lifted both hands. Ice-crystal snowflakes drifted out of the gray sky. At first there weren’t many. When they brushed against people’s skin, they left nothing but a faint chill.

But the tornadoes pulled in more.

The high-speed airflow sucked the ice crystals straight into their cores. Snowflakes spiraled along the wind’s paths, multiplying fast, until even the originally gray wind columns were dyed that bright, icy color.

Elowen brought her hands together.

A cold glare shot into the sky.

The temperature dropped in an instant. The biting air rolled over the ruins and sat on everyone’s chest like weight. Every exhale turned to white fog, and a thin, clear glaze of ice formed over the scattered rubble.

The tornadoes still spinning let out a heavy, grinding sound.

Frost climbed from the bases of the wind pillars upward, then froze layer by layer along the rotating currents inside. The wind cores tried to keep the tornadoes turning—only to find that every rotation just locked more ice crystals together.

In only a few breaths, those massive tornadoes became gigantic spinning ice tops.

Seraphina let out a bright, delighted dragon cry and beat her wings, shooting up into the air.

She didn’t bother with anything fancy. She lowered her head, lined her horn up with a frozen wind pillar, then used the dive to build speed. Her horn slammed head-on into the ice core.

Boom!

Cracks spiderwebbed outward from the impact point.

The frozen tornado split down the middle. Countless chunks of ice were blasted up into the air—then rained down around the ruins. The uneven blocks fell like chaotic hail, hammering the ground and punching dense craters into the dirt.

Koya saw it and immediately got excited too.

She flew up, and behind her a huge Divine Sovereign Moth gradually took shape. Its broad wings unfurled in the glow, carrying her as she charged another giant ice mass.

Copying Seraphina’s move, Koya ducked her head and sprinted forward with everything she had.

Thud!

She hit the ice.

Not even a clear crack appeared.

Instead, Koya rebounded backward from the shock. She clutched her forehead, the excitement on her face flipping straight into regret.

Too hard.

That hit did absolutely nothing.

When everyone saw her expression, they burst out laughing. Even the exhaustion from the battle eased under the sound, like someone had loosened a tight strap around their ribs.

Elira stood in the crowd, turning shy at the laughter.

She didn’t fly up with the others. She only pressed her hands together in front of her chest. Bright energy gathered between her palms, forming a beam threaded with violet-pink light.

Elira raised her arms.

The beam fired upward from the ruined ground, cutting a straight line into the sky and striking the ice chunks overhead.

The instant the light touched the ice, a ring of pitch-black ripples appeared inside every piece at once.

The ripples expanded from the center of each chunk outward. No explosion. No sound. The icy glow was swallowed by darkness in a blink—until even the falling fragments froze in midair.

The laughter died off.

A black staircase formed in the sky.

Each step was made of neat, dark bricks, stretching down from high above until it ended right in front of Ethan. A woman in black walked down slowly, her feet landing on brick with no sound at all.

Yet as she drew closer, the light across the whole sky kept dimming.

Goddess Catheryn.

The Goddess of Mournvale Abyss.

The dark Goddess.

By the time she reached Ethan’s side, every frozen wind core and every suspended shard of ice behind her had already been wrapped in silent black aura.

The ice began to shrink.

It didn’t crack. It didn’t melt. Those huge masses simply kept contracting inside the darkness—going from mountain-sized down to ordinary stone, then down to a single black speck.

Then they vanished completely.

The sky, once stuffed with storm and ice, opened up again.

Cloud layers split. Light spilled down onto the Vaelstorm Ruins, briefly illuminating the broken structures and the rubble-strewn ground.

But the moment Goddess Catheryn truly arrived, the brightness retreated again.

Darkness spread outward from beneath her feet and covered the air above the ruins. The entire region responded to her presence, like it was welcoming its own king.

Auri flew out of Ethan’s body.

The tiny figure landed on the stone ground, and the instant her feet touched down, rich life force surged outward.

Green light swept across the shattered platforms, slipped into cracks in the earth, and washed over every injured person. Wounds began to close. Drained strength refilled.

Feylora, lying off to the side, was also swallowed by that life energy.

The pallor in her face slowly eased. Her breathing steadied. The power she’d nearly burned dry began flowing again, and the fingers she’d been holding rigid finally loosened.

Andona rose into the air next.

Ten pairs of wings spread fully behind her, and golden Light Force poured from between the feathers, covering everyone in the Vaelstorm Ruins.

Warmth seeped into muscle and meridians, further nourishing damaged flesh and battered energy.

Only the area around Goddess Catheryn remained pure darkness.

Whenever Light Force neared her, it naturally bent away, as if it didn’t dare touch her. Not a single thread truly landed on her.

After a stretch of recovery, everyone finally stabilized.

Energy reserves refilled. Injuries stopped interfering with movement. Seraphina shifted back into her massive dragon form, lowered her body, and let everyone climb onto her back one by one.

Her wings spread.

Carrying them all, Seraphina left the Vaelstorm Ruins and flew toward the distance.

Ethan sat on the dragon’s back, feeling the changes inside his own power.

The fight with Maelor had squeezed him past his limits again and again. His energy emptied, refilled with help from Feylora, Auri, and Seraphina, then emptied again. Particle-form, wind energy, and that white lightning had all been used to the edge in sustained, high-intensity combat.

When everything finally settled and stabilized...

...that invisible barrier that had been blocking him was gone.

Ethan broke through smoothly to the peak of 35 Tier.

Seraphina carried them over a mountain range.

They hadn’t even cleared more than a few peaks when the world around them changed.

The first thing to vanish was the distant mountain line.

There was no collapse. No clouds swallowing it. The rolling silhouette simply withdrew from their vision—replaced by enormous vertical bars rising up into the sky.

Seraphina immediately slowed.

Only then did everyone realize they weren’t over the mountains anymore.

They were inside a cage.

The cage was circular, its edges so far away distance was hard to judge. Each bar was as thick as a mountain pillar, stretching upward into the gray sky and downward into darkness with no visible bottom.

Seraphina’s huge dragon body hovered inside it—and still looked small.

No one saw how they’d entered.

One moment they were flying over peaks.

The next, the peaks were gone.

A beam of light suddenly snapped on in the gray sky.

It dropped straight down from above the cage and pinned them perfectly. The glare was so harsh everyone reflexively shut their eyes. Even Seraphina turned her head aside and threw up a wing to block it.

A heavy breathing sound came from outside the bars.

Airflow pushed through the cage, shoving Seraphina’s body sideways. When everyone forced their eyes open against the light, a gigantic dragon head was already there beyond the bars.

That head was larger than the cage’s entrance itself.

The dragon brought one eye close to the bars, studying the people inside with clear interest. Its body extended along the circle into the distance, coiling around the entire prison.

Ethan lifted his head, then turned to look the other way.

He wanted to see the dragon’s full body.

But no matter how far his gaze tracked along it, all he ever found was more scales and more endlessly extending coils. Their position felt like a continuously rotating spatial hollow—the "front" and "back" shifting with the dragon’s body, the sense of direction constantly being rewritten.

There was no way to see it all.

Outside the cage, the dragon raised a claw.

Between two talons, a Stellar Core rotated slowly.

It wasn’t large, but the light on its surface had been compressed to the extreme. Energy layers folded inward on themselves, and with every rotation, the surrounding space visibly caved toward its center.

It looked like a Stellar Core crushed down into a miniature, hyper-dense form.

The dragon toyed with it casually for a moment.

Then it flicked its claw forward.

The Stellar Core shot out from between its talons.

The circular cage didn’t hinder it at all. The sphere slipped cleanly through the bars and flew in a straight line toward the group on Seraphina’s back.