Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Up ahead, the wind core started leaking bright firelight.

It finally felt the shift. The airflow inside it turned chaotic. The green glow stopped being smooth and steady—red fire and gold light began crisscrossing and burning through the core, slowly overwhelming its original wind aura.

The core stopped absorbing on its own.

Seraphina and Andona didn’t.

They pushed even harder.

Their power braided inside the core—scarlet dragonfire fused with holy radiance. The dragonfire burned. Divine Power judged. The two wrapped around each other and followed the core’s internal currents, drilling deeper and deeper.

Burn everything.

Pass judgment on the world.

At last, the wind core tried to forcibly cut the transfer.

It summoned a swarm of smaller wind blasts, surrounding Seraphina and Andona from every side, preparing a coordinated strike. The dense wind blasts arranged themselves into a ring midair, and at the same time the pressure from the core’s depths expanded outward.

Andona beat her wings.

A shield formed instantly—scarlet and gold interwoven—covering both her and Seraphina. Seraphina swept her wings too, her massive dragon wings whipping up a cyclone along the shield’s outer surface. It wasn’t as refined as the enemy’s wind control, but it still reinforced the barrier.

Above them, the wind core began to swell.

The core that had once been green now glittered with gold and threw off sparks of flame. Like it finally realized it couldn’t beat them head-on, it started actively pulling in even more dragonfire and holy light. That suction carried panic... and a kind of grim, suicidal resolve.

Andona glanced at Seraphina, who was still feeding power into it.

Both of them sensed the danger at the same time.

They maintained the transfer while flying outward, trying to open distance. But suddenly, they realized their strength had already been drained down to almost nothing. They tried to cut off the flow—

—and the wind grabbed them.

Their remaining power poured out against their will, all of it forced toward the wind core at the center.

A broken, intermittent voice drifted to them.

"You... thank you..."

The core abruptly turned fire-red.

The reverse-wind barrier around it vanished completely, exposing the true core directly in front of them. Blinding light washed over their shield. Heat and holy radiance mixed together, sizzling against the barrier’s surface.

Andona and Seraphina shot out of the ruins.

They beat their wings, trying to break the pull. The next instant, the core detonated—an explosion of red-hot light laced with resentment and fury. The brilliant shockwave shoved outward, blasting both of them even farther away from the ruin.

The flames and holy power inside that wave were violently unstable.

And with that—

Their real danger arrived.

A white lightning sphere appeared in front of them.

Andona’s golden shield had already been torn apart by the blast. Just as the fire and holy light were about to swallow them, white lightning snapped into a white barrier in front of the two of them. Electric light crisscrossed its surface, forcing the raging wave to stop.

Then the white lightning pierced the wind’s remaining wall and slipped easily into the heart of the explosion.

When it "saw" the power that belonged to Seraphina and Andona inside, it hesitated—just for a moment. Dragonfire and holy radiance had been churned into complete disorder by the wind core. Without control, the aftershock would be enough to blow this entire level of the ruin apart.

The white lightning began to suppress it.

The madness gradually stilled.

Stone pillars on this level had been battered so hard they were nearly ground to dust, their surfaces spiderwebbed with cracks—yet they still stood in the distance. Seraphina and Andona hurried back inside to check.

The wind core was gone.

In its place floated a single pure-white orb.

Lightning and glaring firelight intertwined and fused inside that orb—

—but in the end, every unstable trace was pressed down by the white lightning and dispersed into nothing.

With its job done, that white lightning energy body drifted upward, flying toward the top level.

At the top, Ethan recalled the white lightning sphere and looked toward the center of the formation.

A teleportation array had appeared at some point. The wind blasts no longer formed. Instead, several obedient "core" objects stood quietly in place. They displayed their cores openly—no attack, no dodging, no resistance.

A broken voice echoed directly inside everyone’s minds.

"Welcome... you... here..."

"Hope... follow... you follow..."

Ethan discussed it briefly with the others.

In the end, he decided to leave Namyanna, Elira, and Elowen behind, while the rest would follow him deeper.

One by one, the remaining companions stepped toward the teleportation array. Ethan had already seeped his power into the formation, so it shouldn’t be dangerous. The only thing that bothered him was the cores standing off to the side.

Those cores couldn’t be infiltrated.

They were like powerless butlers, standing watch on their own. Wind still circulated around them, but their inner cores were empty—like they needed to be recharged.

Elira tried to be sneaky, wanting to slip along with them.

The moment she stepped forward, Elowen caught her. Frost crystalized under Elira’s feet, locking her to the spot. Elira looked down, then up at Elowen, and had no choice but to behave and stay put.

Ethan and the others stepped into the teleportation array.

White light flashed, and they vanished.

A blink later, the glow faded.

Ethan slowly opened his eyes.

The space in front of him was completely different.

Countless platforms were held up by towering boulders, arranged in a ring around them. Between each platform was a bottomless gap, and at the center of the entire circle was a pit that looked like it had no end—an abyss with no floor.

Ethan leaned forward, peering down.

There was no light inside. No wind sound. Only a hollow, absolute stillness. It felt like it swallowed every noise. Even their breathing seemed muted.

Ethan frowned and glanced at the "butler" cores that had followed them.

"When did this place get added? You lured us here on purpose, didn’t you?"

The butlers didn’t answer.

Then Ataneya’s tail tapped the ground lightly, making a crisp tick.

The butler cores shuddered.

And one after another, they detonated—out of control.