Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Ethan drew on his white lightning and the spatial power he’d just stolen, trying to pry a passage open in the boundary.

Arcs of electricity skated across the surface in a frantic spread, but all they left behind were ripples that vanished almost immediately. His spatial blade carved into it too—only managing to scratch the faintest, shallow mark between the two layers.

To punch through here, to enter the real Inverted Layer...

Was far harder than he’d expected.

Lily released only a wisp of her strength.

A soft glow seeped out from inside Ethan, spreading along his black particles like a slow tide. It wrapped the rejecting boundary completely, coating it end to end. The surface that had been hard as welded steel suddenly shivered, rippling like a taut membrane that had finally lost the force holding it rigid.

Ethan didn’t even have time to adjust his stance.

The space under his feet dropped out.

All resistance vanished at once.

His body slipped through the boundary and fell straight into the Inverted Layer.

The fall didn’t last long. When Ethan felt solid support under his feet again, he opened his eyes slowly.

This place was nothing like the Surface Layer.

Up there, everything lived under a gray-black shroud, and light only flashed into existence when energy detonated. Down here, the brightness was steady and clean—white light running along the floor and walls into the distance, so pure it reminded him of Andona’s Light Force when she fully unleashed it.

He narrowed his eyes until his vision adjusted, then finally made out the structure around him.

It looked like a massive laboratory.

Not the kind packed with elegant tech or flashy machines. The instruments arranged around the room were simple in shape, almost crude, and thick bundles of pipes ran through the walls and floor—every last one of them converging toward the center.

And at the center of all those instruments...

Hung an enormous brain.

No skull. No protection. Every groove and fold was exposed in sickening detail. Each time it twitched, the pipes around it trembled in response, and strings of shifting data lit up across the instruments like they were reading its pulse.

Ethan stared at the brain, his gaze slowly sliding forward.

On the front-facing structure, there was a face—recognizable.

And uncomfortably familiar.

"Vhalrath?"

Ethan stopped.

It was the same humanoid visage Vhalrath had been wearing earlier... except now only part of its outline remained, fused into that colossal mass of brain tissue.

Beyond it stretched a room that seemed to have no end.

Mirrors formed the walls, the ceiling, even the corridors. The reflections multiplied each other into infinity, making every path repeat and stretch away—almost identical to what Ethan had seen when he’d entered Vhalrath’s body earlier.

The same mirrors.

The same dense maze of rooms.

The same structure that made direction feel meaningless.

If anything, Ethan’s confusion sharpened.

If this was the true core... then why hadn’t he seen this brain when he infiltrated Vhalrath before?

He didn’t approach right away. Instead, he moved along the room’s edge at a slow, measured pace.

Thin streams of data rose from the instruments, weaving through the air like glowing threads. Sometimes they condensed into rough human silhouettes. Sometimes they broke apart into chaotic strings of symbols. In the end, they slipped into different mirrors and vanished.

Ethan watched for a moment, then murmured, almost to himself.

"Cloning?"

He lifted a hand toward one of the streams. Before his fingertip could touch it, the data split on its own into several smaller strands.

"Or copying?"

The central brain reacted.

Its steady, rhythmic twitch paused—just once.

Then the mirrors nearest Ethan flared bright all at once. Light and shadow inside them rearranged at high speed, and familiar figures stepped out of the reflections.

Ataneya appeared first.

Twelve fox tails spread behind her, their tips fanning in different directions as she scanned the area with hard caution.

From another mirror, Catheryn walked out more slowly. Her long black dress dragged over the bright floor, and deep-black aura bled outward around her feet.

More companions emerged one after another.

When they first arrived, none of the copies locked onto Ethan. They held their own guarded stances instead, as if searching for an intruder.

Then one of them noticed the black particles on the ground that hadn’t fully dispersed yet.

Every replica turned at the same time.

Their combat forms snapped open in unison.

Ataneya’s fox tails slammed forward first. Catheryn’s darkness surged in from the other side. The rest of the attacks followed, ripping through the room and converging where Ethan had been standing.

Boom!

The floor spiderwebbed with cracks.

The mirror-walls shuddered from the impact, dense ripples racing across their surfaces.

But the real Ethan was already gone.

Before the strikes landed, he’d returned to black particleization, slipping through the blind spots created by the mirrors’ reflections. He flowed around the replicas and reappeared beside the central brain.

With Lily backing him, he really could afford to breathe.

Ethan re-formed.

Black particles gathered along the brain’s side, knitting back into a full body. He didn’t attack immediately. He just stood close, studying the monstrous thing in front of him.

The brain kept twitching.

Every fold contracted independently. Clear fluid beaded and seeped across its surface. Some of the pipes were thick, some thin—certain lines were pumping energy into the brain, while others were siphoning away lit-up data and power.

Feeding it...

And also harvesting everything it produced.

Ethan followed the pipes with his eyes and took a few steps along their junction points. He was about to reach out and examine one when a voice suddenly sounded in his head.

"You finally came."

It didn’t come from any direction.

It appeared directly in the deepest part of his consciousness—flat, calm, and completely emotionless.

"A few seconds late. But it doesn’t matter."

Ethan stopped cold.

A chill crawled up his spine.

Finally came?

It had been waiting for him?

Lily didn’t give it a second to act.

She fused into Ethan instantly.

The moment their powers met, the air around Ethan was forced outward as if shoved by invisible hands. White light surged from his chest through his limbs, and a violent pressure blasted upward, shaking the nearby pipes until they rattled hard.

The central brain began to twitch faster.

And at the same time, the mirrors changed.

Inside the surfaces that had been reflecting the room, faces appeared—twisted, warped, pressed up close. Men and women. Some still vaguely human. Some so distorted you couldn’t even tell what species they’d once been.

Then the screaming started.

"Don’t!"

"Ah— I don’t want to...!"

"Stop... don’t...!"

The voices layered over each other in waves, hammering straight into Ethan.

They had no clear source. No stable distance. No matter how Ethan tried to shut out sound, the screams replayed right beside his ears—because they weren’t traveling through air at all.

Someone was crying.

Someone was begging.

And some of them were past words, reduced to raw, repeating shrieks.

The noise thickened, growing denser and denser, like it was trying to pack every empty space inside his mind until there was nothing left.