Through Julian’s account, Ethan finally pieced together the truth about Micah’s strange behavior.
When Ethan and KH3106 had departed aboard the Shatterstar, Morzan had sent the surviving trial participants back to their original locations. The day before, Red had bluntly asked Blackie to leave with her. To everyone’s surprise, he refused.
That night, however, sothing unthinkable happened. Red ambushed Blackie and knocked him unconscious. The next day, she was gone, and he returned alone. From then on, the once playful, talkative Blackie beca withdrawn, quiet, and unreadable. Nobody knew what had really transpired—until Micah erged from his ditative trance.
The very first thing Micah did was drop a revelation that shook everyone. While wandering the void during ditation, he had seen what had truly happened that night: Red had taken Blackie by force. She had sought to preserve her dwindling bloodline and chose Blackie—the Black Qilin—as the vessel for it.
The incident left Blackie traumatized. His personality withered into silence and gloom. Fearing the damage would fester, Micah began to constantly provoke him into duels. He pushed Blackie to fight, not only to sharpen his own arts but to give Blackie a release for his frustration. Over ti, Blackie clawed his way back from despair, growing stronger in battle and slowly recovering the glimrs of his old, goofy self.
Ethan listened to the tale in stunned silence. He could scarcely believe Red was capable of such a thing. Did she truly harbor feelings for Blackie, or was it nothing more than reproduction for her bloodline? If it was the latter, then Blackie’s fate was tragic indeed—especially since it was clear he had genuinely loved her.
"Blackie isn’t stupid. He’s loyal," Julian muttered, casting a glance at the qilin as it scrambled out of a pit of sand. Then Julian looked back at Ethan, his stare sharp and unyielding.
Ethan blinked at him, unsettled. "What?"
Before Julian could answer, Blackie suddenly froze mid-charge. His neck snapped upward, and he shouted in disbelief. "Wait a second—why are there only eight suns left?"
Ethan and the others quickly looked up. The Umbral sky, once dominated by nine blazing suns, now held only eight.
"Holy hell... eight suns, and that’s still considered normal?" Micah, visiting the Umbral for the first ti, stood slack-jawed at the sight.
Ethan’s chest tightened. A sick thought gnawed at him. Could the missing sun be the one he had tampered with? The very star that had been consud to power the Shatterstar... and to feed it’s last transformation? A wave of grief rippled through him. KH3106’s sacrifice was still too raw to bear.
Julian’s voice pulled him back. "Ethan... do you notice sothing? The Sea of Death doesn’t look the sa."
They all looked around. Logically, they should have appeared above Hurricane City. Yet the landscape was unrecognizable—an endless desert of golden sand, with no mountains, no storms, and no trace of Hurricane City’s colossal eye.
Ethan yanked up his system map. Their position matched perfectly: they were at the intersection of three ley-line formations, an area known as Rumination Valley. "This is the Central Region. Which ans... we should be right above Hurricane City!" he said, his voice shaking.
Julian and Blackie stared blankly, struggling to process it. Where was the hurricane? Where was the Windspirit Faction? Where was everything?
"What the hell happened here in just one year?" Ethan whispered. Then he steadied himself. "We should head back to Beastfall City first."
The others nodded, Julian especially eager. The vanishing of Hurricane City left him with an uneasy dread.
Ethan tapped the watch on his wrist. With a resonant hum, the colossal form of Shatterstar materialized before them.
Julian and the others froze in awe. "That... that’s Shatterstar?"
Ethan smirked proudly. "Not bad, right? Looks pretty slick."
The ch glead with a futuristic edge—its body a deep, tallic purple trimd with fine veins of gold, sleek as a predator. Its silhouette had the presence of a war machine but the clean elegance of sothing alive.
"Let’s go," Ethan said, motioning them aboard. As soon as they stepped inside, his voice rang out: "Shatterstar, engage stealth mode."
The ch shimred and vanished from sight. In a world like this, discretion mattered more than firepower.
Ten minutes later, they hovered above Beastfall City in the Southwest Region—and their hearts sank.
"Gods..." Julian’s voice broke with worry. Beastfall City, the eternal bastion that had stood unshaken for countless generations, now lay scarred and broken. Its walls were fractured, entire sections collapsed into ruin. From their vantage, they saw people laboring frantically to repair what remained.
Worse still, a gargantuan rift, stretching nearly a thousand miles, split the city clean in half as though so celestial blade had cleaved it apart. A vast pontoon bridge had been constructed to connect the two halves, but the wound was impossible to ignore.
Ethan’s brow furrowed. His mind spun with grim possibilities. The missing sun, the Sea of Death’s changes, Beastfall’s destruction—it all lined up. Natural disasters triggered by the loss of balance. The Spirit Realm will’s words echoed in his mind, claiming he had wrought endless slaughter. At the ti, he had dismissed it as exaggeration. Now he wasn’t so sure.
How vast was the Umbral? If the catastrophe rippled across the entire world, millions of spirits would die. Entire races might vanish into dust.
With a heavy heart, Ethan retracted Shatterstar. Their forms appeared in the open sky above Beastfall City.
Instantly, alarm horns blared from below.
Julian squinted down. "So Father really has returned..."
At once, countless purple silhouettes soared into the sky, each carrying a human rider on its back. These were the Illusionary, proud beings who served as mounts for Beastfall’s Central Guard.
The Guard was officially sworn to the City Lord, but Julian knew the truth. His father, Regis, had built this army himself before passing command down. Their true loyalty was not to the office of City Lord, but to their family. If Regis fell and Julian was denied succession, the Central Guard would simply disband.
They were his father’s blade, and now, they were already in the sky.
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