Lightning swallowed the man whole, his scream cut off mid-breath as his body disintegrated into drifting ash.
"Pah. Trash."
Blackie spat without the slightest hesitation, his face twisted with open contempt as the last sparks faded from the air.
"Blackie!"
He didn’t even flinch, still wearing that look of utter disdain, until a faint voice rose from below. It was weak, almost illusory, as if it didn’t fully belong to this world.
Blackie froze.
He snapped his head down, eyes widening as he stared toward the ground. A familiar face was looking back up at him, lips curled into an infuriatingly calm, knowing smile.
"B-Boss!"
Shock and joy crashed into Blackie all at once. His body dissolved into a streak of lightning, and in the next instant he was already on the ground, standing right in front of Ethan.
"Boss! It’s really you! It is you!" Blackie grabbed him, arms wrapping tight as his voice cracked. "Wahh... you’re finally back!"
Ethan endured the hug for about two seconds before the awkwardness beca unbearable. He shoved Blackie off and grabbed him by the shoulders, his grip firm. "Enough. What the hell happened?"
Blackie sniffed loudly, wiping his face with the back of his hand. "I thought I’d never see you again..."
"Not that," Ethan cut in, giving him a sharp shake. "I’m asking about Lyla and the others. And the Divine Sea Temple. How did their people co ashore? Did the restrictions break?"
Blackie stiffened, his expression turning uncertain. "Lyla and them... I don’t know. I really don’t." He hesitated, then hurried on. "But the Divine Sea Temple, that was because of the Energy Pool. When the concentration hit a certain level, they could survive on land. It was like... like..."
He frowned, struggling to find the right comparison.
"Like fish in water," Ethan finished quietly, his eyes narrowing. "Then what about this place? Why was it marked as their forbidden zone?"
Blackie had said earlier that Ethan had co back again, which ant he himself had returned here multiple tis.
"I don’t know that either!" Blackie blurted out, clearly frustrated. "I swear!"
Ethan let go and exhaled slowly. If even Blackie didn’t know, then guessing was pointless. He would need answers straight from soone’s soul.
That thought made Shatterstar surface in his mind.
"Let’s go."
He didn’t wait for a response. Ethan activated his humanoid combat ch, lifted off smoothly, and shot toward Shatterstar. Blackie hurriedly wiped his face and followed.
Inside Shatterstar, Ethan imdiately accessed the surveillance systems. With the ship’s technology, any cara feed was fair ga. Shatterstar wasn’t just advanced. It was the ultimate hacker. No system on Earth could truly hide from it.
He began with real-ti feeds. Dozens, then hundreds of windows flickered to life across the screens, but Ethan’s enhanced Soul Sense processed them effortlessly.
"Hm?" he muttered, brow furrowing. "So only this area is abandoned? Other regions... people are living normally?"
He turned slightly. "Blackie, weren’t you in the badlands? What’s the situation over there?"
Blackie blinked. "Oh, right. About half a year ago, the badlands got unified. Blackfin tead up with the Apex Predators and took control, so I ca back here. When I arrived, a few punks showed up and I dealt with them. I couldn’t find any of you, so I went back. Since then, I’ve been checking this place every once in a while."
Ethan nodded and issued a command to roll back the footage tistamps. Much of the data from a year and three months ago had already been overwritten, leaving large gaps, but by pushing backward little by little, he was still able to piece together the larger picture.
Six months ago, roughly one month before Blackie’s return, Harmony City experienced a massive surge in Energy Pool activity. Not long after, the phenonon spread outward. Magnolia Valley as a whole was affected, then other regions followed. Across the rged world, alliances began to form, and four or more Advanced-tier fortresses fell under the control of single guilds.
The first eruption had occurred in Magnolia Valley, specifically in the Southern Theater. Ethan tried to recall the power structure there from his past life, but no matter how hard he thought, he couldn’t rember any single faction strong enough to monopolize all the Advanced fortresses.
Clearly, his mories from his past life could no longer be used as a reliable reference. Back then, the strongest guild in the Southern Theater had been the Drunken Wanderers, but even they would have needed allies to pull this off. Whether they were still dominant this ti was anyone’s guess.
Comparing the data from multiple regions, Ethan noticed a clear pattern. When the Energy Pool concentration reached a critical threshold, it triggered an eruption. In Magnolia Valley, the eruption point wasn’t Ember City, but Central Magnolia City, located southwest of it, near the geographical center of the state.
The surveillance data for that area was a complete dead zone. No caras, no recordings. Everything had been deliberately destroyed, leaving behind a perfect blackout.
It wasn’t far.
Ethan decided to see it for himself. Sothing was spewing out an enormous amount of energy from that location. Without such a concentrated supply, the Divine Sea Temple’s people would never have been able to survive on land. More than that, he suspected it was their forward base. Otherwise, there was no reason to erase surveillance so thoroughly.
There was no reason to wait.
Ethan set Shatterstar on auto-navigation but didn’t take the pilot’s seat. He continued reviewing footage as they traveled. As for why the villa had been declared a forbidden zone by the Divine Sea Temple, he had several guesses. It could be related to Lyla and the others. Or perhaps they knew he had vanished from this place, failed to find him, and sealed it off as a precaution. Another possibility was more unsettling. They might believe this was his ho.
If that was the case, then the Divine Sea Temple already had him firmly in their sights.
Ember City was close to Central Magnolia. Before long, Shatterstar hovered above the city.
Ethan looked down.
Silence.
An oppressive, unnatural stillness blanketed everything. Not a single person could be seen. The entire city looked like it had been emptied overnight.
"Ethan, look at that!" Blackie suddenly exclaid, pointing downward in shock.
Ethan had already seen it.
A gigantic sphere of light dominated the city’s center. Dense, overflowing energy seeped from it like mist, distorting the air.
"Is the Mythic Age arriving?" Ethan murmured. "This level of energy..."
On Earth, only the Mythic Age had ever produced eruptions this violent. And those eruptions had always originated from the Divine Sea Temple.
The Temple was like a massive reservoir, storing energy across eras. At the end of each great cycle of Earth, it would be destroyed naturally. Every creature within it held enormous reserves of power. In that sense, the Divine Sea Temple was a leech.
A cultivated leech.
Earth itself was like a sleeping giant. While it slumbered, the leech fed greedily on its blood. When the giant awoke, it squeezed all that blood back out, then crushed the leech completely.
That blood was energy, the fuel the gods of the Mythic Age used for cultivation. But it was never infinite. There was always a limit. Seen that way, the Divine Sea Temple was less a leech and more a herd of fattened livestock, raised carefully by Earth and slaughtered when the cycle ended.
Ethan had thought about this before. But this wasn’t the Mythic Age.
So where was this energy coming from?
He issued a command to Shatterstar to analyze the sphere.
The response ca almost instantly.
[Beep... Analysis complete. Source identified: Grand Ethereal Array.]
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