Long Chapter
—
Everything had happened so quickly that Ethan could barely process it. One mont he had been arguing with that troubleso little monk, and the next the kid had been chased off by lightning that twisted through a perfectly clear sky.
Still, one thing was certain.
That annoying brat was finally gone.
Not wanting to risk the possibility that the kid might suddenly reappear, Ethan imdiately picked a direction and bolted. As for the parting shout about finding him later, Ethan could not care less.
Forget whether the lightning would kill him or not. Even if it did not, Ethan was hardly alone. He had plenty of people around him.
If the kid really ca looking for trouble, they would simply surround him and beat him senseless.
So what if he was fast?
Ethan would happily introduce him to the ancient and reliable concept known as a group beating.
Moving at high speed, Ethan quickly decided he was too lazy to keep flying under his own power. With a casual command he summoned his ch. The sleek humanoid machine materialized around him, and once he set the coordinates, the ch blasted forward at full speed while Ethan simply rode along inside.
Before long he had reunited with Victor and the others.
When Ethan arrived, the area looked like a battlefield that had barely survived a war. The forest was wrecked, trees shattered or burning, the ground gouged with deep scars from violent energy collisions.
It was obvious the fighting here had been fierce.
Ethan had contacted Victor imdiately after activating his ch, so he already knew the battle had ended. According to Victor, the fight had started shortly after Ethan left. At first, Victor and the others had simply been testing their abilities against the lower level fighters from the Divine Sea Temple.
They had been using the opportunity to hone their skills. Unfortunately, the temple mbers had absolutely no sense of honor.
Instead of matching them fairly, the entire group attacked at once.
Even their strongest fighters joined the assault.
Victor and the others had been completely caught off guard. They had expected a series of smaller duels, not an all-out swarm.
Fortunately, Uncle Jed and Hank had stepped in.
They intercepted the two strongest temple fighters and held them back while everyone else dealt with the weaker enemies.
The clash between the powerhouses had lasted nearly half an hour. Neither opponent had been easy to handle.
One of the temple fighters had fought Uncle Jed head-on and managed to survive, barely.
The other had taken on Hank.
Their battle had been even more evenly matched. The two of them traded attacks back and forth in a constant exchange of techniques, neither gaining the upper hand.
Hank’s strength was clearly stronger, but the temple fighter had strange equipnt that allowed him to compensate.
The man carried so kind of ion shield that ford a glowing grid around his body whenever he activated it. No one knew where the Divine Sea Temple had obtained such advanced technology.
Because of that shield, even though his strength was weaker than Hank’s, he could withstand the endless barrage of wind blades Hank unleashed.
Then everything changed.
Hank summoned a massive tornado, a roaring pillar of wind that tore through the battlefield.
The enemy responded imdiately.
With a roar he threw a punch forward, forming a gigantic fist-shaped energy imprint that surged toward the tornado.
The two techniques were about to collide, but right at that mont, Blackie moved.
He simply flicked his finger.
A tiny spark shot out from his fingertip like a flying sword and instantly rged with Hank’s tornado.
BOOM—
The mont the spark entered, the energy inside the tornado surged violently. A wave of scorching heat burst outward as Hank’s swirling vortex suddenly turned blazing red.
The tornado had beco a massive firestorm. Even Hank himself stared in shock.
"Holy mother..."
Before he could react further, the enormous fist imprint slamd into the fire tornado.
FWOOOSH—
It was like watching a twig thrown into a hurricane. The massive energy fist shattered instantly.
Before this, their attacks had clashed many tis and always ended the sa way, both techniques destroying each other in a stalemate. But after thirty minutes of fighting, Hank’s energy was beginning to scatter slightly from exhaustion.
anwhile the temple fighter, though weaker, seed strangely stable. His energy remained perfectly steady, almost as if he had an endless supply.
Because of that confidence, he had not taken Hank’s latest attack too seriously.
He never expected such a sudden change.
By the ti he realized what was happening and tried to defend himself, it was already too late.
The blazing tornado closed the distance in seconds.
The man activated his shield again, the glowing grid instantly wrapping around his entire body. Then the fire tornado swallowed him whole.
Tornado techniques were sustained attacks. They did not explode once and vanish. They continued grinding and tearing apart anything trapped inside.
The shield proved surprisingly durable. The spinning vortex carved through the air with endless cutting force and blistering heat, but the glowing grid barrier held firm.
No one could tell what kind of power source was driving it. It looked almost limitless.
Blackie flicked his finger again, this ti a small green spark shot out.
Everyone clearly saw it. The spark resembled a tiny leaf shrunk down to almost nothing.
In an instant it streaked through the air and plunged into the raging fire tornado.
The tornado shuddered violently.
Flas erupted outward as the spinning vortex expanded wildly. From the outside it looked like the tornado had swollen into a massive rotating fireball.
Within seconds it reached nearly a hundred ters across. But the expansion only lasted a brief mont, then the fireball suddenly collapsed inward.
THUD.
A dull, heavy sound echoed through the air as the enormous sphere rapidly compressed.
Its color deepened as it shrank. At a few ters wide it had turned dark red, at the height of a person it had beco a terrifying black-purple fla.
Only then did everyone hear the scream.
"AHHH... NO...!"
The cry ca from inside that black-purple burning figure.
POP.
The sound resembled a balloon bursting as the flaming figure shattered apart and vanished instantly. Nothing remained except the suffocating heat in the air and the forest below slowly catching fire.
It was as though the man had never existed at all.
Everyone stood there staring.
The earlier transformation of Hank’s tornado into a fire tornado had clearly been Blackie’s doing as well. The ability to interfere with soone else’s attack without disrupting it, even strengthening it instead, was terrifying.
Just how deep was Blackie’s understanding of elental power?
What confused everyone even more was the green leaf he had launched afterward. That attack carried an unmistakable wood elent aura.
But since when did Blackie possess wood elent? Everyone knew he controlled wind, fire, water, and lightning.
Four elents.
Now it seed there was a fifth. Apparently he had awakened it at so point without anyone noticing.
With Blackie’s help, one of the temple powerhouses died instantly.
Hank did not waste the opportunity. He imdiately swung his arm and launched a massive wind blade toward the opponent fighting Uncle Jed.
That man had barely been holding his ground against Uncle Jed already. His only advantage was a strange pistol that fired powerful beams of energy.
Now, with Hank interfering from the side, the man had no chance. Uncle Jed’s spear thrust forward and pierced straight through his chest.
"Ugh... useless... Divine Sea Temple is eternal... we are immortal..."
The man coughed blood while grinning up at Uncle Jed.
"Die."
Uncle Jed twisted his spear.
BANG.
The man exploded into a cloud of blood mist.
"Immortal, my ass," Uncle Jed muttered, spitting in disgust. "I’ll make sure you die screaming." The blood mist covered his entire body, leaving him standing there like a blood-drenched war god.
With their strongest fighters dead, the remaining temple mbers imdiately panicked. They scattered in every direction like frightened monkeys, buy unfortunately for them, Ethan’s orders had been clear.
Kill them all.
The mont they tried to escape, Uncle Jed raised his palm.
Dragon Child flashed into the sky, her body dissolved into an enormous curtain of water that spread across the entire battlefield.
The area was sealed instantly, there was nowhere left to run and nowhere left to hide. Within seconds, every remaining temple fighter had been wiped out.
After the battle ended, Uncle Jed and the others did not approach the Energy Sphere.
Ethan had warned them earlier. For so reason he had always felt sothing strange about that sphere.
He had specifically told them to wait until he returned before getting any closer. When Ethan finally arrived, his first order was for everyone to stay where they were.
He walked toward the sphere alone. The Twilight War Spear was still in his hand, those golden and pink lights clinging to it still prevented him from storing it away, forcing him to carry it like this.
When he reached the base of the massive sphere, Ethan rested the spear on his shoulder and reached out with one hand.
His fingers passed straight through.
Nothing. The sphere behaved like a projection, It had no physical substance at all.
Ethan extended his perception to examine it. Still nothing.
Yet the energy radiating from the sphere was very real. It poured outward like a massive fountain and standing near it felt like standing inside a hurricane.
His clothes snapped violently in the rushing energy currents. The waves of power surged toward him continuously, trying to seep through his pores and enter his body.
But Ethan had suspected sothing was wrong with this energy long ago, so before approaching, he had already sealed every pore on his body with his own power.
Unable to enter him, the energy waves continued to crash against him, however, they behaved strangely.
The first wave attempted to force its way inside. When it failed, the energy simply flowed past him like a gentle wind. After that, the waves no longer tried to force entry.
They just drifted past him and continued onward. Wave after wave, in an endless circle.
A normal person would never notice anything unusual, but Ethan’s powerful soul senses made the difference clear.
The energy waves reaching him were not the sa each ti.
Every ti a wave discovered it could not enter his body, it reacted almost like a bee discovering a flower that held no nectar. It would touch him briefly, realize there was nothing there for it, and then drift away.
"Definitely not normal," Ethan muttered.
"This energy behaves like sharks slling blood when they sense the human body. Where is it coming from?"
His eyes narrowed as he studied the massive sphere.
"Disguised as pure energy... tempting people to absorb it. What’s the real goal?"
Even the sphere itself might be nothing more than an illusion. If that were true, then where was the real source?
Ethan slowly looked down at the ground beneath his feet.
"Underground?"
His senses plunged downward. One kiloter, nothing.
He frowned.
Where had this thing co from? It could not have appeared out of nowhere. With no imdiate answers, Ethan slowly stepped back.
Once he reached a safe distance, his body crackled with energy as the ch reford around him.
"Shatterstar," he said calmly. "I’m sending you the footage. Analyze it."
The ch’s eyes glowed blue as scanning mode activated. From bottom to top it scanned the entire sphere and the ground beneath it, recording every detail before transmitting the data to Shatterstar’s core system.
A response ca quickly.
[Analyzing...]
[Beep...]
[Analysis complete.]
A stream of data appeared on Ethan’s terminal.
Shatterstar did not give a verbal explanation. Instead, it sent him a modified version of his scan with detailed annotations.
The entire sphere was outlined and labeled:
[Illusory Projection]
Ethan’s eyes narrowed. Just as he suspected.
Sothing that could be seen but not touched or detected through perception could only be a projection.
But projected from where? What exactly was it hiding?
That question remained unanswered. The next label appeared beside the flowing energy.
[Divine Realm: Contaminant]
Below the label was a data file.
"Divine Realm?" Ethan murmured. "This energy... cos from the Divine Realm?"
More alarming was the second word.
’Contaminant.’
Ethan opened the file and a video began playing. The first scene showed an enormous starfield.
Suddenly the fabric of space trembled violently. Sothing seed to pierce through the barrier surrounding that starfield.
Black gas poured through the breach, wave after wave. The mont it appeared, it scattered in every direction like a swarm of locusts.
The next scene shifted to the surface of a planet. The inhabitants looked surprisingly similar to humans from Earth.
But there were differences.
So people had snail-like antennae growing from their heads. Others had purple or green skin. Despite their strange appearances, they all shared one thing in common.
Every single person wore a ch. So had partial chanical armor, while others were equipped with full-body systems similar to Ethan’s.
But that was not what captured Ethan’s attention; It was the chaos.
The sa black gas waves from before descended upon the planet. They behaved like living creatures.
Each wave targeted a single individual and Once it reached them, the gas forced its way into their body.
Monts later the fallen victims stood up again, their eyes had turned completely black. No whites and no pupils. Then, like mindless wandering souls, they ford lines and began marching away in silence.
Where they were going remained unknown. Then the video ended abruptly. Apparently whoever recorded it had been attacked as well.
"This footage is from where?" Ethan asked.
Shatterstar responded imdiately.
[This recording originated from a remote undeveloped planet located on the outer edge of the First Universe.]
[After this footage was received, the First Universe initiated a planetary defense program. The first phase was destroyed within hours.]
[The second phase was activated in response. That program created .]
Ethan’s expression darkened.
"So this is the Divine Realm contaminant you ntioned. How is it different from the energy we’re seeing here?"
[The current energy eruption contains traces of that substance. Concentration approximately one ten-thousandth of the original sample. Extrely diluted.]
Ethan stared at the massive energy sphere. This so-called energy had already spread across the entire planet.
Even if the contaminant existed at only one ten-thousandth concentration, it was still entering countless human bodies.
For now it had not caused visible problems, but at higher concentrations... It would eventually produce the sa results shown in the video.
Those people had clearly been controlled. And where they marched afterward was unknown.
Shatterstar’s database contained only the initial recordings. It had lost contact with the First Universe long ago. After leaving, it had crashed in the Second Universe and remained inactive for nearly a thousand years.
No one even knew how ti flowed between the First and Second Universes. For all they knew, the First Universe might already be completely overrun.
An entire universe of life, unimaginable numbers of beings, possibly dood.
"Divine Realm..."
Anger slowly burned in Ethan’s chest. What exactly did that place want? Those victims had not been killed imdiately.
Unless...
A sudden thought crossed his mind.
Earth’s own history was filled with invasion and colonization. Was the Divine Realm doing sothing similar?
Did they lack population?
Were they invading other universes to gather people and expand their own world?
Divine Realm.
Was "Divine" simply a prettier word for Void? Like, was it empty?
Ethan shook his head and pushed those thoughts aside. Right now the priority was stopping the massive surge of energy.
If this eruption could be halted, perhaps the contaminant would no longer cross into their world. Or perhaps the energy itself originated from the Divine Realm.
If that were true... Then the Divine Realm’s power reserves were truly terrifying.
Ethan looked back at the video file again, carefully checking whether Shatterstar had marked any possible thod of shutting the phenonon down.
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