Ethan frowned.
Lily kept going. "But my power can be loaned to you anyti. You can call on it—just don't play yourself to death."
She paused, her gaze settling on him.
"But rember this. You absolutely can't die."
Her voice dropped lower.
"My body and yours… in a sense, they're linked."
"If you die, I can't live either."
A cold sheen of sweat broke out across Ethan's forehead.
He was just about to press her—what the hell did she an by linked?—when Lily's voice sank completely into the depths of his consciousness.
The ghost-blue Infernal Primordial Power that had been coiling around him also seed to get reeled back by so unseen force, fading bit by bit until it was gone. Only the spatial orb remained, rotating slowly in midair as it kept drinking in the last scraps of energy around them.
Lily's presence vanished.
Ethan stood there, his palm still carrying the lingering echo of the power fluctuations she'd shoved into him. But the entire underground space had gone quiet—so quiet it made his ears feel tight.
The collapse up above sounded farther and farther away. All around him, the endless darkness closed back in, heavy as a real abyss pressing against his skin.
He took a deep breath and forced the unease down.
He couldn't stay here.
What Lily had left him with was too sudden, too loaded—but now wasn't the ti to unravel it. This fractured Infernal Abyss pocket world was collapsing. The surrounding energy had already slipped out of balance. If he kept lingering, there was no telling what kind of distortion would swallow him up.
Ethan recalled the spatial orb. Ghastly white lightning spread under his feet.
Electric light wrapped his body, and he turned into a streak of pale-white radiance, shooting back the way he'd co.
The darkness peeled away around him. Loose stones didn't even have ti to hit the ground before the lightning shockwave crushed them into powder.
But he'd barely made it halfway when a dull tremor pulsed from deep inside the rock wall beside him.
In the next instant, an absurdly powerful force burst out of the stone.
No warning. No buildup.
It slamd straight into Ethan's side.
His ghastly white lightning barely managed to throw up a guard before the ghost-blue impact crushed it into violent distortion. Ethan went flying, his shoulder and back hamring into the opposite wall.
Boom!
A wide section of rock shattered. Cracks raced outward like veins across the stone.
Ethan was embedded half his body into the wall, chest tight and buzzing.
He detonated lightning and blasted the rubble off him, then snapped his head up toward the source of the strike.
In the darkness, a figure glowing with ghost-blue light slowly took shape.
The outline was unmistakably humanoid, but there was no normal flesh texture to it. It looked like a body condensed purely from ghost-blue energy.
Light flowed across its shoulders, chest, and arms in steady currents. With each pulse, the surrounding darkness energy gathered tighter around it. When it stepped out of the rock wall, it made no sound—
Yet the entire underground space shuddered in response.
"I really didn't expect it," the ghost-blue figure said, staring at Ethan. Its voice dripped with greed, along with a cold, superior edge. "Soone actually managed to obtain power from the abyss."
Then it tilted its head slightly, as if looking down at sothing laughably unworthy.
"But you're just a tiny human. What right do you have to hold that kind of power? Hand it over."
Ethan's heart sank.
The pressure coming off this thing was overwhelming.
That ghost-blue energy wasn't the ordinary Infernal remnants from earlier, and it wasn't like the blood-red world-gem energy on the Titan Turtle, either. It was closer to the root of this underground space itself.
It gathered to him from every direction, as if the darkness—this whole place—was standing behind him, feeding him.
Even after absorbing an Infernal Abyss energy core, even with his ghastly white lightning strengthened again, Ethan still felt that crushing weight the mont they faced off.
They weren't even playing the sa ga.
Not on the sa level at all.
Ethan's fingers tightened slightly. Ghastly white lightning slithered along his arm, but he didn't fire blindly. He was watching for a gap—anything that would let him slip away.
The ghost-blue figure only took a single step forward.
The surrounding darkness imdiately contracted inward, sealing off several routes Ethan could've broken through.
As Ethan calculated his next move, a bizarre aura suddenly surged up from deep beneath the ground at his feet.
That power didn't belong to Lily, and it didn't feel like the Infernal Primordial Power he'd just absorbed.
It rose through the fissures in the rock, climbed along his ankles, knees, and forearms, and finally resonated with the blood in his veins.
Ethan jolted.
His blood was heating up.
Not ordinary heat—more like every drop of blood was being shaken awake by that force.
The ghastly white lightning coursing through him sped up. The dark ghost-blue patterns lit in response. Even the blood-red crystals he'd just stored away trembled faintly inside his spatial reserve.
This energy was completely unfamiliar.
It could boost him in an instant, but its origin was unknown and its nature unstable. If Ethan had been anywhere else—if he'd had even a little room to be cautious—he would never have absorbed sothing like this on a whim.
But he didn't have a choice.
He opened the channels inside his body and pulled in that blood-resonating power.
Boom!
A violent aura detonated out of him.
The ghost-blue darkness that had been pinning his movent was ripped apart by ghastly white lightning, and the rubble clinging to the walls blasted outward in a spray of碎石.
Ethan's presence climbed in surges. The strange energy flowing through his blood fused with Infernal Primordial Power for a brief mont, forming deep, dark-blue patterns that spread across his arms and chest like living markings.
The ghost-blue figure was forced back several steps by the shockwave.
For the first ti, disbelief cracked through his expression.
"Impossible."
He stared at Ethan, his voice sharpening into sothing almost shrill.
"This place is my private territory. Every bit of power here resonates with my bloodline. How are you absorbing it?"
Ethan didn't answer.
The truth was, he didn't know either.
Why this energy had responded to his blood. Why it had surged up at the critical mont. Why it could override this ghost-blue figure's control over the underground space—none of it made sense yet.
But it didn't matter.
Right now, only one thing did.
Kill the bastard in front of him first.
User Comments
0 comments from readers