Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Chapter 1153: Eyes in the Deep

Ethan felt the brand-new power coursing through him and didn’t linger in the cave.

His eyes went to the massive fissure in the center of the floor—the one the grotesque creature had torn open when it burrowed up.

The crack was bottomless. Darkness spilled out of it like a living thing, with not a trace of light inside. And yet the closer Ethan got, the more active the Infernal Abyss runes inside him became. Even Lily’s presence sharpened, noticeably more awake.

There was something down there.

Ethan didn’t hesitate. He jumped straight into the fissure.

The moment his body dropped into the dark, the cave’s faint light vanished behind him.

All that remained was the sound of air ripping past his ears as he fell. The fissure felt like it led to an endless abyss—far deeper than any normal underground space. Ethan kept plummeting, ghastly white lightning sliding along his skin, but it couldn’t illuminate more than a short distance ahead.

He didn’t know how much time passed before he finally hit the ground.

A heavy, muffled echo rolled out beneath his feet.

Ethan straightened slowly and looked around.

It was pitch-black.

No ghost-blue glow. No runes lighting up. Nothing to give him direction. The entire space felt terrifyingly dense, so heavy that even his breathing seemed to get swallowed halfway.

After landing, Ethan’s breaths quickly turned ragged.

The darkness around him was too thick.

This wasn’t just the absence of light—it was like a slab of energy pressing in from every side.

He raised his hand. Ghastly white lightning sparked to life in his palm as he tried to carve out a beam of light—

But the instant the arcs flared, the darkness surged in from all directions.

The light was devoured.

The lightning still danced in his hand, but it didn’t reach even half a foot. The moment any glow left the edge of the electrical arcs, it vanished in silence—wiped out by something that seemed born to suppress light.

Ethan’s expression darkened.

He forced his mind steady and opened the system, scanning the energy in the surrounding area. The feedback appeared almost instantly, rows of data sliding past his eyes.

The air. The rock. The spatial boundary. Even the unseen ground beneath his feet—

Everything was saturated with the same energy.

Pure darkness energy.

This wasn’t an ordinary shadow, and it wasn’t what happened when there simply wasn’t any light. This was a force that actively swallowed illumination, suppressed perception, and cut off energy fluctuations.

Ethan tested it, sending a thin strand of transparent lightning outward.

The moment it left his body, the darkness crushed down, making the strand shudder violently.

He frowned, already thinking through how to force even a sliver of light into this place.

Then something inside him trembled.

Humm!

A figure slowly surfaced from within Ethan.

Lily appeared at his side. Her body was far more solid than before, though she still carried a faintly translucent quality.

She lifted a hand. Infernal Primordial Power rippled out from her palm. What it released wasn’t ordinary light, but a deep, ghost-blue radiance.

As that ghost-blue glow spread, the darkness finally retreated.

It didn’t rush in to swallow it like it had with Ethan’s ghastly white lightning. Instead, it reacted as if it had encountered a higher-ranking power of the same origin—slowly parting to either side.

Rugged stone walls emerged from the black. Broken strata. And ahead, an underground passage stretching forward with no visible end.

Ethan watched, something shifting in his eyes.

But Lily was already staring into the distance.

"Yeah," she said softly, with excitement pressed tight beneath the words. "This is the place."

"It looks like when the Infernal Abyss collided with other worlds back then... a fractured piece of that world fell away," she murmured, gaze locked forward.

"And it landed right here."

Hearing that, Ethan’s heart jolted.

He looked at the rock walls lit by Lily’s ghost-blue glow.

This place didn’t feel like an ordinary cave at all. Fine black veins ran through the strata everywhere, and deep inside those veins, an incredibly faint current of Infernal Primordial Power flowed.

It was nothing like the hidden world above.

If anything, it felt like some ancient force had hammered a foreign piece of reality straight into the earth and left it wedged here.

"So what you’re saying is..." Ethan turned to Lily. "This is basically a small world derived from the Infernal Abyss?"

Lily nodded.

She walked a few steps forward, lifted her hand, and lightly tapped the stone wall beside her.

Crack.

A thin seam split open in the supposedly solid rock.

At first it was only as wide as a finger, but it quickly stretched upward and downward. From within the fracture, a woven light leaked out—ghost-blue tangled with ghastly white.

In the next instant, a violent surge of energy blasted out from inside the crack and slammed into the underground space.

Humm!

Rumble—rumble—rumble!

The wall shook hard. The surrounding darkness was forced back, peeling away under the pressure.

Ethan’s pupils widened. He’d never seen Infernal Primordial Power this pure.

It was more complete than any Infernal power he’d ever encountered—heavier, too, like an entire abyss had been compressed down and packed into the energy source hidden inside that seam.

This was on a completely different level from the broken scraps he’d collected before.

The excitement in Lily’s eyes finally spilled over. She dove straight into the crack.

The moment her body entered, the Infernal Primordial Power inside reacted like it had finally found home, roaring toward her in a frenzy. Ghost-blue light coated her hands first, then raced up her arms, across her shoulders and chest, down her legs—filling her from the outside in.

Lily’s nearly transparent form began to solidify at a visible pace.

Her outline sharpened. Skin, hair, even the clarity in her pupils recovered their real texture bit by bit as the energy poured in.

The ghost-blue Infernal Primordial Power spiraled around her, then compressed inward, all of it sinking into her body.

Rumble!

A stronger aura burst off Lily.

Her Tier rose—one full Tier.

Ethan watched the change, turbulence kicking up in his chest. Most of the energy here had been absorbed by Lily, yet even so, residual waves still seeped out from deeper within the crack.

Ethan only drew a thin thread of it into himself, and he could already feel his ghastly white lightning turning heavier again—denser, more oppressive.

Lily lowered her head, staring at her own hands.

She flexed her fingers once, and a long-lost satisfaction surfaced on her face.

"I finally got my body back."

Then she looked up. The excitement in her eyes didn’t fade—if anything, it tightened into something sharper.

"But this still isn’t enough."

Ethan’s heart punched again.

She’d already swallowed most of the Infernal Primordial Power here. Her body had fully solidified. Her Tier had jumped an entire level.

And she was still calling it not enough.

So how terrifying would a truly complete Infernal Abyss core be?

Ethan was about to ask—

When a low growl rolled out of the distant darkness.

It skimmed along the ground, vibrating the stone under their feet until the strata trembled. In the depths where the ghost-blue glow couldn’t reach, a pair of eyes slowly lit up.

That gaze wasn’t like a normal beast’s.

Something bizarre flowed inside it—something that didn’t belong to any natural creature.

Then a figure stepped out of the dark, shaped like a kirin.

Its body was covered in scales, each one edged with a deep, oily sheen. When its four limbs touched down, it didn’t make much sound, yet the darkness energy in the underground space rippled outward in concentric waves.

Strange power leaked from its eyes, forming two thin bands of light that swept toward Ethan and Lily.

The light passed over the ground.

The rock split open without a sound.