Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory-Chapter 1013: Something Began to Obey

Ethan didn't hesitate anymore.

He immediately mobilized his power and started refining it on purpose.

White lightning spread like wildfire through his body, rapidly wrapping those brownish-purple energies layer by layer—breaking them down, purifying them, washing them clean.

That foreign power, originally steeped in corrosion and destruction, was scrubbed again and again until it actually started shedding its murky shell. Bit by bit, it transformed into a purer thunder force, flooding into his limbs and bones.

"Damn… that feels good."

The sensation nearly made him sigh out loud.

A rush of fullness and relief he'd never felt before made his body swell almost imperceptibly, like even his physical frame had been strengthened. The leftover energy between heaven and earth seemed to suddenly find its true center, streaming toward him in an endless flow.

But the battlefield didn't give him much time to enjoy it.

At this point, the fighting across the entire canyon had entered a true deadlock.

Emerald Castle's side was starting to seize the initiative, but this ant legion was far more terrifying than expected.

If they didn't produce a single, overwhelming breakthrough—something that could crack the board open—what waited for them next would be nothing but endless attrition and grinding entanglement.

Ethan rose slowly into the air and looked down over the whole battlefield.

It didn't take him long to spot the real problem.

The ant legion's real threat wasn't its numbers.

It was those leader-class individuals.

Each of those bastards controlled a single element—but in an extremely pure, specialized form. Every one of them had pushed their chosen energy path to an almost absurd extreme.

As long as those leaders stayed alive, the ant tide wouldn't truly collapse.

So—

Kill the leaders first.

Ethan's gaze swept across the battlefield. He quickly locked onto one ant leader wielding water.

Its aura wasn't the strongest of the group, but the problem was simple: all it had to do was twitch a finger, and it could summon endless water.

In a chaotic melee like this, water's ability to spread and blanket an area had already forced a lot of Emerald Castle's soldiers into miserable, passive positions.

Ethan wasn't going to let that kind of piece stay on the board.

He drew a slow breath, then lifted his hand.

In the blink of an eye, white lightning unfurled from his body, spreading like a real thundercloud as it pressed downward. The water-element ant leader barely had time to react before the entire zone was swallowed by white thunder.

In a way, water had always had a natural relationship with lightning.

And when the two forces truly collided, that relationship only got amplified.

The ant leader tried to pull water currents up to counter and suppress him—but the moment the water took shape, it became the perfect conductor. White lightning raced along every stream it summoned, spreading with terrifying speed, wrapping around its entire body in a single instant.

The next second—

It began to convulse violently.

Countless white arcs danced crazily through the seams of its carapace. The elemental structure inside it was pierced straight through on the spot. It didn't even manage a full scream before it slammed to the ground.

Ethan, of course, didn't waste an opportunity that close.

The water-element leader had only just been completely paralyzed, its body still twitching uncontrollably on the ground, when Ethan became a blur and appeared in front of it.

He gave it no room to speak. No time to struggle.

His fingers clenched, and he grabbed it by the throat.

In the next instant, white lightning poured down his arm and detonated inside the ant.

This wasn't an ordinary shock. It was a compressed, penetrating scourge—something that forced its way through flesh and energy channels alike, then tore them apart from within.

The ant leader's carapace managed one shrill burst of cracking noise, and then its entire body started to collapse in the lightning. Flesh, shell fragments, and elemental waves all exploded together, and in moments it was nothing but debris and wet ruin scattered across the ground.

Ethan reached out and grabbed—

From the still-dispersing energy wreckage, he forcibly drew out an energy core.

The instant it landed in his hand, even he paused.

It was heavier than he'd expected, the power inside so dense it almost felt viscous. It carried a clear infernal aura… but it was also mixed with something extremely unfamiliar, something that made instinct itself tighten in warning.

Ethan only probed it for a moment before he realized: deep inside that so-called "water element," there was a hidden trait with terrifying destructive potential.

It wasn't ordinary corrosion.

It was a kind of melting property that dismantled whatever it touched at the level of its fundamental structure.

Even the tiniest thread of it—if it truly got onto living flesh—could probably liquefy a human body into a puddle of rotten sludge in seconds.

But because of that…

Ethan was interested.

He didn't recoil like most people would. He directly guided that power into himself.

White lightning quickly wrapped around the foreign energy flowing out of the core, drawing it in layer by layer, dismantling it, then slowly circulating it into his own thunder structure.

This process wasn't easy.

Ethan could feel it clearly: that destructive trait hidden inside the water element didn't want to be tamed.

It behaved like a living thing with malice, surging and slamming around inside his energy channels, trying to contaminate his originally pure white lightning.

Ethan only frowned slightly—then forced it down even harder.

Soon, the fusion was complete.

When he released his power again, the nature of his white lightning had obviously changed. Inside that violent, pure thunder—packed with extreme destructive intent—there was now a faint, almost imperceptible "melting" quality.

It wasn't flashy.

It was deadly.

Ethan lifted his hand and tested it, compressing the fused power in his palm before whipping it straight down at the ground.

When the attack hit, it didn't explode immediately. It first pressed a shallow dent into the surface—then detonated with a violent roar.

The earth was torn open into a massive crater.

But the truly terrifying part was the ant legion around the rim that hadn't managed to dodge. The instant they touched that newborn thunder, their bodies locked up as if something invisible had pinned them in place.

Then the melting began.

From carapace, to bone, to the elemental structure inside them—everything collapsed, corroded, and disintegrated layer by layer. They didn't even get out full screams before, under the double effect of white lightning and that destructive water element, they rapidly dissolved into charred, twisted fragments.

Ethan glanced down at the wreckage, a spark of light flashing through his eyes.

This fused power was even more domineering than he'd expected.

And if it was this effective, there was no chance he was holding back.

The next moment, violent power poured out of him again in an endless surge. Bolts of strengthened white lightning slammed down one after another, like a storm of thunder raining onto the battlefield.

"Boom! Boom! Boom—!"

Deep, heavy blasts rolled through the canyon.

The enhanced thunder ravaged the ground. Every strike wiped out a swath of the ant legion. In only a short span of time, the dense ant tide that had carpeted the canyon entrance was punched through—Ethan carving a bloody hole straight through it by force.

He hovered high in the air, his whole body wrapped in white lightning, like the one undeniable center of the entire battlefield.

The remaining ants' eyes snapped toward him almost at the same time.

And for the first time, there was real fear in them.

But just as they were finally starting to understand how dangerous he was, Ethan released everything again. White lightning spread rapidly between heaven and earth, unfolding until it formed a massive electric domain that covered a huge area.

The moment the field took shape, almost the entire ant legion on the battlefield was swallowed inside it.

Countless arcs leaped, threaded, and overlapped through the domain. That enhanced destructive trait spread with the thunder itself. Any ant that couldn't escape was reduced to flying ash in the blink of an eye.

Ant King Threxus finally let out a screech that mixed fury with pain.

Brilliant, multicolored energy erupted crazily from the gemstone on its forehead, blasting Desert Queen Kaelira—who had been suppressing it step by step—backward.

Then, with a flicker that was practically a short-range teleport, it appeared directly in front of Ethan.

"What the hell are you?" Ant King Threxus stared at him, hard. For the first time, its voice wasn't just rage—there was unmistakable fear threaded through it. "Why do you have power at this level?"