Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory

Ethan took a few steps forward and slowly extended a finger, reaching for a wisp of energy floating in the air.

The instant his fingertip touched it, the surrounding power reacted.

In that split second, the energies that had been scattered everywhere—quietly drifting—moved as if they'd suddenly recognized their rightful master, surging toward Ethan in unison.

It wasn't a slow flow.

It came fast—thread after thread, layer after layer—until a dense energy whirlpool formed around him in the blink of an eye.

And the change was even more obvious on Feylora and the others.

As that power poured in, a pale pink crystal began to condense on Feylora's forehead, bit by bit.

It wasn't large, but it was unnaturally clear. Inside it, energy flowed slowly like liquid.

The other Fairies showed similar changes.

Only their core gems were different colors—light gold, pale green, some with a cold white sheen.

Each one kept absorbing the surrounding power as it formed, pushing the Fairies' auras higher and higher.

Ethan's eyes lit up immediately.

He could feel it clearly—every Fairy's Tier and strength were climbing. Feylora's rise was the most obvious of all. In a blink, her aura jumped straight to the peak of 32 Tier.

The improvement was practically visible.

But before anyone could fully digest the surprise, an odd sound came from a wall not far away.

At first, it was only fine cracks.

Then those cracks spread at speed, webbing across the entire wall. In the next instant, with a thunderous boom, the whole section collapsed.

Dust and broken stone rolled outward.

And from behind that fallen shadow, a huge figure stepped out, slowly.

The monster was crystalline from head to toe, like it had been carved entirely out of diamond.

Each step made the ground tremble faintly. More shocking was the power flowing inside it—light refracting through its crystal structure until its entire body carried a violently unstable sense of danger.

It stopped and looked down at them.

"Who are you? Why have you trespassed here?"

As the words fell, a domineering energy wave spread from it, shaking the already-cracked walls into chunks of rubble again.

And as more wall sections continued to cave in, more figures emerged.

One.

Two.

Ten.

Dozens.

A massive number of Diamond Golems filed out from behind the collapse. Each one was just like the first—crystal bodies, dense energy running inside.

When they stood together, the pressure in the underground space rose sharply.

Ethan's chest tightened faintly at the sight.

He truly hadn't expected that a place like this would be hiding an army of this scale.

And what he cared about even more was the crystal structure inside them—

The power flowing there felt like a piece of this world's very origin.

The moment that thought formed, Ethan moved.

He pressed his breathing steady. Then his power burst outward, and he became a streak of white thunderlight, shooting straight at the Diamond Golem in front.

The instant the distance closed, his right arm sank. Every last bit of power poured into his fist, and he smashed it into the thing's shoulder.

There was no restraint in that punch.

White lightning was driven to the extreme. Thunder flared up his arm. When his knuckles landed, a shrill electric screech exploded first—then the heavy impact finally pressed fully into that crystal body.

But the result still made Ethan's eyes shift slightly.

A blow like that hadn't shattered the Diamond Golem outright.

All it did was blast off a single chunk of crystal from its shoulder.

That was all.

Yet in the very next moment, Ethan's attention was seized completely by that fallen shard.

The second it hit his hand, the dense energy inside it reacted like it had been triggered, flooding through his palm and ramming into his body.

The sensation was unmistakable—like gripping an energy core compressed to the absolute limit, its power so abundant it felt endless.

Light flared in Ethan's eyes.

He opened the system immediately and scanned the Diamond Golems in front of him. Data layered into view almost at once. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

What came back made his heart jolt.

Their bodies looked unbelievably hard, yet the system's analysis was clear—their overall structure was relatively fragile, while the power stored inside them was so dense it was absurd.

Meaning, as long as they could kill them all—

The energy extracted from these things would be enough to feed everyone in Emerald Castle for a long, long time.

Once he saw that, the last trace of caution in Ethan vanished.

These Diamond Golems weren't "unmanageable" monsters. On the contrary, they were basically a herd of mobile energy vaults wrapped in thick crystal armor.

Smash them. Dig out the crystals and cores inside.

The payoff from this dive into the depths would be staggering.

He raised a hand at once and ordered everyone to charge.

The instant the command dropped, the Diamond Golems moved too.

The one in front let out a low, shrieking roar, and the entire underground space trembled faintly.

Then power erupted across its whole body. The blood-red gemstone in its forehead flared bright, and a deep, piercing beam shot straight out, driving forward in a dead line.

That beam carried terrifying momentum. Along its path, it pressed the air into a clearly warped track, and the reflections off the crystals in the walls and ground were dyed a brutal crimson.

But when Ethan truly saw the beam, his expression shifted slightly.

It was strong.

But its "strength" wasn't pure killing power. More precisely, it felt like raw energy compressed and shoved outward—massive in volume, yet lacking the kind of instant, all-rending destructive edge.

That judgment flashed through Ethan's mind for only a heartbeat.

In the next instant, the spatial power inside him spread out.

He didn't block it head-on.

He cut in—precise to the point of cruelty. Spatial ripples unfolded around the beam, locking its trajectory first, then peeling the energy inside it away layer by layer.

The sight was eerie—like Ethan had reached out and grabbed hold of that enormous pillar of light.

Then started to eat it.

The power inside the beam was rapidly broken down, turned into thinner and thinner streams that surged up Ethan's palm and arm, flooding into his body.

The deep red energy that had been pressing down with intimidation thinned in a blink—spreading, shredding—until the entire beam was stripped hollow, completely absorbed into Ethan.

That full-body saturation made heat bloom in his chest.

Too full.

Excitement flashed hard in his eyes.

In the next second, savage power erupted off him in full.

He dropped like a bolt of thunder, slamming down above the lead Diamond Golem and driving a hand into it—pinning that massive body to the ground.

A dull boom.

The earth shook.

Half the Diamond Golem's body was pressed down into the ground. Before it could even fight its way up, Ethan's energy had already finished gathering again.

White lightning coiled around his arm and fist, crackling in violent bursts. Then he smashed down.

The strike landed square on its shoulder.

At contact, blinding electric light detonated first—then the heavy impact forced its way in completely.

A teeth-grinding crack split the air. The shoulder structure broke, and the entire arm was torn off by brute force, flying away in a spray of crystal shards.

"Aa—!"

The Diamond Golem let out a shriek so distorted it barely sounded like something living.

And with that blow, dense cracks began crawling across its body surface.

They spread from the shoulder in an instant, racing toward its chest, its waist, its legs—its entire massive crystal frame giving off the tiny, relentless sounds that came right before a full collapse.