Mystic Calling：Stone of Glory-Chapter 927: The Phoenix Didn’t Even Get to Scream

The Gemward Tribe exploded into chaos.

"Impossible!"

"That’s ancient magic—we haven’t seen it in centuries! How the hell could an outsider pull it off?!"

"The crystal on his forehead... that’s a king’s mark!"

"Don’t tell me... was he chosen by the land itself?"

Fear. Rage. Confusion. It spread through their ranks like wildfire.

"Enough!"

A furious voice tore through the uproar.

"He killed our chief! I don’t care who or what he is—that’s a death sentence!"

Rational thought evaporated, buried under swelling hatred.

The warriors moved almost in unison.

Each one reached inside their robes or armor and pulled out a jagged, golden crystal—not quite gemstone, not quite artifact. More like a chunk of energy itself, raw and dangerously unstable.

The surface shimmered with deep rips in space, like the crystal was distorting reality just by existing.

They didn’t hesitate.

They hurled them skyward.

One.

Ten.

Dozens.

The gold shards fused mid-air—magnetized by something unseen—pulling together until they became a single, massive, radiant core.

Then—

All at once, every warrior poured their power into it.

The world screamed.

A burst of raw, devastating force detonated above them.

And from the sky, a vast spectral form began to take shape.

A bird.

Broad-winged, glowing in eerie shades of phantom blue, its body wreathed in cold flame. It opened its beak in silence as if crying out from worlds deeper than this one—

A phoenix born of void and vengeance descended upon the battlefield.

Ethan inhaled slowly.

Thick pressure pressed down from above, like the very air was being crushed by invisible hands.

His own energy no longer simply flowed—it surged, flooding outward like an uncontainable tide.

Above him, the crystal in his forehead pulsed once, then lifted gently from his skin to float into the air.

A breath later—

A dark aura erupted from the core of the hovering gem.

Not shadow.

Something deeper.

A kind of darkness that devoured light. A pit without a bottom. A truth the world itself seemed to flinch from.

Ethan stepped back.

Then launched forward.

And in that instant, he ceased to be a man.

His body merged completely with the dark energy spilling from the mark. What moved wasn’t muscle—it was raw force given form.

BOOM—!!

The pressure that hit the battlefield was immense.

Space cracked.

Air ripped like torn fabric. Thin fissures laced through the sky itself, lines where reality had no strength to hold.

The Gemward warriors, weapons raised, barely had time to brace—let alone attack.

Before they could even move again, Ethan was there.

Right in front of them.

He lifted a hand.

Just one finger.

And pointed up.

No blast. No flare. Not even a sound.

But the result—

The spectral sky-phoenix shattered on contact like brittle glass, splintering into fragments of light, its death silent and instant.

The release of force that followed expanded outward like a storm out of control.

But in that tide was something worse than destruction.

Erasure.

Space didn’t just break—it disappeared.

Screams caught in throats and never made it out.

Some warriors were ripped limb from limb—

Others? They didn’t leave a body behind.

Not a drop of blood. Not a ripple of energy. They were just gone.

When the storm settled...

Silence fell like a tomb.

The battlefield was a graveyard of ash, shattered earth, and stunned survivors locked in place, pale and shaking.

None dared move.

None dared speak.

Then, slowly, one of the stronger warriors—a man taller and broader than the rest—stepped forward.

Shaking.

He didn’t lift his weapon.

He didn’t puff up his chest. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

He dropped to his knees.

In both hands, he held a faintly glowing gem—steady, but dim. He laid it at Ethan’s feet like an offering to a god.

"From this moment on," the man said, voice shaking with fear and surrender, "I... I pledge myself to you. Please... spare my life."

That shattered whatever pride the rest had left.

A second person dropped to their knees.

Then a third.

A fourth.

One after another.

The remaining Gemward warriors fell, heads bowed low, each placing their own crystal before Ethan.

Those weren’t trophies.

They were life cores—personal power sources bound to their very essence.

Giving them up wasn’t just surrender.

It was abandoning everything.

Their strength.

Their legacy.

Their right to fight.

Their choice to kneel was the clearest message possible:

You win. We belong to you now.

Ethan watched the scene unfold in total silence, his expression unreadable.

When no one else moved, he finally raised a hand—and with a subtle pulse of power, every gemstone at his feet flew toward him, spinning once in the air before vanishing into his storage.

Then he turned, walking straight toward an old man with long, silver-white hair and a trembling frame.

"Is this all that’s left of your tribe?" Ethan asked calmly.

The elder froze as though struck. He didn’t dare lift his head.

With shaking hands, he drew a pitch-black stone from inside his robe and lightly tapped its surface.

A flicker of light sparked from the stone, projecting a detailed topographic map into the air above them—contours of mountains outlined in glowing lines.

"Our people have lived in these mountains for generations," the man said in a low, cautious voice. "Many of them dwell in caves scattered across the range. They rarely come down... and have little contact with the core settlement."

Ethan studied the glowing marks on the map, his eyes narrowing with interest.

Judging by the distribution, the terrain between those cave clusters... likely housed an abundant spread of energy ore.

If he took it all—

It would fuel a force the likes of which this world had never seen.

"Take me there," Ethan said.

Then, after a pause, his voice turned cold—just a thread of threat beneath the words.

"Maybe if I’m in a generous mood... you’ll live to see tomorrow."

No one argued.

The remaining Gemward warriors moved immediately, leading Ethan in the direction of the nearby mountains.

The Stoneclaw Tribe followed in silence. None of them spoke.

Not after what they’d seen.

After that display of power, Ethan was no longer just a man in their eyes.

He was something greater.

In their oldest myths, only gods could dissolve into particles... and consume another’s essence completely.

Now, before them, that myth breathed and walked and destroyed.

The march didn’t take long.

Before sunset, they arrived at the foot of a jagged cliffside that looked anything but natural.

The entire mountain face had been cleaved down the middle—clean and smooth, like a god’s axe had struck it from the heavens.

The rock wall towered high and steep, slick as glass.

Totally unscalable by ordinary means.

But there—lining the sheer cliffside—dotting it from base to summit were dozens, maybe hundreds, of shadowed cave mouths, each varying in size and depth.

People moved inside them.

This was it.

The true heart of the Gemward Tribe.

Their hidden nest.

Ethan took it all in at a glance.

Then he stepped back.

His body began to dissolve again, breaking into fine light-particles, scattering like wind-swept dust—then shooting upward, hugging the cliff face as they flew.

Within moments, the particles reformed inside one of the larger caves.

And Ethan stood whole again.

The interior was compact but dense with energy. It clung to the walls like mist. Thick. Oppressive.

And in the center stood a man—an enormous Gemward warrior.

His body was inlaid with so many golden gemstones they looked like they were his bones. Every single one was fused to him, embedded deep into muscle and skin.

At the center of his chest pulsed a blood-red gem the size of a fist.

It beat—literally—slow and steady, like an exposed heart.

All the lesser gemstones on his body streamed energy toward that single red core.

That was his center. His lifeline, his power source.

The warrior’s eyes shot up the moment Ethan materialized.

His face froze.

Then shifted—to rage.

"Who the hell are you?!"

He grabbed a massive staff from the wall beside him, baring his teeth.

"You dare invade my sacred grounds?! You begging to die?!"

He swung.

The staff howled through the air, fast and brutal.