Novel Full Chapter 845: Entering the Ruin [5]
Chapter 845: Entering the Ruin [5]
Michael felt ground beneath his boots again.
The twisting sensation stopped abruptly, leaving a brief moment of weightlessness before gravity settled into place.
Darkness surrounded them.
Not absolute darkness.
A deep, endless twilight.
The world they stepped into was vast and open, yet there was no visible sky. Instead, an immense black canopy stretched overhead like a ceiling lost in shadow. Faint currents of pale light moved across it like distant, silent storms.
Then the crystals began to glow.
Softly at first.
Scattered across the terrain were clusters of crystalline growths that pulsed with dim blue and violet light. They rose from the ground like strange, transparent plants, some shaped like jagged grass blades, others like crooked trees made of glass.
The ground beneath their feet was not soil.
It was dark stone, smooth in some places and cracked in others. Thin lines of luminous crystal ran through those cracks, forming glowing veins across the surface, like a vast network of frozen lightning embedded in the earth.
The light from those veins illuminated the area in a low, dreamlike haze.
Arianne’s Flame Lion exhaled slowly, its golden mane reflecting the crystal glow in fractured colors. The beast’s presence cast warm light that contrasted with the cold radiance of the terrain.
Lucien and Alaric turned slowly in place, eyes widening slightly.
Cedric’s hand returned to his sword hilt, not out of panic, but instinct.
Michael did not move immediately.
He released a small portion of his perception outward.
The terrain stretched into uneven ridges and shallow depressions. In the distance, crystal outcroppings rose in clusters, casting long, distorted shadows across the stone plains.
It was eerie.
And beautiful.
The crystals did not shine harshly. They glowed like stars fallen to the ground, painting the world in shifting hues of indigo and silver. Every step caused reflections to ripple across the surface beneath them.
Michael glanced upward again.
So this is the ruin.
Arianne guided her lion a step forward. The beast’s claws scraped against crystal veined stone, producing a faint ringing sound that echoed farther than expected.
Lucien crouched briefly, touching one of the glowing lines running through the ground.
Cedric scanned the horizon.
Alaric narrowed his eyes toward a distant ridge where the crystals seemed denser.
Despite the silence, there was a strange harmony to the place.
A quiet symmetry.
Michael’s instincts did not relax.
After all, this had once been the domain of a Rank Four supernatural.
Only the heavens knew what it truly contained.
Michael’s gaze swept across the vast crystal lit landscape again, his mind steady but alert. Perhaps he was being overly cautious. Every Rank Four existence he had encountered so far had left a deep impression on him, and none of those impressions had been pleasant.
Still, caution here would not harm him.
So he did not suppress it.
He let his senses stretch a little farther, and what he saw left him in awe.
Life truly was amazing.
At Rank One, the world had already felt vast to him. His senses had sharpened. His body had grown lighter. Every advancement back then had felt like a leap into something extraordinary.
Rank Two had only deepened that feeling.
Yet standing here now, within what had once been the territory of a Rank Four existence, he could not help but feel that Rank Four was something entirely different from Rank Three.
Not just stronger.
Different.
Of course, that was obvious.
But perhaps his thoughts were influenced by how smooth Rank Three had been for him. He had not struggled the way others did. The bottlenecks that trapped most people had felt like shallow steps in his path.
That might have skewed his perception.
Rank Four, however, felt like a threshold that truly divided worlds.
He was not surprised by how vast this realm was.
He had once stepped into a Rank Four domain before. Even when suppressed, it had been immense. That alone told him how much deeper the foundation of such beings ran.
And this place was not an active domain.
It was a remnant realm left behind for dozens, perhaps hundreds of years.
Unsupervised.
Developing naturally.
Absorbing ambient energy.
Stabilizing.
Expanding.
It would have been strange if it were small.
Michael let his gaze sweep across the horizon one final time before speaking.
"Stay alert, everyone," he said calmly. "This is unknown territory."
No one argued.
They began advancing in formation.
The crystal veins beneath their feet pulsed faintly as they moved.
Michael extended his perception quietly. To avoid attracting unnecessary trouble, he condensed it to roughly two hundred meters around him.
As they continued forward, something shifted beneath one of the crystal ridges ahead.
Michael felt it immediately.
A fluctuation.
"Hm... seems to have lower energy too," he thought.
He did not speak.
Instead, he chose not to intervene.
He wanted to see the capabilities of his teammates.
From the energy level, this thing was manageable. To understand them better, it was better to observe how they reacted in real combat.
A faint distortion rippled across the ground ahead.
The stone cracked.
A black mass peeled itself from the surface like tar separating from rock.
It stood upright in a single fluid motion.
Faceless.
Humanoid in outline but wrong in proportion.
Its limbs were slightly too long.
Its torso too narrow.
Its head smooth and round without eyes, nose, or mouth.
No mana signature leaked from it in the normal sense. Instead, its energy clung tightly to its form, compact and dense.
Cedric reacted instantly.
He charged forward.
His sword left its sheath in a clean arc.
The black figure lunged without sound.
Its speed was not extraordinary, but its movement was unnervingly smooth.
Cedric’s blade cut downward.
The strike was precise.
Steel met shadow.
Instead of resistance, the sword sank halfway into the creature’s shoulder.
There was no blood.
No sound.
The faceless head tilted slightly.
Then its elongated arm snapped forward.
*
A/N; Thank you for reading today’s Chapters! See you with more tomorrow!!!