Chapter 1361
After lying on the ground for nearly an hour, Sonia finally struggled to her feet. The black-gray mist that had shrouded her body had completely dissipated. Her skin was slick with blood, dark green tinged with streaks of crimson slowly oozing out, filling the cave with an ominous aura.
"Leon Merlin, I want you dead. I want all of you dead. Everyone must die..."
Sonia screamed madly, then began summoning Screamers in reckless abandon, completely disregarding the risk that such power might awaken the monster beneath the earth. She had even started to doubt whether there was a monster at all, and by now, she didn't care—monster or not, all she wanted was revenge...
Having fused with the bloodline of an infernal creature, Sonia possessed not only the powers of Hell, but also the power of death and a measure of soul manipulation. Such immense power could not exist without fatal flaws.
Her soul was no longer pure, her body terribly fragile. She lacked both the extraordinary power expected of a mage and the physical resilience of a bloodline warlock. She was strong in one aspect, yet disturbingly weak in another—a grotesque imbalance.
Previously, Amy had attracted the attention of a Hellgate Demon Lord precisely because of her unique soul. Though no longer pure, it was special enough to tempt those demon lords who collected souls as trophies—an opportunity worth seizing.
The calm had vanished from Sonia's eyes. She summoned Screamers underground without a care for the consequences, and mixed among them were countless other types of ghosts. The flood of spirits spilled through the winding tunnels like a breached dam.
Though the ghosts were numerous, their ranks were still low. Compared to the Giant Worm Horde, there was little difference. The ominous aura began to spread through the underground, carried slowly along the wind that flowed through the tunnels...
Elsewhere, Leon led his group in another long circuit through the underground. Suddenly, he sensed the presence of wind at a tunnel entrance. It wasn't that the wind itself was strange, but rather its direction...
"Reina, we already passed through here once earlier, didn't we? It took us more than ten hours, but back then, the wind was blowing in the opposite direction. Am I remembering that right?"
Leon furrowed his brow, quietly sensing the direction of the wind here. From the very beginning, all his calculations and attention had focused on determining the right direction, never considering the wind’s flow. The wind here always seemed to follow a predetermined path, never changing for days on end. But now, something struck Leon as odd.
This sort of detail—Lord Shaun would never notice, nor would Hubert. Only Reina might pick up on something like this.
"The wind direction has changed, and the temperature carried by the breeze is different too—it's a little warmer than before."
Hearing Reina’s confident answer, Leon couldn’t help but smile.
"That settles it. I think I’ve finally found the way. If we can sense a change in the wind’s direction here, it means only one thing—we’re very close to our destination now.
It’s the monster’s breath. The closer we get, the more obvious it becomes. The wind has changed simply because the monster has shifted from exhaling to inhaling. Its breathing isn’t quite like ours, but there are similarities—a cycle of three years breathing out, three years breathing in. We’ve arrived just as its breath is changing."
Factoring wind direction and speed into his calculations, Leon quickly determined the route to their destination. Even a rough path would be enough.
They pressed on, and soon everyone felt the wind growing stronger and the changes in gravity becoming more bizarre.
Walking through the stone-walled passage, Leon placed one foot on the wall, a strange expression flickering across his face. Then he lifted his other foot and walked up the side wall, but it felt no different than walking on flat ground. He continued along the wall to the ceiling, and it still felt like standing on level ground. Looking up, he saw Hubert and Reina standing upside down on the ceiling, like bats, their feet planted firmly above his head.
After circling around the stone wall, he still didn’t feel anything odd about the direction of gravity. Here, gravity seemed to have lost all sense of direction—so long as your foot touched the stone, any vertical surface became the new down.
"We’re almost there. Gravity is completely chaotic now—we must be close to our destination, less than a thousand meters away in a straight line."
A faint smile tugged at Leon’s lips. This expedition had gone almost too smoothly—once they reached their goal, this plane could finally be developed. The mana crystal resources here could be harvested, magical plants cultivated on a large scale, and even special magic flora grown to feed the massive native reptiles, producing rare materials as precious as golden honey.
Half an hour later, after passing through another tunnel and rounding a bend, the path ahead suddenly dropped off into a cliff. Standing at the mouth of the cave, they looked out at a vast space at least two thousand meters high. Floating in the center was an enormous crystal, over a thousand meters tall, with more than a hundred thousand facets.
Gentle radiance poured over the chamber, and the mana here was so dense it condensed into visible light. These magical rays illuminated the stone walls, which were covered everywhere with thick layers of concentrated mana crystals. The entire two-thousand-meter-high chamber was sheathed in a glittering crust of pure magic.
Everyone was stunned by the sight of the colossal crystal. Lord Shaun extended a trembling claw, pointing at the massive gem, stammering in shock.
"Damn it, that’s a mana crystal! A mana crystal! Oh hell, it’s huge!"
No sooner had Lord Shaun shouted than Leon quickly set up a soundproof barrier and clapped a hand over Shaun’s mouth.
"Damn it, Lord Shaun, are you trying to get us all killed? If you wake that thing up, we’re in serious trouble!"
Lord Shaun clamped his own hands over his mouth, the gleam in his eyes so bright it seemed to light up the chamber.
"Damn, a mana crystal this huge—how long would it even last me? No, there’s no way I could ever finish it, it’s just too big! How could there be such a massive mana crystal? Damn it, even a level forty-nine magical beast—no, even a level fifty beast king—couldn’t possibly have a crystal this size!"
Merlin, damn it, you knew about this all along, didn’t you? What the hell is going on here?"
Leon gazed at the colossal mana crystal before him, unable to hide his shock. Without seeing it firsthand, one could never truly comprehend its magnitude. The largest mana crystal ever found in the world of Northend was barely the size of a grown man’s fist—and that came from a Sky Rank magical beast.
Even the largest beasts, hundreds of meters long, would only have a mana crystal the size of a fist. Even the star beasts, which could stretch for dozens of kilometers, had heart cores no bigger than a human head.
A mana crystal is the highly condensed essence of a magical beast’s power—the stronger the beast, the denser its crystal, but not necessarily larger in size.
The quality of a mana crystal is the most direct proof of a beast’s rank. Just by looking at one, you can tell what level of beast it came from—this is common knowledge among mages.
If the mana isn’t concentrated enough, it’s impossible to form a crystal at all. But this colossal crystal before them was true Sky Rank quality, and not just any Sky Rank—it was at least level forty-eight by quality.
But even with that kind of quality, ten thousand level forty-eight crystals put together wouldn’t be anywhere near this size.
"This is the monster’s mana crystal. That’s right—we’ve been inside the monster all along. This plane, the ground beneath our feet, is its body.
The creature itself may have once been a spatial beast, but due to some unusual transformation, it perished. Yet the space and mana within its body underwent a strange evolution. The emergence of that blue sun was both the catalyst and the driving force behind all these changes."
Mana and space, combined with the vast body of a spatial beast, created the perfect conditions for this unique plane to be born. It became a special kind of magical creature, enduring the blue sun’s rays for hundreds of thousands, even millions or tens of millions of years. The brilliance of mana transformed everything here.
It generated a mana crystal, nurtured a soul, and became a living entity—a plane and a creature all at once.
Everything in this plane is part of its body, and this is its core. If we’d awakened it before reaching the core, we wouldn’t have been able to develop this plane until it slept again.
If a path to another plane were opened here, it would immediately wake this unique lifeform. Even the fluctuations of extraordinary power could rouse it. The closer we get to its soul, the greater the danger."
The group stared in stunned silence at the dazzling, explosively colorful mana crystal before them, so overwhelmed that they barely heard Leon’s explanation.
No one had imagined that this plane itself was a living entity, or that it had birthed such a colossal mana crystal deep underground.
Leon stepped to the edge of the cave, where the wind carried pure mana like plunging into an ocean of magic. With a single breath, his own mana was partially restored. For any mage below Sky Rank, even breathing here could drown them in mana.
Looking out from the cave, the enormous circular chamber was studded with hundreds of small openings in the stone walls. Stepping out, feet planted on the stone, still felt like standing on solid ground. Walking along the wall, no matter the angle, that colossal mana crystal hung overhead like a sun.
Entering one of the openings beneath their feet, their bodies shifted sideways, yet the bizarre change in gravity felt completely natural.
"To this giant, we’re nothing but insects—it doesn’t care about us at all. As long as it doesn’t wake up, every living thing in this plane is just a fragile parasite to it."
It only tolerates these fragile parasites, or rather, ignores the unintelligent reptiles. True sentient beings cannot emerge here—it would never allow it.
Drink the potion I gave you earlier. I'm about to begin."
Leon took a deep breath and swallowed a vial of potion. Hubert, Reina, even Lord Shaun and Hughes, all drank the special potion Leon had prepared.
To this plane, every living thing is a parasite. Even if the monster itself is unconscious, it could instinctively reject these parasites. What Leon was about to do might trigger that instinctive rejection.
If the monster wakes, things will get much worse. The potion is meant to ensure the plane itself doesn’t see us as a threat and expel us…
Entering the vast spherical chamber, Leon began laying out the prepared materials, arranging an alchemical array. This place was like the head of a magical beast, the repository for its mana crystal. The openings in the walls were channels for the crystal’s mana to flow throughout the plane—key to its magical circulation.
Within the giant crystal, the soul of this strange lifeform slumbered. Its magical breath drove the flow of air underground, drawing in the mana radiance of the blue sun through the earth itself.
The entire earth was this creature’s body, which is why there were almost no other minerals to be found here. But the external mana radiance and the internal magical currents created countless mana crystals beneath the ground.
As long as this colossal mana crystal deep underground remains, the mana crystals—and even pure mana essence—within this plane will continue to be born endlessly.
Now, as long as the alchemical array is set up to temporarily sever the connection between the mana crystal and the outside world, the monster’s soul will remain in eternal slumber, and this plane can be developed like any ordinary one.
In the future, it was impossible to open a planar pathway directly within this plane, as doing so would always awaken the monster. Instead, a massive city was constructed in the endless void.
Eventually, a method was discovered to keep the monster’s soul in perpetual sleep, but by then, everyone had grown accustomed to the void city, which became a vital supply station in the endless void.
Due to the plane’s uniqueness—not only a plane, but also an immense living creature—the planar pathways remained unstable and had side effects on the plane itself. Ultimately, they were abandoned.
Inside the spherical chamber, Leon continued to lay the foundations of the alchemical array, glancing up at the colossal mana crystal floating overhead.
When half the array was complete, a Screamer ghost suddenly emerged from one of the holes. The moment it saw Leon, it opened its mouth to scream, but a subtle surge of mana instantly subdued it, erasing the ghost in utter silence.
Leon exhaled softly, cold sweat trickling down his forehead…
So close to the mana crystal, any attack that struck it could immediately awaken the monster. Their smooth progress was only possible because no creature had ever entered this chamber before, so the monster was unguarded. Even so, while arranging the array, Leon relied solely on his hands, not daring to use any mana before the array was activated.
A level twenty-five Screamer ghost at this distance could easily have awakened the monster…
Luckily, Leon reacted quickly, subduing the ghost and erasing it with pure mana before it could make a sound.
The moment Leon erased the Screamer ghost, something occurred to him, and his expression suddenly darkened.
If a Screamer could appear here, it meant only one thing—Sonia, that madwoman, must be nearby. At the very least, she’d already found her way here…
Three seconds later, from over thirty openings surrounding that one, a torrent of ghostly creatures erupted like a geyser. In less than a second, thousands of undead appeared, and the outpouring showed no sign of stopping.
Seeing so many ghosts appear, Leon turned and fled, knowing the situation was now beyond control. With such a flood of undead, their unchecked deathly aura would undoubtedly awaken the monster…
Leon could no longer afford to hold back his magic. Mana flickered across his skin as he leapt into one of the openings.
In an instant, the entire chamber seemed to tremble. The gentle light from the colossal mana crystal turned blinding, and the once-soft magical breaths accelerated wildly. Mana formed a pure tempest within the vast spherical chamber.
As the Mana Tempest erupted, half the ghostly creatures were shredded to pieces. The storm only intensified, while more and more undead continued to pour out of the openings.
These foolish undead, when attacked, could only think to retaliate—even if they couldn’t find their enemy, they would still strike back…
A Screamer ghost began to shriek, and instantly, every Screamer joined in. Countless Screamers unleashed a soul-shattering assault, their raw power mixing with the Mana Tempest in the cramped chamber, forming a terrifying hurricane that tore everything apart.