The torrent of Magic within his body answered his will, splitting into countless fine streams. Following the resonance frequency Archmaester Marwyn had discovered, they strengthened and weakened in turn, flowing without pause into the stone.
At first, there was no response.
The Black Stone remained silent and dead, devouring every trace of energy fed into it.
Time seemed to congeal.
Only the fine beads of sweat seeping from Lo Quen's temples revealed the immense drain on his Magic.
Suddenly—
A nearly imperceptible black halo slowly spread from the point beneath Lo Quen's palm.
It was thin as a cicada's wing, yet so deep it seemed capable of swallowing all light.
Marwyn drew in a sharp, restrained breath.
Qyburn's pupils contracted instantly.
Janice clenched her hands without realizing it.
It worked.
The frequency was correct.
Lo Quen's focus sharpened. He guided the Magic with even greater precision, following the sequence marked on the diagram exactly: strengthening, weakening, shifting, oscillating…
The Magic he poured in seemed to transform into countless invisible tuning forks, striking the dormant structures within the Black Stone in a precise, measured rhythm.
As the flow continued and the resonance grew more exact, the thin black halo began to pulse violently.
Like a still lake struck by a massive stone, ripples spread in all directions. The halo itself became unstable, its edges warping and tearing, like a dying creature writhing in agony.
"It's dissolving!"
Marwyn cried out, unable to contain himself.
"The seal is collapsing! Your Grace, keep going! Don't stop!"
Lo Quen's breathing grew heavy and rapid.
He could clearly feel it now. An immense, unfathomable magical presence, deep and obscure as an abyss, was forcing its way out from the sealed core within the Black Stone.
It was no longer the cold, lifeless stillness from before. It carried a strange sense of vitality that filled him with unease.
Just as the halo of the seal boiled violently, teetering on the brink of complete dissolution—
Hum.
A low sound rang out, almost too faint to hear, yet it seemed to detonate directly within the depths of his soul.
Without warning, countless twisted and grotesque symbols surfaced across the rough surface of the Black Stone.
They were not carved. They looked more like blood seeping out from within the stone itself.
Deep crimson. Dark red. Rusted scarlet.
They formed incomprehensible pictographs and geometric patterns so intricate they bordered on madness.
The instant these blood-colored runes appeared, they flared with blinding red light.
In a heartbeat, the entire cavern was flooded with crimson.
The cave walls, stone pillars, even the faces of everyone present were washed in a flowing, ominous blood-red glow.
"Is this Valyrian blood magic?!"
Qyburn, who had studied some Valyrian magical texts, sucked in a sharp breath.
"And the most ancient, forbidden kind."
The blood-red runes and patterns did not remain still.
They flowed, spun, twisted, and reassembled wildly across the surface of the Black Stone, like billions of living blood-worms writhing in frenzied motion.
Utter chaos, yet within that chaos, they obeyed some unfathomable cosmic law, rapidly evolving toward a strange and unsettling order.
Runes leapt, linked, and layered over one another.
At last, before Lo Quen's eyes, within the core of the massive Black Stone, all the blood-red patterns converged, sketching out a three-dimensional structure so vast it was suffocating.
It was a miniature universe.
Countless stars, nebulae, and warped strands of spacetime, all formed from crimson runes, were born, extinguished, and flowed endlessly within it.
At the very center of this frenzied vision floated an enormous rust-red sphere.
It resembled a decaying planet. Its surface was carved with immense ravines, from which oozed thick, dark-red matter like coagulated blood plasma.
Lo Quen's entire awareness was seized by that rust-red sphere.
The flow of Magic within him had become almost instinctive, maintaining the resonant frequency on its own, yet his gaze could not tear itself away from that eerie core.
At the instant the cosmic tableau fully took shape—
Woo…
Bzzz…
A strange "sound" began to seep out from the deepest depths of the Black Stone.
At first, it was like the faint sigh of the universe at the moment of its birth, distant and ethereal.
But within just a few breaths, it abruptly rose in pitch, becoming sharp and urgent.
It was no longer sound, but something closer to a "celestial tone" that struck directly at the soul.
Countless incomprehensible melodies stacked and collided, roaring together into a torrent of sound powerful enough to grind human reason to dust.
Lo Quen felt as though he had been thrown into the eye of a violently spinning storm.
The flow of Magic instantly became sluggish and difficult. His mental world teetered on the brink of collapse under the impact of that overwhelming celestial resonance.
A cold, chaotic will followed the sound and stabbed straight into his mind.
It sought to tear his consciousness apart, to strip away every shred of reason that made him human.
His body went completely rigid. Even his blood seemed to freeze.
Cold sweat soaked through his clothes in an instant.
Against the backdrop of the blood-red cosmos, the dark-red substance flowing across the rust-colored sphere began to writhe slowly.
Deep within the ravines, that vast, boundless sea of crimson liquid surged and heaved.
It formed an eye.
A gigantic scarlet eye slowly opened from the depths of the blood sea.
Its pupil was bottomless, like a gateway leading into an endless ocean of blood.
Where an iris should have been, countless massive blood-red fissures crisscrossed and spread, filling the entire white of the eye.
The colossal eye, formed of a rust-red planet and a boiling sea of blood, suddenly turned.
Its inhuman pupil, laced with crimson cracks, locked onto Lo Quen in an instant.
Indescribable terror.
Incomprehensible malice.
An unbearable gaze.
Lo Quen felt his soul freeze and shatter all at once.
The celestial sound in his ears had become an apocalyptic howl, savagely tearing at the last fragile barrier of his sanity.
The will of that giant eye was cold and vast, carrying indifference and madness on a cosmic scale, intent on assimilating and crushing him completely, reducing him to a speck of dust within that blood-red universe.
He felt himself dissolving…
At the very brink—
Ding!
A crisp electronic notification exploded inside the chaotic core of his mind.
The sound was abrupt, yet overwhelmingly powerful.
From a higher plane of existence, it instantly drowned out and erased the aberrant presence within the Black Stone.
Cut off.
The world-ending celestial roar was severed in an instant, vanishing without a trace.
Lo Quen's entire body jolted.
He sucked in great gulps of air, his heart hammering wildly.
Within the Black Stone, deep inside the pupil of that giant eye rising from the blood sea, something like human shock seemed to flicker for the first time.
Then the pupil contracted sharply.
A piercing, frantic, silent scream filled with extreme fury and unwillingness slammed into Lo Quen's consciousness.
But it struck the system's cold defense and shattered instantly, dispersing without a trace.
The silent scream ended.
The monstrous eye stared fixedly at Lo Quen. The boiling blood-red fissures within its pupil seemed to ignite, overflowing with venomous hatred and curses.
Then it began to sink.
With profound reluctance, it slowly descended back into the churning dark-red blood sea, until it vanished completely.
The frenzied blood-red cosmic vision at the core of the Black Stone rapidly dimmed, collapsed, and finally dissipated.
Just as Lo Quen was forcibly dragged back to reality by the system, his heart still racing—
Boom!!!
An indescribably vast force erupted from the core of the massive Black Stone.
Immediately after, transparent ripples spread outward in rapid succession, expanding in all directions with the Black Stone at their center.
Hum—
The ripples swept over Lo Quen's body.
He shuddered violently as an immense, ocean-like torrent of Magic surged through his palm and flooded into every part of his body.
In an instant, it replenished everything he had expended, even filling his Magic pool to the brim.
But that was only the beginning.
An even more shocking change followed.
As the invisible ripples expanded, the entire cavern—
No, the free-floating magical elements in the air itself—seemed to answer a summons, erupting into violent motion as they rushed together.
Their concentration skyrocketed at a terrifying speed.
Inside the cavern, a black glass candle on the worktable suddenly flared to life.
"The candle…"
Marwyn saw it and collapsed to the ground, murmuring in a daze.
Qyburn's face twisted with unrestrained fervor.
"Look outside!"
Janice's cry shattered the cavern's silence. Her face had gone deathly pale as she pointed toward the massive opening of the cave.
Lo Quen spun around.
Outside the cavern, the once-clear sky had changed completely.
As if drenched in immeasurable quantities of boiling blood, the entire firmament was steeped in a dense, oppressive crimson.
The clouds were stained blood-red. Sunlight was completely swallowed. All that remained between heaven and earth was an endless scarlet.
And at the eastern edge of that blood-soaked sky, a colossal crimson comet tore through the red veil, hurtling straight toward the western continent.
...
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