Chapter 683: Shattered Seals

Third Person’s POV

The tendrils reached his body.

Then—

They sank directly into his skin.

One after another, the streams of violet liquid were absorbed into Ethan’s body.

Eleanor’s expression became increasingly tense as she watched the potion enter his bloodstream.

Now, all they could do was wait and see whether their desperate gamble would succeed.

The women knew that his condition was very critical, but they didn’t know its severity from the inside.

Ethan’s blood and veins had strangely been dyed in shades of poisonous blue, while his ice mana had been depleted to almost nothing.

Even his internal organs had become infected, their vitality slowly being eroded by the terrifying poison.

His heart, which continued beating inside his chest, had turned an unnatural shade of poisonous blue, and each sluggish beat came with increasing difficulty.

It seemed as if it would stop beating at any second.

His mana veins had withered into almost nothing and were already on the verge of disappearing entirely.

Yet the most surprising effect the poison had on Ethan was something even he could never have anticipated.

It was eating away at the dark blue mana restriction seals covering his mana veins.

These were the seals that had been personally placed by Ivan Froststar, the Lord of Froststar City and the maternal grandfather of Erius.

The mana seals were extraordinarily complex and had been designed to sustain themselves indefinitely.

They didn’t simply suppress Ethan’s mana.

The seals didn’t need the caster’s mana to function, as they used Ethan’s own dark mana to sustain their existence, transforming that mana into chains that continuously restricted his mana veins and prevented him from accessing his true strength.

Ethan had understood this long ago.

In fact, he had always found a certain irony in it.

His own mana was being used to imprison itself.

But now, the situation had changed.

The two kinds of mana inside his body had already dried up after being devoured by the blue poison, and the rivers connected to it had consequently followed.

With Ethan’s mana nearly exhausted, the seals had gone dormant and unresponsive.

Yet they still hadn’t broken.

If his mana had simply dried up, the seals would have remained intact despite becoming dormant, continuing to restrict him until their source of power was restored.

If it had been so easy to destroy them, Ethan would have already done so by intentionally diffusing his mana into the world and depriving his body of mana for a while.

Afterwards, he could have then broken those seals, but reality was not so simple.

There was, however, an external factor that Ivan Froststar could never have accounted for, regardless of how powerful or intelligent he was.

The dark blue poison, the poison that slowly melted the seals from within.

It infiltrated their complicated structure, seemingly learning the way in which the seals were constructed before gradually unraveling them from the inside.

Almost all of the seals were already on the verge of disappearing.

The poison had possessed more than enough time to erode them ever since it had first entered Ethan’s body.

In the past, Ethan himself had attempted to do something similar.

Whenever he tried to use his soul sense or mana to interfere with the seals, however, his efforts were immediately blocked.

The seals had been designed specifically to prevent such interference from soul power and mana.

But the poison was different.

It did not belong to the Agate Star World.

It was fundamentally different from the elemental energies that existed within this world, and it was one of the most lethal demonic poisons unique to the species of that deformed creature.

The seals had never been designed to defend against something like it.

Yet just as the final traces of the seals were beginning to dissolve, something else entered Ethan’s body.

Several streams of violet-colored liquid suddenly surged through his bloodstream.

The moment the blue poison sensed the foreign substance, its instincts immediately reacted.

An enemy.

That was what its instincts told it.

The corruption and infiltration that had been occurring throughout Ethan’s body suddenly stopped.

All of the blue poison’s attention shifted toward the newly arrived violet streams.

It gathered its scattered existence throughout Ethan’s body and immediately attacked the violet liquid, its instinctive desire to survive driving it to devour the new intruder before it could threaten its existence.

But the blue poison was unaware of one crucial fact.

The violet streams possessed similar instincts.

The moment the violet potion had entered Ethan’s body, it had also perceived the blue poison as its absolute nemesis.

The two forces collided.

And the strange devouring properties possessed by both began to tear into each other.

BOOM!

Within Ethan’s body, wherever the poison and potion met, blue and violet vortices began forming one after another.

The blue poison had already grown considerably stronger after absorbing Ethan’s mana and vital energy for such a long period of time.

But the violet poison was far from weak.

It was a potion Eleanor had painstakingly developed using numerous precious magical ingredients, each containing an enormous amount of elemental energy.

Those ingredients had been combined together with extreme precision, allowing their individual properties to synergize with one another and produce the greatest possible effect.

Neither side was willing to retreat.

The blue and violet forces violently clashed throughout Ethan’s body, creating a strange internal tug-of-war as each attempted to devour the other.

And caught between these two opposing forces were the remaining mana seals.

The pressure they were subjected to suddenly became too much, and one after another—

CRACK!

The mana seals finally began to fracture.

Then the remaining seals shattered completely.

The instant the last seal broke, a powerful heartbeat suddenly resounded from Ethan’s chest.

THUMP!

Inside his mana dimension, a huge hexagonal dark crystal floated silently within a dim gray world.

The barriers surrounding that world had finally broken.

The connections between Ethan’s mana dimension and his physical body were finally restored.

And for the first time in many days, nothing remained to prevent the power within his mana dimension from flowing outward into his body.