Chapter 684: The Two Poisons

Third Person’s POV

Dense, viscous darkness suddenly surged from the hexagonal crystal.

It spread through Ethan’s mana veins like black ink flooding through empty channels, reaching the areas that had been reduced to brittle and feeble remnants by the poison.

Wherever the darkness passed, the damaged mana veins began to rejuvenate.

The withered channels slowly regained their vitality.

There were no longer any seals to stop the darkness.

The power from Ethan’s dark crystal erupted through his mana veins completely unchecked, flowing wildly throughout his body before instinctively completing a full circulation.

And that sudden eruption of darkness didn’t merely restore his mana veins.

The tremendous surge of power also reached his dormant consciousness.

The consciousness that had seemingly settled deep within his mind space because of his body’s deteriorating condition began to stir.

For the first time since the poison had taken control of his body, something within Ethan began to awaken.

As his consciousness awakened, he was shocked in the next second.

"What is this?"

Ethan was shocked as his consciousness rapidly spread throughout his body.

The moment his awareness returned, he immediately sensed the chaotic situation within him.

Two strange and seemingly living liquids were battling each other, treating his body as their battlefield.

Blue and violet energies continuously collided within his blood vessels, muscles, organs, and mana veins, while the aftermath of their clashes tore through his already damaged tissues.

His blood had been infected.

His organs had been poisoned.

Even his nerves were suffering from the effects of the terrifying poison.

For a moment, dismay filled Ethan’s heart, yet beneath that dismay, there was also joy.

A faint, familiar sensation was surging through his body.

It was dark mana, his dark mana.

It had been so long since he had felt this familiar darkness flowing through him.

The sensation brought him an indescribable sense of comfort and peace, accompanied by a feeling of strength that he had almost forgotten.

Ever since he had awakened in Ice Emperor City, Ethan had always felt handicapped because his darkness had been sealed.

It was as though one of his arms or legs had been forcibly removed.

It felt as if he had been deprived of his eyes and forced to navigate the world without them.

Even something as simple as eating had gradually become strangely tasteless to him.

He had never allowed those feelings to control him.

Instead, he had suppressed them with sheer willpower and continued moving forward.

He had received the most important key to his advancement into the Crystal Formation Realm through a combination of luck and coincidence during that horrifying battle in the Abyssal Sanctum, with the transformation ultimately culminating during the period when he had fallen into that deep sleep.

He had guessed that the key might be the leftover essence of darkness of that mysterious enemy that had incapacitated him in the prison of Eagle’s Peak.

Yet after awakening from that sleep, he had never truly been able to enjoy the fruits of his achievement.

His magic realm had advanced, his body had transformed, and his strength had increased, but the darkness that had always been an integral part of him remained sealed away.

Because of that, a terrifying amount of resentment had slowly accumulated deep within his heart toward those who had forced this fate upon him.

Now, however, that suffocating feeling was finally gone.

His dark mana was finally flowing through his body again.

For the first time in days, Ethan felt whole, but his exhilaration didn’t last long.

His mind quickly calmed as he focused on the battle taking place inside his body.

A multitude of blue and violet vortices were fiercely colliding with each other.

Each collision twisted the surrounding space within his body and tore through his tissues caught between them.

Ethan immediately reacted.

Now that his consciousness had awakened, the first thing he did was spread his dark mana throughout his body, using it to protect his fragile organs and tissues from the destructive aftermath.

Only after ensuring that his body wouldn’t be immediately torn apart did Ethan attempt to interfere with the battle.

And that was when he discovered something shocking.

The moment his dark mana approached the vortexes, it was suddenly twisted in a strange direction.

His mana was forcibly dragged out of his soul’s control toward the swirling forces.

To his shock, it was then ripped apart and finally devoured.

Ethan’s expression became grim.

He immediately tried several different methods to interfere with the vortexes, but the result remained the same.

He couldn’t try unleashing any destructive spell with his dark mana, as that would end up killing him.

The strange force field generated by the two opposing poisons distorted everything that entered its range.

Even his dark mana couldn’t escape its pull.

Worse, the more mana the vortexes devoured, the stronger they became.

Seeing this, Ethan’s eyes narrowed as he realized something.

If these two forces weren’t fighting against each other, they could have simply joined together and devoured all of his remaining mana.

And now that his mana dimensions had been released from their restrictions, the amount of dark mana available to them was enormous compared to what they had been consuming before.

That realization made Ethan’s expression even more solemn.

He wasn’t foolish enough to underestimate the danger.

Those vortexes had essentially created a strange force field within his body, and Ethan quickly understood that their mutual conflict might actually be his only opportunity to survive.

As long as they continued fighting each other, neither could focus completely on him.

But if they ever stopped fighting and turned against him together...he would truly be in trouble.

Ethan recognized the blue vortices immediately.

They were the poison belonging to the deformed creature.

The same terrifying poison that had been sprayed onto his body during the creature’s final moments.

It had already infected and destroyed a large portion of his body.

Had Ethan not awakened at that exact moment, and had his dark mana remained imprisoned within his mana dimensions, he might have been crippled first, then died before ever waking up.