The Flame Demon Eye, for the first time, revealed genuine shock. In that instant, a flicker of disbelief passed through Astreia’s purple Magic Eyes, which had always held a teasing smile.
She hadn’t expected that a mere Laxana’s mental strength could be so paranoid as to shake the Law Imprisonment she had personally set. On the surface of the purple-black spherical barrier, that fine crack was spreading madly in an unstoppable manner.
“Wendy… is MINE!!!”
A screech unlike any human voice, wrapped in endless resentment and the will to destroy, tore out from the crack.
It was no longer a plea.
Nor was it anger.
It was the final Curse a Soul uttered before being completely incinerated, using every last bit of its existence.
With that screech, the purple-black spherical barrier exploded into pieces!
Laxana’s figure reappeared in midair.
But her entire body was burning.
Seven pure elemental energies, each refined to the extreme, were frantically reversing, colliding, and annihilating within her body, until finally erupting uncontrollably as a pillar of rainbow light connecting heaven and earth, swallowing her whole!
“Laxana! No!”
From another sphere below, Layana let out a Mother’s most desperate wail.
She understood.
She understood what her daughter was about to do.
Sacrifice.
Sacrificing everything about herself—her Soul, her Power, her memories, even her very existence—to detonate the already wildly unstable Power of the Seven Luminaries within her body.
Law Imprisonment was unbreakable. Yet that seemingly thin layer of purple light might as well have separated two different Worlds. She could do nothing. She slammed her head, her body, every ounce of strength she had, crazily against the barrier, but that purple light didn’t budge an inch.
All she could do was watch helplessly as that familiar yet unfamiliar figure walked toward eternal destruction within that dazzling pillar of light.
Wendy was completely dumbfounded too.
He instinctively reached out a hand, his mouth opening and closing, but no sound came out.
He wanted to stop her.
But it was too fast.
Everything had happened too fast!
That face which had once shown him a morbidly obsessive smile now held only the mania of destroying everything.
For some reason.
At that very moment, Wendy’s heart clenched sharply, a real, piercing pain he had never experienced before surging through him.
Astreia’s reaction was lightning fast.
The moment Laxana’s body began to transform, she released Wendy and slammed her palm forward, trying to press it against the re-coalescing Chaos Energy.
Torrential purple-black Demonic Flame erupted from her palm, desperately trying to force its way in and stabilize that destructive force on the verge of total失控.
But it was too late.
Laxana’s will for self-destruction was absolute.
She had already relinquished all control over her body and Power.
The moment Astreia’s Power made contact, it was violently repelled by that destructive energy collapsing inward!
The next second, the World fell silent.
That sphere of rainbow light enveloping Laxana shattered soundlessly.
A single thought, desperate to the extreme, like weeping and murmuring, rang out clearly in the depths of everyone’s Soul.
“Since I can’t have him…”
“Then let my Love… become the flame that burns everything to ash!”
There was no deafening roar.
No world-shaking impact.
Only a rainbow halo, beautiful enough to steal one’s breath yet containing ultimate destruction, expanding outward at terrifying speed from the epicenter of Laxana’s final existence.
Everything the halo passed through was annihilated.
The twisted dead forest, the shattered weapons, the mountains of bones…
All of it, as if erased from the World by an invisible giant hand, turned into pure nothingness.
Even space itself was erased and reset before that halo.
In the nick of time.
Astreia yanked the still-stunned Wendy behind her.
She extended her left hand forward, fingers snapping open wide.
“BOOM!”
A colossal barrier of purple-black Demonic Flame rose from the ground, soaring into the sky, like a Wall of Sighs separating life from death, shielding her, Wendy, and the two purple spheres holding the Two Deans behind her.
The rainbow halo swept past.
The entire Dream Demon Graveyard, along with that eerie Blood Moon, was devoured by that beautiful halo.
When the dazzling light finally faded.
That eerie, sinister land of bones… was gone.
In its place stood a colossal crater so vast its edges were beyond sight, smooth as a mirror, as if forged from glass.
Laxana had turned to ash along with it.
Not even a single speck of dust remained in this World.
Astreia slowly withdrew the purple flame barrier before her.
The two purple spheres enveloping Layana and Aurelia silently dissipated as well.
Layana stumbled as she fell from midair, her feet touching the glass-smooth ground, yet she felt no sense of reality at all.
Step by step, like a walking corpse, she made her way to the edge of the crater.
She stared at the empty pit below, at the World where every trace of her daughter had been utterly erased.
Her knees gave way.
She collapsed helplessly to the ground.
She didn’t wail or scream. She only let out a few low, anguished whimpers, suppressed to the extreme, like a wounded beast.
In the end, this Dean of the Mage Academy, who had always maintained her elegance and strength, completely broke down.
She lay on the ground, burying her face in her arms, and wept openly.
That cry was filled with regret, with Despair, with the deepest pain a Mother could bear.
Aurelia silently sighed, stepped forward, and gently pulled her grief-stricken old friend into her embrace.
Wendy, still shaken, peeked out from behind Astreia’s tall silhouette.
He stared blankly at the massive crater, at the Two Deans weeping in each other’s arms in the distance, his mind still a complete blank.
Dead?
Just… like that… dead?
“Laxana… h-how… how?!”
Wendy instinctively looked at the Witch Queen who had shielded him from everything.
And in that instant, he clearly saw a flicker of deep, genuine regret and annoyance pass through Astreia’s Magic Eyes, which always burned with purple flames.
That expression was like someone who had meticulously prepared a perfect plan for years, only to have it completely ruined at the final step by a foolish accident.
Wendy even heard her whisper two words under her breath, barely audible.
“Idiot.”
There was no anger in those words.
No mockery.
Only pure helplessness and regret.
Yet that emotion vanished in a flash.
So quickly that Wendy almost thought he had imagined it.
The next second, Astreia’s cold demeanor instantly returned to its usual icy indifference, as if everything that had just happened was merely an illusion.
What exactly was she planning?
Was Laxana’s death also outside her plan?
Then what was her original plan, exactly?
An unprecedented chill ran up Wendy’s spine, straight to the top of his head.
Just as this eerie atmosphere of deathly silence and grief enveloped everything—
A new change erupted!
The entire space of the Dream Demon Graveyard suddenly trembled violently!
A fierce wind rose from the ground, kicking up dust from the crater’s edge, forming a massive vortex in the air.
All the residual Magical energy in this space—whether it belonged to Astreia’s floating purple-black Demonic Flame or Laxana’s not-yet-fully-dissipated rainbow specks of light—at this moment, as if summoned by some invisible force, transformed into hundreds of millions of streaks of light, racing toward the very center of that colossal crater!