Ethan’s eyes flickered.

That lined up perfectly with what he’d already seen.

He’d been about to press for details step by step, but the flower was so terrified it didn’t dare wait for questions. It dumped everything it knew in one frantic rush, words spilling out so fast it sounded like it was afraid he’d rip its root-stalk off if it paused for even a breath.

"When this world was first born, two completely different powerful energies existed from the start," it said, voice tight and rushing. "One of them makes the beings born here possess almost endless energy. The other one is their fated nemesis. Once that power appears, it directly shatters the energy that’s opposite to it!"

"These days just happen to be when that nemesis power shows up, so everyone in Varkharr is hiding. Nobody dares walk around outside!"

It finished in one breath, the edge of its bloom trembling.

As Ethan listened, excitement rose in his eyes—slow, bright.

If that was true, then going forward he didn’t need to move like he was tiptoeing through a minefield.

Calamity Days were a disaster for Varkharr... but for him, they were a perfect window. If he used the timing right, he could sweep through and drag out the ones that were normally hard to deal with—one by one.

After spilling everything, the flower went quiet.

It stared at Ethan with a pleading, almost pitiful look, begging without words for him to let it live.

But Ethan had never planned to keep it.

Even ignoring everything else, the power leaking off this man-eating flower was dangerous enough. And the number of energy cores inside it was obviously huge. If he brought those back, it would be a seriously valuable haul.

More importantly—this was Calamity Days.

The flower was only this obedient because its strength was being suppressed right now.

Once these days ended, who could guarantee it wouldn’t flip on them instantly?

Ethan drew a slow breath. The power in his hand surged.

Transparent lightning exploded from his palm and shot up along the flower’s root-stalk.

The massive plant barely managed to let out one short, terrified scream before the lightning pierced through its body.

Bloom, leaves, stalk, roots—everything ruptured in sequence under that violent force, until it was blasted into a mess of debris across the ground.

Ethan didn’t pause. He reached in and extracted the energy cores one after another.

Just then, Queen Seraphine’s gaze shifted to the canyon wall on the other side.

Her eyes stayed there, her tone cool and level.

"There are more than ten people hiding in there," she said lightly. "They’re probably hiding from the Calamity too. Want me to drag them out?"

Ethan’s interest sparked instantly.

No extra talk. His energy surged again.

A flood of transparent lightning spread down his arm with a sharp, tearing crackle and slammed toward the rock wall like a falling tide.

The moment it touched, the entire wall shook violently. Cracks raced across it, and then the whole section blew apart with a roar.

Rock, dust—and the auras concealed inside—were exposed at once.

More than a dozen battered figures tumbled out, stumbling and rolling. Some couldn’t even keep their footing and hit the ground hard.

Every one of them carried a powerful energy fluctuation, but right now they kept it sealed tightly inside, not daring to leak a single thread.

And the instant they were exposed, the atmosphere changed.

The energy pressure hanging over the canyon dropped sharply, like something above had suddenly "noticed" them. Then a blood-red lightning bolt tore down from the sky and smashed into one of them. 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

Boom!

That lightning didn’t look overwhelmingly strong—at least not compared to the kind of attacks Ethan and Queen Seraphine could throw around.

But the effect on those people was horrifying.

It wasn’t normal damage.

It was absolute suppression—true, natural counterforce.

After the first strike, the victim screamed on the spot.

A second red bolt followed immediately, hitting another person—ripping open flesh and energy at the same time.

By the third strike, the group was already falling apart. Bodies mangled. One half-kneeling and shaking. One rolling on the ground. One so wrecked they couldn’t even get a full scream out.

For them, that blood-red lightning was a complete, undeniable bane. An inescapable nemesis.

Of course Ethan wasn’t going to let an opportunity like that slip.

He pressed his hand down. Transparent lightning swept through the air and dropped over the group with ruthless precision, striking the ones who’d already been shattered by the Calamity lightning and couldn’t fight back anymore.

The thunderlight pierced, detonated, and spread—erasing their last traces of life.

Then Ethan flexed his fingers and ripped out every energy core from their bodies.

More than a dozen cores floated around him, each one radiating a different—yet equally dense—pulse.

The look in Ethan’s eyes sharpened, brighter by a notch.

And then—right when his mood was at its best—a streak of light tore in from the distance.

Fast.

It had barely appeared at the edge of his vision when it was already closing on the canyon’s outer rim, dragging a long, twisted distortion through the air behind it. Even the surrounding energy got tugged into a visible tremor.

"Who’s there?!" Ethan snapped.

His alertness hit maximum in an instant.

Power surged inside him. Transparent lightning and the rest of his energy condensed in midair together, and in the blink of an eye, a savage dragon phantom took shape. It wasn’t even fully solid yet when the space around it began to shake.

Ethan swung his hand and smashed it forward.

The dragon roared as it lunged at the incoming figure.

At the same moment the newcomer landed, he released a domineering force of his own—and slammed into the dragon phantom head-on.

Boom!

The shockwave raced down the canyon, blasting碎石 in every direction.

But almost immediately, Ethan felt something off in the structure of the other man’s power—its fluctuations, its source. It didn’t match Varkharr’s native existence at all.

This guy was most likely an outsider, too. Someone from another universe.

After stabilizing his stance, the man didn’t even look at Ethan’s face first.

His eyes flicked sideways—straight to the dozen-plus energy cores floating nearby.

There was a look there that was both familiar and greedy, like he’d seen this exact scene a hundred times and liked it every time.

"Every Calamity Day, I come here to hunt these pieces of trash," he said, his tone almost matter-of-fact.

"No one’s ever tried to compete with me before. Didn’t think this time I’d run into two."