Chapter 36: The Seal of Grace

(EVELYN POV)

Above the collapsing realm, their eyes met in silence—a deity of dark destruction and the last master of the Grace blade.

The dark sky had turned a bruised blood-red, the crimson moon hanging low like a swollen eye. Translucent fractures spider-webbed across the firmament, catching the flickering purple light from below. With every passing second, the spatial walls groaned under the strain, dropping faint, sparkling dust into the rising wind.

From her vantage point in mid-air, Evelyn Grace scanned the devastated hillside.

Ryu lay motionless on the broken gravel, his sword thrown ten yards away. Farther down the ridge, Liora’s pale body remained huddled beneath a circle of terrified, sobbing youths who clutched at one another in utter despair.

Evelyn set her jaw. The dimensional structure was failing fast. If Nyx broke through the rift into the outside world, the Heretical Dark Faction and Velista’s encroaching forces would be the least of humanity’s concerns—an ancient horror would be unleashed upon a world unprepared to contain it.

A heavy knot of remorse tightened in her chest. She had arrived too late to spare them this agony.

(A short while earlier...)

Evelyn’s eyelids fluttered open, her vision swimming before settling on two familiar faces hovering above her. Reika and Miku stood by her side, their brows furrowed with visible relief. Sitting on a woven mat nearby was an elderly woman with deep-set wrinkles, flanked by two young maidens who tended to her with quiet care.

"Ah... Princess Evelyn is awake," Reika breathed, letting out a long, shuddering sigh.

"Thank goodness," Miku added, resting a hand over her chest.

"Princess Evelyn..." the elderly woman rasped softly, her weathered voice carrying a trembling weight.

Evelyn sat up, her eyes widening as recognition washed over her. "Grandmother...?"

She knew this woman. Decades ago, before the kingdom fractured, this elder had served the royal house of Grace as a senior attendant for nearly thirty years.

Reika glanced between them, blinking. "Wait, Princess... you know her?"

Evelyn gave a firm nod, her gaze remaining fixed on the old woman. "She was Zephyrion’s lead restoration caster. She spent forty-seven years in service to my family’s estate before returning to her homeland when Zephyrion called for aid. After that... she vanished."

The old woman offered a faint, melancholy smile.

Evelyn pressed a palm against her side, feeling the lingering sting of depleted mana. "How did you end up trapped in this domain, Grandmother? What happened here?"

The elder let out a ragged breath. "When the council summoned me, my duty was to remain at the forward staging grounds, tending to the vanguards injured in the monster waves. But then... Vora attacked."

She closed her eyes, her voice tight with remembered terror. "Her forces overran the camp. She dragged scores of us into this artificial realm."

"Then there are others here?" Evelyn asked.

"There were," the elder replied quietly. "Vora executed most of the captives over time. Only a fraction of us survived long enough to find Liora. Together, we carved out a small haven to stay alive."

Reika held her chin, her brows drawing together. "Why snatch so many people just to murder them in a pocket dimension? That doesn’t make any sense."

"Nobody acts without a motive," Miku agreed, her voice grim. "Vora has to be planning something specific."

Evelyn pieced the details together in silence. Vora was a known commander within the Heretical Dark Faction, but slaughtering non-combatants inside a sealed sub-space was far too calculated to be mindless cruelty.

Before she could press further, the old woman reached out with a trembling hand, grasping Evelyn’s fingers tightly.

"Princess..." tears gathered in the folds of the elder’s eyes. "The others are heading for the ridge to find Liora. Vora is bound to be there as well."

Miku immediately dropped to one knee beside the old woman, gently patting her back. "Please, don’t strain yourself—"

"Liora... she intends to offer up her own life force to break the barrier," the old woman wept, her chest heaving with heavy, choked hitches. "She kept her plan hidden from the rest of us because she didn’t want us to stop her. She only confessed it to me in secret... made me swear not to utter a word..."

Evelyn’s chest went cold.

Liora wasn’t merely a survivor—she was the living battery sustaining this entire sub-space. Her earlier warning about the difficulty of escaping had been a quiet farewell. She had directed them north to draw Vora away, intending to use her own death as the key to collapsing the realm’s anchor. Without her, the spatial domain would be forced to rely entirely on Vora’s mana to exist.

"Princess Evelyn, I beg of you..." The old woman looked up, her sight clouded with tears. "Save them."

Reika stepped forward, her voice low and hesitant. "Grandmother... Princess Evelyn suffers from severe mana burn after her duel with Velista. She can barely stand, let alone fight—"

"She can," the old woman interrupted softly.

She turned to one of the young maidens beside her and offered a quiet nod. The girl hurried to a rolled-up straw mat at the edge of the shelter, reaching beneath the fibers to retrieve a small, velvet-wrapped object. She returned and placed it into the elder’s hands.

The old woman unfolded the cloth, revealing a polished, deep-violet crystal that hummed with a quiet, inner radiance.

"Take this, Evelyn," the elder said, extending her cupped hands. "It is the heirloom of the Grace bloodline."

Evelyn stared at the glowing stone, her breath catching. "How... how do you have this? The royal vault in the capital already holds the purple crystal."

"Your house never possessed merely one," the elder explained, her eyes solemn. "The late Duke split the ancestral crystals into three pieces long ago. Dark cults and rogue factions were hunting them relentlessly, desperate to harvest the raw dark magic sealed within. Keeping all three in one place would have invited the absolute ruin of Starlight Kingdom."

She smoothed her thumb over the crystal’s polished surface. "Your grandfather entrusted this shard to me for safekeeping. When Vora raided our camp in Zephyrion, she sought this very stone. I managed to conceal it beneath the floorboards, leaving her with a decoy crystal I had crafted years prior."

Reika and Miku leaned closer, their faces illuminated by the violet glow emanating from the palm-sized jewel.

Evelyn gently took the crystal into her hands, feeling a subtle warmth seep into her skin. "Why give this to me now, Grandmother?"

"I can feel an ancient, suffocating pressure surging from the hill," the elder said, her eyes fixed on the distant ridge where the sky had begun to bleed. "It is not Vora’s magic, nor does it belong to any Aberrant monster. It is far older. Far more terrifying."

"What am I supposed to do with it?"

"The ancestral crystal holds the power to elevate a Grace descendant’s soul mark to its absolute peak," the old woman answered, her tone dead serious. "It will burn away your mana exhaustion and expand your core beyond its normal limits. But more importantly... it was forged for a single purpose: to seal the Dark God Nyx."

The ambient wind seemed to drop, leaving a chilling stillness in the air.

"The entity that laid waste to human civilization two hundred and fifty years ago..." Evelyn murmured.

She had always believed the ancestral crystal in the royal vault was nothing more than a symbolic relic—a talisman passed down through generations to preserve the family’s legacy. Her elders had trained her strictly in martial prowess, never revealing the true dark history bound to their bloodline.

"Are you saying... Nyx has awakened here?" Reika whispered, her face draining of color.

The old woman gave a grim, single nod.

Evelyn squared her shoulders, her fingers tightening around the warm stone. "Rest easy, Grandmother. I’ll handle this."

"Reika, Miku—stay here and guard the survivors," Evelyn commanded as she stood up.

High above, translucent streams of stray souls began drifting through the canopy, drawn toward the distant hilltop like iron filings to a magnet.

Miku pointed toward the sky, her voice tight. "What is that...?"

’Something catastrophic is happening up there,’ Evelyn thought.

She held the violet crystal against her sternum, closing her eyes as she concentrated her remaining intent. The crystal rose from her palms, hovering mid-air before her chest. Reika and Miku watched in quiet awe as the solid stone dissolved into a dense stream of violet light, sinking directly into Evelyn’s skin.

A faint, violet ’X’ mark burned onto her right palm before fading into her flesh.

Instantly, the sluggish, hollow sensation of mana burn vanished. Her blood coursed with renewed vigor, a towering column of brilliant blue mana bursting from her frame and sweeping away the surrounding dust.

(Present moment...)

’The structural collapse is accelerating,’ Evelyn thought, watching the spatial fractures spread across the sky. ’I have to bind him before the realm shatters entirely.’

She raised her right hand, her fingers twisting into a complex sequence of spell signs.

Behind her, the massive golden magic circle expanded, spinning rapidly as intricate runes lit up along its outer ring. The floating array of normal-sized blue spectral swords surrounding her began to resonate, their blades humming with condensed sacred energy.

With a sharp flick of her wrist, Evelyn pointed two fingers directly at Nyx.

BOOM—!

The hovering longswords surged forward, expanding mid-flight into colossal, titan-sized blades of brilliant blue energy that tore through the air, their heavy shockwaves parting the gale as they converged on the ground below.

Nyx let out a low, cold laugh.

"You think a cheap sky-blade technique is enough to bind me?"

He whirled the ornate ’S’-orb scythe beside him, the dark blade whistling violently as a massive surge of pitch-black mana erupted from its tip, rising to meet the descending rain of light.