“—Master Makarov, I’m sorry. I somehow dragged you into this as well.”
Byakuran mentally bowed to the guild master.
Once this matter was over, he would definitely return to the guild and buy Master Makarov two months’ worth of alcohol as an apology.
Not a single person in the hall could utter a word.
Arcadios’s hand was already gripping the hilt of his sword—not because he intended to draw it, but simply because holding it gave him a slight sense of security.
He had monitored this man for four days.
During those four days, the man had not shown any obvious flaws, yet everything about him seemed suspicious.
Even when eating, he used magic to conceal his face.
Arcadios had already filled an entire notebook with “suspicious points.”
Now, every single word recorded in that small notebook against his chest had become meaningless.
“…Impossible.”
Dordon pressed himself against the wall, his voice trembling.
“This is impossible. If a Mage of such magnitude truly existed, the Council couldn’t possibly not know. We couldn’t possibly not know. The entire continent of Ishgar couldn’t possibly have never heard of such a person…”
“That is why I hide in the shadows.”
Byakuran’s tone remained calm.
There were plenty of things they didn’t know.
It was understandable if they knew nothing about the Black Dragon.
It had always been searching for dragons overseas and rarely appeared in public.
But Zeref wandered around Ishgar every day, and yet hadn’t they all believed he was dead?
“You… You!”
“Your Majesty.”
Layla suddenly spoke, breaking through the suffocating silence that had settled over the hall.
She did not look at Byakuran.
Instead, she lowered her head slightly, deep in thought.
A trace of nostalgia appeared on her refined and lovely face.
“I once… had the honor of communicating with the Celestial Spirit King.”
That single sentence stunned everyone.
“That was a long time ago. He was the most immense and sacred existence I had ever seen in my life.”
Layla slowly raised her head, an unusual light flashing in her eyes.
“Yet just now, I had a very inappropriate illusion.”
Her gaze returned to Byakuran, and for the first time, something resembling awe appeared in her eyes.
“I cannot quite explain what it was. But I am certain that the oppressive feeling I felt just now was genuine.”
“Layla…”
Jude’s heart tightened.
He instinctively reached out and grabbed his wife’s hand.
“Dong—”
A muffled chime suddenly rang out from directly overhead, its massive echo reverberating throughout the underground passageways before crashing into the gloomy hall.
Then came a second chime.
And a third.
The palace Mage standing at the top of the stairs hurriedly ran down, shouting anxiously.
“Y-Your Majesty! An urgent report from the observatory! The Eclipse phenomenon has begun!”
The scene instantly descended into chaos.
King Toma slowly straightened his back.
The dignity belonging to a ruler awakened within him.
At this moment, he was no longer an ordinary eccentric old man.
He was the final generation of the royal family that had guarded the Eclipse Gate for four hundred years.
“Madam Layla.”
“Yes.”
The king looked at her.
“Today, I will keep watch here. The royal family has guarded this place generation after generation for four hundred years, all so that we could witness this very moment. Please open the gate.”
Layla closed her eyes and took a deep breath.
When she opened them again, all hesitation and worry had completely disappeared.
Only absolute determination remained.
The arrow was already on the bowstring and had to be released.
The Eclipse celestial phenomenon would not wait for anyone.
Ancestor Anna had been waiting on the other side of the gate for four hundred years, and the Heartfilia family had passed down this legacy for four hundred years precisely for this day.
“Mr. Ye.”
“Mhm.”
“I am wagering my life and my family’s destiny on you.”
Layla paused.
“If you lied to me—”
“I know.”
Byakuran nodded calmly.
“The person behind you will kill me immediately.”
Zudil, who was kneeling to the side, shuddered violently and abruptly raised his head.
“You—?!”
“Zudil.”
Layla interrupted him without saying anything more.
“The keys.”
“…Yes.”
Zudil gritted his teeth and raised the Capricorn key in his hands.
Layla walked toward the gate.
Eleven golden keys floated up from her palms.
After circling around her once, they flew precisely into the grooves carved into the surface of the gate.
Click. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
Click.
Click.
Aries.
Taurus.
Gemini.
Cancer.
Leo.
Virgo.
Libra.
Scorpio.
Sagittarius.
Capricorn.
Pisces.
Eleven brilliant rays of starlight suddenly erupted.
However, the twelfth groove—the ancient astrological position engraved with an inverted Aquarius vase—remained pitch-black and completely silent.
The enormous gate lit up with eleven sections of radiance, yet the activation stopped precisely at the final piece.
Layla brought her hands together in a prayer gesture, her fingertips gathering the lingering glow of the eleven rays of starlight.
“Respond to me—”
Her crisp and solemn voice echoed through the empty hall.
“Spirits of the Zodiac!”
“In the name of Heartfilia, and upon the pledge of the promise made four hundred years ago, forcibly open the gate—Eclipse!”
Boom!!
The constellation reliefs on the enormous gate simultaneously lit up to their absolute limit, suddenly exploding into a sky full of radiance.
The eleven streams of stellar power fiercely crashed toward the center of the gate, illuminating the constellation grooves one after another.
However, when they reached the vacant twelfth groove, the massive surge of energy suddenly came to a violent halt.
Eleven-twelfths of the seal had been torn open.
The final one-twelfth was still missing.
Immediately afterward, Byakuran heard a strange sound.
It was not an explosion.
It was not the collapse of a building.
It was a pure, almost predatory extraction.
“—Hum-woo—!!”
In an instant, every magic crystal lamp illuminating the hall went completely dark.
This was not a normal loss of energy.
The magic power within them had been violently sucked away into a vacuum in the span of a single moment.
The darkness lasted for only half a second before the hall was illuminated once again by the eleven wildly flickering rays of starlight.
The defensive magic arrays engraved into the walls began failing and collapsing on a massive scale, eventually becoming nothing more than withered, lifeless markings.
“Ah—!”
The elite knights lined up on both sides collapsed to their knees one after another.
The meager magic power within their bodies, which they used to maintain their heavy armor magic, was forcibly dragged out of them by the tyrannical suction force.
Visible streams of fluorescence surged wildly across the ground toward the greedy giant gate.
“Your Majesty!”
Arcadios’s eyes widened in fury as he stepped forward to shield the king.
The magical patterns on his knightly armor were dimming inch by inch.
“W-What is this?!”
The documents in Dordon’s hands were instantly swept away by the violent airflow.
They slammed against the wall and trembled there in a crumpled bundle.
Meanwhile, Layla, who stood at the very center of the storm, instantly turned deathly pale.
Byakuran’s eyelids twitched.
It’s coming.
Because a portion of the required power was missing, the Eclipse Gate had begun instinctively devouring every source of energy within its reach.
But even this was far from enough.
Layla’s blonde hair, tied behind her neck, was pulled straight by the invisible gale.
All color drained from her lips, and her fingertips trembled violently.
Yet she continued standing firmly before the gate.
She refused to yield even half a step.
In the original story, this should have been the exact moment when Layla stepped forward and replenished the missing magic power with the essence of her own life until the gate opened, ultimately suffering from a terminal illness due to her depletion of magic power.
“Layla—!”
Jude desperately tried to rush forward, but the head-on surge of energy violently blew him away.
“Lady Layla!!”
Zudil’s eyes widened in terror, his roar so torn and desperate that it barely sounded human.
Byakuran sighed softly.
Finally, he took a step forward.
Then he extended his right hand and fearlessly pressed it against the upper reaches of the violently devouring torrent of magic power.
Ruumble—!!
This could no longer be called a simple “release.”
It was more like a dam bursting open.
A pillar of pure white energy violently erupted from Byakuran’s palm.
The moment it rushed out of his body, the energy directly materialized under its overwhelming density.
It was no longer formless magic power.
Instead, it transformed into a surging, roaring white torrent that emitted a deep, dragon-like roar.
The materialized wave of magical fury fiercely slammed into the Eclipse Gate, exploding into ring after ring of terrifying annular wind pressure.
The knights who had been kneeling were flipped over and sent rolling across the ground like straw.
King Toma’s black magic-repelling cloak was blown straight into the air. This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
If this had not been the royal forbidden ground buried hundreds of meters underground, this tide of magic power would have been enough to completely change the color of the sky within a radius of a hundred miles.
The floor of the grand hall began to crack.
It was not being smashed apart by some physical object.
It was simply being crushed beneath the terrifying absolute weight of Byakuran’s magic power.
Dense, spiderweb-like cracks spread wildly from beneath Byakuran’s feet toward the Eclipse Gate, with dazzling white light gushing from the gaps.
The Eclipse Gate sensed this vast energy.
Instantly, all of its suction force abandoned everyone else.
It transformed into an enormous abyssal mouth and greedily lunged toward Byakuran, attempting to completely drain the arrogant mortal from the inside out.
Yet then it discovered something.
What it was facing was not a deep well that could eventually be pumped dry.
It was an endless ocean.
No.
Even an ocean had boundaries and a seabed.
The man standing before it…
had no limits whatsoever.
The pure white torrent of magic power continued expanding wildly.
Eventually, Byakuran had to turn his body sideways and use his left hand to firmly grip his right wrist.
For the first time in his life, he experienced a strange kind of discomfort.
It was not because the magic power inside his body was running out.
It was because the exit was too small.
The speed at which his magic power rushed out of his body was simply too fast.
It scoured his entire arm as if it were being burned by blazing flames, even causing the webbing of his right hand to ooze thin wisps of blood.
Meanwhile, the underground hall, which had remained almost completely unchanged for four hundred years, began to collapse beneath the relentless torrent of magic power.
Stone slabs shattered.
Walls peeled apart.
The dome collapsed in massive chunks.
Yet when the falling debris and enormous stones reached midair, they eerily came to a halt.
They were firmly suspended by the magic magnetic field, which had become so dense that it was almost viscous.
The debris vibrated wildly in midair along with the surging energy, unable to fall to the ground.
The knights scrambled across the ground on all fours, retreating in terror.
Some discovered that they could not move at all.
Their heavy armor had been pressed tightly against the cracked stone floor, as though an invisible giant hand were forcing their spines into the ground.
Others experienced a terrible ringing in their ears.
The entire world seemed to lose its sound, leaving behind only the storm-like pounding of blood vessels against their temples.
Still others opened their mouths wide to breathe, only to discover that the surrounding air had long since been evaporated, making it impossible to inhale even a shred of oxygen.
“Don’t look up! Everyone, get down!!”
Arcadios roared at the top of his lungs, but most of his voice was instantly swallowed by the deafening roar of the magic power.
Yet Arcadios himself did not get down.
As the captain of the Cherry Blossom Knights, he half-knelt before the king, supporting himself against the ground with one hand while raising his shield with the other.
He stared at the godlike, demonic figure standing before him.
His mind had gone completely blank.
Only endless fear and absurdity remained in his heart.
Are you kidding me…?
For the past few days, I was actually monitoring a monster of this level?!
Dordon slid down the wall and sat on the ground.
His lips moved for a long time, but not a single word came out.
His entire life had been devoted to scheming and planning for the “safety of the kingdom.”
Only at this moment did he finally understand that some existences were simply beyond the limits of human effort.
They could not be measured by human standards.
Layla stood completely frozen.
Her exquisitely beautiful face was filled with indescribable shock and disbelief.
The terrifying suction force that had been frantically draining her life force had been violently cut off the moment that man intervened.
Her blonde hair gently settled back behind her neck, while the color slowly returned to her pale face.
But immediately afterward, the bottomless eruption of magic power plunged her into an even deeper state of shock.
The man who had concealed his face from beginning to end.
The man whose words had always been vague.
The man she had secretly suspected and guarded against for four entire days.
He was now standing atop the fractured ruins.
With the power of a single person, he had unleashed a torrent of magic power that did not belong to humanity—or even to this world.
He was suppressing and filling the Eclipse Gate, a gate said to connect time and space, until it was completely overwhelmed.
This man’s magic power was bottomless.
The greatest existence Layla had ever witnessed in her life was the Celestial Spirit King.
Yet the thought that surfaced in her mind at this moment felt almost inappropriate even to herself.
So there really was a second kind of greatness in this world.
King Toma hid behind Arcadios, desperately tilting his head upward.
His beard had been blown into complete disarray by the violent wind, yet his eyes were shining brilliantly.
He had completely forgotten about fear.
“Ooh-ooh-ooh—! I-Is this what a Mage is like?!”
“Your Majesty, please step back!”
“I will not step back!”
The short king desperately clung to his knight captain’s shoulder guards, his face flushed red with excitement.
“I held so many banquets precisely so I could see something like this in my lifetime!”