Wizard: Stronger through Marriage

Chapter 1277: Chapter 594: Abyssal Crystal Corrosion

The messenger shook his head with difficulty, his eyes red and swollen, tears frozen into clear beads of ice.

"His Majesty has ordered ’no audience and closed doors’. She has vanished, without any response." His voice trembled, lost and adrift. "I don’t know where Yi Lin has gone, only that wherever it is, it’s growing more and more dangerous..."

Silence shrouded the command hall, and the expressions on every face gradually froze into a cold, resolute mask.

A kind of ominous foreboding never felt before rose unbidden: not only the dire calamity outside, but a more intricate, unknown unrest brewing within.

And the former ally Yi Lin was now nowhere to be found, adding layers of doubt and foreshadowing to the already tangled situation.

Liya tightened her grip on the Magic Staff once more. Her face was pale, yet her voice was steady. "We have to reinforce the Rune Protection Array as quickly as possible, to create a safe environment for His Majesty’s recovery.

This will not be a brief battle, but a long vigil."

Alia walked to the edge of the ruins, her sharp gaze sweeping across the small pockets of territory that still hadn’t been cleared.

"The remnants of the enemy are still insidious and sly. We must not relax for a single moment." She held her sword with austere posture, brimful of vigilance. "Guarding this place is laying bricks for our eventual victory!"

Hill ground out his words between clenched teeth: "I’ll gather the elite Wizard Knights into an assault unit, and scour the local zones of the ’Black Scars’, leaving not a single fragment of corruption behind!"

Chief technomancer Wizard Erin’s brows were etched with exhaustion, yet she kept her gaze fixed on the screens, constantly adjusting the Star Core release frequency in hopes of stabilizing the current conditions.

"If the ’Bridge between Planes’ is completed, we’ll be able to rapidly dispatch resources and reinforcements across domains." She murmured, "But for now, it’s only a hope of the future, still needing tempering and perfection."

As David’s palm slowly touched the core of the Star Gnomon, a dazzling blue-white radiance erupted, like dawn breaking all at once to pierce the frozen night.

The space around them seemed to warp and twist, time freezing in an instant and then rushing on again.

A violent sense of being torn asunder struck them—then, suddenly, everything locked into place.

They had arrived near the Far North Fortress.

The sight before them was so overwhelming that no one could find the words.

The Far North Fortress, once towering and unyielding, as if carved from indestructible stone, now lay in shambles—broken walls and shattered ramparts piled chaotically amidst snowdrifts and rubble.

The gray-white bricks had been smashed to pieces, and the Rune Protection that had once covered them was either dead or utterly destroyed.

More horrifying still, the walls and turrets that had once made enemies quake with dread were now mostly buried beneath a strange lattice of purple-black crystal veins.

They writhed and stretched like living things, ceaselessly devouring stone and iron, slowly transforming the fortress into an unclean corpse woven from corrosion and erosion.

On the crystal veins flickered eerie dark-violet corpse-lights, Flame that burned like something dredged up from the Hell Abyss—glimmering and cold, giving off no heat, only suffusing the air with a stifling stench of decay.

Low, rumbling tremors rolled through the ground, accompanied by a faint humming, as though some ancient, forbidden power was awakening from ages past, steadily expanding its dominion.

The Earth was even more appalling: yawning maws split open the ground, bottomless fissures tearing snow and rock to shreds, and countless Low Tier Demon crawled up in a boiling surge from those pitch-black wounds.

Their forms were grotesque and twisted—bat-wings spread wide, bloodied claws, horns rearing sharp and grim.

They howled and roared, casting death’s shadow across the desolate wasteland, turning this once-glorious battlefield into a Purgatory of pure despair.

But what shocked and terrified everyone most were—those humanoid figures clad in the Armor of the Empire’s Royal Knight Order, their plates stained with brutal battle-scars and warped by sinister dark patterns.

These Demonized Knight had eyes that burned scarlet like living embers, their gaze brimming with savage, unhinged madness. Thick, viscous black miasma coiled around them, exuding a corrosive poison like the very essence of a Demon itself.

The black vapors flowed and drifted at will, yet seemed almost sentient, ready at any moment to strike or to shield, swallowing their enemies silently into the shadows of the Abyss.

More dreadful still, these Demonized Knight were not merely beasts who had lost all reason—they still retained fragments of their old Martial Arts and lethal command skills.

Amid smoke-choked chaos and spreading blood, they issued orders with chilling precision, driving the tide of Demon against the last lines that had yet to fall.

They swung their Giant Sword to butcher former comrades, charging through the shattered ruins, every stroke erupting into a thunderous roar and a spray of flesh and blood.

Their bellows and shrill screams rent the night sky, making the garrison’s hearts quail and shudder, yet no one could halt this cataclysm that was eroding the very Soul foundations of their homeland from within.

"Look... over there..." Hill’s brows knit tight. He pointed toward a cluster of Knight, among whom several leader figures wore Armor laden with the Empire’s crests, yet their eyes were nothing but bloody crimson as they hurled ruthless commands at both foes and allies, calling on Demon battalions to encircle and annihilate the remaining defenders.

"This mutation... they actually have clear thoughts? They can coordinate in battle!?"

Cynthia’s projected blue-tinted face quivered faintly. She raised a hand to cover half her visage, agony scrawled across her features.

"They are... my people... my Guardian... yet they’ve been polluted by this evil..." Her voice broke, that resonance stabbing through the Soul like needles. "I can feel their struggle inside, but I cannot dispel the miasma that’s invaded them."

The very air grew heavier under the burden of that shared pain, a suffocating sorrow blanketing the scene.

Upon these fallen ruins, every collapsed stone seemed to bear the weight of former glory, now reduced to a testament of their fall;

every crystal vein spreading out was like a proclamation that the Frost Crown was cracking apart, and the future beyond it would be woven from unknown terror and clashing storms.

The Earth groaned and thundered. Along the edge of the vast, living rift that reached toward the core sector, purple-black dust and glinting Rune shards poured forth. Those Rune strands stretched and replicated themselves, radiating outward at unnatural speed, even drawing in the wind and snow as though being swallowed into a bottomless Abyss—despairing, irreversible.