Chapter 368
Myra Astrielle's hatred toward Alaric Syah was not static.
It did not freeze at a certain level.
On the contrary, it grew.
Each day she lived remembering that cruelty, each night she spent dreaming of revenge, each small advance in her strength that made her feel one step closer—all of it added wood to the fire of her hatred.
'After countless prayers, after every preparation was completed, emptiness was what remained.'
Frankly speaking, Myra Astrielle waited with a dreadful patience, filled with poisonous anticipation.
Every day she woke with the same hope—that this would be the day Alaric Syah returned.
She imagined those seconds with painful precision, especially the moment when her blade or power would strike and sever the man's head from his body.
Every shadow moving at the corner of her eye, every fluctuation of foreign energy, made her heart pound, ready to transform into a killing machine.
She lived in a constant state of high alert, a predator lurking at the edge of her own forest of existence, awaiting the return of her sole prey.
Yet year after year passed with the cruelty of time.
Seasons changed, leaves fell and grew again, but there was no sign whatsoever of Alaric Syah.
His long-awaited—or rather, deeply cursed—arrival never came.
Even after Myra prayed, or more accurately cursed, hundreds of times at the altar of her own anger, the sky remained silent.
There were no dimensional tears, no disturbing surges of dark cosmic energy, no familiar shadow.
The patience that had once been the furnace of her burning rage slowly began to lose its fuel.
Myra's blazing spirit to sever Alaric Syah's head—the bastard in her narrative—began to fade.
It was not a conscious decision, but a gradual erosion, worn down little by little by the uneventful routine of time.
The signs of that fading were real.
Her secret training ground, once a temple of devotion and suffering, was slowly abandoned.
Dust began to cover the equipment, cobwebs adorned its corners, and the silence there was no longer the silence of concentration, but of neglect.
Myra might still have trained, but the intensity had lessened.
Her once laser-sharp obsessive focus began to widen and lose its edge.
Her life, which had revolved around a single axis of revenge, started to feel empty and directionless.
She still hated, but that hatred began to lose its concrete shape, turning into a general bitterness drifting within her.
Until one day, on what seemed like an ordinary afternoon, while Myra Astrielle was shopping in a crowded market, trying to distract herself with the colors and sounds of an ordinary world, something extraordinary occurred.
Right above the bright market sky, the air suddenly tore open.
Not like an ordinary teleportation rift, but an unnatural spatial rupture, emitting a faint green light that pulsed strangely.
And from within that tear, it was not Alaric Syah who emerged, but an invasion of something entirely foreign.
Something moss-green in form, yet alive and energetic, spreading rapidly through the air like a giant fungus growing at impossible speed.
It radiated a kind of cosmic energy, but of a different quality—a cold and ravenous collective consciousness.
'Strikingly similar.'
Myra Astrielle's confidence in herself was not empty.
She proved it with tangible results amid the chaos of the market overrun by the moss-green energetic creatures she called Lanto Baba.
With a composure that had returned, now armed with years of knowledge, she moved with devastating precision and power.
Dozens of Lanto Baba charging in grotesque forms were struck down one by one, shattered into clumps of green energy that gradually faded.
Every attack she read, every weakness she discovered, and every end of battle only strengthened her conviction that her relentless training had borne fruit.
She was confident, and that confidence was paid for with visible victories before the eyes of fleeing civilians.
However, in the midst of battle and her rising confidence, Myra's gaze caught something else.
A young man's silhouette standing at some distance, not only nimbly avoiding every wild Lanto Baba strike, but actively holding back their assault.
What drew Myra's attention was not merely his ability to endure, but what he did next.
The remaining Lanto Baba suddenly merged, forming a single massive serpent-like body with ten writhing heads.
And before that greater threat, the young man acted.
From his body, Myra sensed a rare and complex fluctuation of energy.
He mastered the five basic elements—fire, water, earth, air—along with cosmic energy.
More than that, he wielded something called Perception Alteration, an ability allowing him to subtly yet effectively manipulate the surrounding reality.
Yet what made Myra's breath catch was the color of his cosmic energy.
Between streams of light and darkness, there was a burst of super dark cosmic energy that was precisely, eerily identical to the energy once possessed and used by Alaric Syah to destroy everything.
That sudden shock and wave of recognition made Myra falter for a fraction of a second.
In that instant, invisible shackles—born from the aura of the Lanto Baba—lashed onto her with impossible speed.
Her hands and feet were bound tightly, positioned as if she were being crucified in midair, though no cross was visible.
Her shock quickly turned into deep panic as she realized something horrifying was happening within her.
The Lu Core she had studied, mastered, and honed for years with such hardship was suddenly thrown into chaos.
A cruel interference disrupted her energy flow from within.
The Lu Core that should have been her strength turned against her.
She felt it rebel, attempting to kill its own owner, as though she herself were being branded the villain by her own power.
The unbearable pain and the fear of being consumed by the very force she had painstakingly built forced her to scream.
'Fate, it seemed, had other plans.'
Clearly, Myra Astrielle had surrendered.
Within the paralyzing shackles and the inner turmoil of her Lu Core threatening from within, she saw no way out.
The thought of resisting had extinguished, replaced by an overwhelming exhaustion.
She even intended to close her eyes, bitterly accepting that her life—filled with waiting and bitterness—would end here, in a chaotic marketplace, not by Alaric Syah's hand as she had longed for, but by a foreign force and betrayal from within herself.
She prepared to embrace the final darkness, a bland conclusion to her tragic story.
But it was there that fate chose to say otherwise.
The foreign young man who had displayed that suspicious dark cosmic energy suddenly shifted his full attention.
The Lanto Baba that had formed the terrifying ten-headed serpent was swiftly and easily handled by him.
Not with excessive violence, but with a profound understanding of the surrounding reality.
The young man did not panic.
He raised his hand, and an extraordinary concentration radiated from him.
To be continued…