The darkness swallowed Ethan whole.There was no longer any ocean around him.No ruined temple.No coral forest.No ancient city.Only darkness.He descended through the opening created by the shattered Deep Seal, surrounded by fragments of ancient stone and broken chains falling into an abyss whose depth even his Abyss Eyes could not measure.The deeper he went, the heavier the pressure became.Then the System responded.[EXTREME ABYSSAL PRESSURE DETECTED.][ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURE EXCEEDS KNOWN A-RANK DUNGEON PARAMETERS.][HOST ADAPTATION ACTIVE.]Ethan continued downward.His Sovereign Frame remained stable.His newly acquired Kraken adaptations were already responding to the environment.The pressure no longer threatened his body.Instead, his body was learning from it.Then something moved beneath him.A shadow.Massive.It crossed his entire field of vision.Ethan stopped.His Abyss Eyes activated at maximum intensity.The darkness opened.A creature appeared.It was not the Krak

The world did not wait for Ethan to return.While the Ghost Syndicate reinforced its armies with abyssal armor and the 23 dreadnoughts remained stationed above the Coral Abyss, the governments beyond Ethan’s territory finally reached the conclusion they had spent months avoiding.They could not defeat him individually.The Global Hunter Association had failed.The Northern Faction had fallen.The Central administration had been absorbed.The continent’s largest guilds had either submitted, collapsed, or entered Ghost-controlled resource networks.Ethan Vance had gone from an unknown scavenger to the most powerful individual on the continent.And now his influence was spreading beyond its borders.The foreign powers had one question.What happened when he came for them?A secure conference began inside a fortified complex thousands of miles from Central Capital.Thirty-seven representatives appeared around a circular table.Presidents.Military commanders.Guild leaders.Corporate exec

The ocean went silent.Not calm.Silent.Five hundred dreadnoughts had arrived expecting the sea to become a battlefield, yet the moment Ethan Vance stepped out of the collapsing ocean rift, the entire coastline seemed to lose its voice.He stood alone on a black stretch of shattered rock several hundred meters from the water.Behind him, the enormous A-rank rift continued to churn beneath the ocean, its circular boundary glowing with deep violet energy. Ancient abyssal power still leaked from its depths, rising through the seawater in immense columns before dissolving into the atmosphere.Ethan’s clothes were wet, but nothing about him appeared damaged.The pressure of the deep had not marked his body.The ancient ruins had not wounded him.The Leviathan King had not broken him.The Kraken Calamity had not stopped him.And now, after descending into a world that had existed beneath humanity’s civilization for centuries, the Ghost Sovereign stood at the shore and looked directly at th

The second salvo began with silence.For half a second, the five hundred dreadnoughts did not fire.They simply charged.Across the coalition formation, thousands of weapon systems synchronized into a single network. Anti-mana cannons reached maximum output. Gravitational compression weapons locked onto Ethan’s position. Spatial anchors unfolded from the hulls of specialized vessels, creating overlapping fields designed to restrict movement. Suppression arrays activated beneath the larger warships, feeding energy into the weapons above.This was no longer a conventional bombardment.The coalition had learned from the first attack.They were no longer trying merely to destroy Ethan’s body.They were trying to overwhelm every system that made him dangerous.The central command vessel transmitted the final order.“Fire.”Five hundred warships unleashed their second attack.The ocean disappeared again.But this time, the incoming weapons behaved differently.Gravitational projectiles arri

The ocean had not finished moving when the sky opened.Above the five hundred dreadnoughts, hundreds of armored figures descended through the clouds.They did not arrive in ordinary aircraft.They flew under their own power.Silver wings of condensed mana extended from their backs, each pair formed from high-density energy and reinforced alloy. Their armor carried the insignia of the United Continental Coalition, and every warrior held a weapon designed specifically for aerial combat.The coalition had kept them hidden until now.The Sky-Knights.Three thousand elite aerial hunters.All Tier-6 or above.At their center flew forty-one Tier-7 aerial combatants.Their arrival immediately changed the battlefield.The tactical displays aboard the coalition vessels registered a new formation.SKY-KNIGHT LEGION DEPLOYED.TOTAL AERIAL UNITS: 3,000.TIER-6: 2,959.TIER-7: 41.PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: ETHAN VANCE.Admiral Lucian Veyr looked upward.The fleet had been crippled by Ethan’s Sovereign Dom