Magic Card Era: Infinite Deck Enhancement — Chapter 42

Chapter 42: It’s All About the Thrill!

“Black Gate!”

The moment those two words shattered the tense silence of the monitoring room, Chairman Yu and the other officials abandoned all pretense of composure. They surged toward the main screen, their eyes narrowing sharply at the feed.

On the display, jagged black particles bled continuously from the mangled corpse of the Carnivorous Hunter. The dark matter gnawed at the air, gradually tearing open a jagged crack in reality. Within seconds, the expanding spatial rift stabilized, transforming into a deep, abyssal Black Gate that bridged their world to an unknown Dimensional Plane.

“It is indeed a Black Gate, but why would one manifest inside the Demon Spirit Home right now?” Chairman Yu’s expression darkened. For any Dimensional Plane, the sudden appearance of a Black Gate signaled an exponential spike in lethality.

Worse yet, Luke, Bei Hanyun, Wang Ping, and the rest of Cangling City’s brightest new generation were currently trapped inside. If this elite group of Magic Card Masters perished, the city would suffer a devastating generational gap—a catastrophic loss they simply could not afford.

The timing was entirely too sensitive.

“The manifestation of the Black Gate might be directly tied to Luke,” City Lord Cang Fenghua said, taking a slow, measured breath. “Or rather, it is a byproduct of the clash between the Red-Eyes Meteor Dragon and the Carnivorous Hunter.”

The room fell stunned for a fraction of a second before the realization hit them.

The underlying rules governing a Dimensional Plane were inherently incomplete, making its spatial fabric far more fragile than the main plane of the Magic Card Civilization. The Demon Spirit Home was naturally capped at housing Six-Star Extraterrestrial Beasts simply because its spatial integrity could only withstand Six-Star power. The moment an output exceeded that threshold, the resulting spatial instability would tear the fabric of reality, forming a Black Gate.

Though the battle between the Red-Eyes Meteor Dragon and the Carnivorous Hunter had been brief, its sheer destructive intensity had breached the critical limit of the Demon Spirit Home.

Damn it! This kid Luke was putting their hearts through a blender!

“Move out. We are entering the Demon Spirit Home immediately.” Wasting no time, Cang Fenghua activated the portal.

Whenever a Black Gate anchored itself to a Dimensional Plane, the surrounding spatial laws weakened. During this volatile window, even the forceful entry of high-level experts like Cang Fenghua would not trigger a worse collapse.

“Chenyuan, Baiman, you two break off and secure your students,” Cang Fenghua ordered the moment they crossed the threshold into the Demon Spirit Home. “Right now, the Black Gate is localized at Luke’s coordinates, but we cannot be certain if the shockwaves have destabilized other sectors.”

“Understood, City Lord.” Zhao Chenyuan and Da Baiman exchanged a grim look and nodded. Neither of them had anticipated a routine training exercise mutating into a Black Gate crisis.

Without another word, the two principals launched themselves into the sky, flying frantically toward the last known coordinates of Bei Hanyun and Wang Ping. While those students couldn’t hold a candle to Luke’s monstrous talent, they were still the absolute hope of the First and Second High Schools.

Flight was a hallmark of any Magic Card Master who had broken through to the Monarch Realm, making it effortless for these two Emperor Realm experts to cross the distance.

“Let’s go,” Cang Fenghua commanded. As the two principals vanished over the horizon, the City Lord and the remaining officials took to the air, blazing a direct trail toward Luke. The boy’s survival took absolute precedence.

[Black Gate]

[Introduction: A spatial anomaly formed when localized spatial integrity is shattered. It acts as a bridge to an unknown Dimensional Plane, serving as a conduit for Extraterrestrial Beasts.]

“So this is a Black Gate?”

Luke stood at the epicenter of the spatial distortion. The corpse of the Carnivorous Hunter, previously scorched by dragon fire, had completely dissolved into the void, leaving behind only the ominous, swirling vortex. Reading the system prompt, he quickly matched the anomaly to the warnings Cang Fenghua had drilled into them.

“Am I lucky, or just cursed?” Luke muttered, his eyes locked on the rift.

A few seconds later, massive, bladed limbs hooked onto the edges of the portal. A towering, insectoid Extraterrestrial Beast dragged its grotesque bulk through the Black Gate and into the Demon Spirit Home.

[Abyssal Predator]

[Race: Extraterrestrial Beast]

[Quality: Rare]

[Level: Seven-Star]

[Skills: Predation, Absorption, Dimensional Parade, Bone-Devouring Swarm]

The Abyssal Predator resembled a gigantic, mutated beetle forged from jagged obsidian. The moment it crossed over, rows of glowing compound eyes locked onto the Red-Eyes Meteor Dragon and Luke. While the Dragon-type possessed an inherently terrifying aura, this predator had spent years parading through the brutal voids between Dimensional Planes. It felt no fear.

The faintly glowing carapace on its back suddenly split open. With a deafening, chittering screech, a massive cloud of fist-sized insects erupted from within—the Bone-Devouring Swarm. From a distance, it looked like a suffocating black curtain, but up close, the dense, writhing mass of mandibles and wings was enough to make anyone’s scalp crawl. It was absolute hell for anyone with trypophobia.

“Seven-Star Rare… Abyssal Predator.” Luke took a slow breath, his expression cooling into absolute focus as he scanned the beast’s data. This monster outleveled even his Red-Eyes Meteor Dragon. “Attack!”

In a flash of golden light, the Dark Magician Girl materialized at his side. No words were needed; her combat instincts were perfectly synchronized with his.

With a sharp twirl of her staff, she summoned her Spellbook. Dark Magic Inheritance activated instantly, pushing her mana output to a blinding zenith. She swept her staff in a wide arc, unleashing a wave of dark magic that incinerated the leading edge of the insect swarm.

Without dropping her momentum, she leveled her staff directly at the towering beetle. Dark Burning Attack!

A violent torrent of concentrated black magic blasted toward the Extraterrestrial Beast.

High above, the Red-Eyes Meteor Dragon launched a synchronized assault. Fiery rage condensed within its maw, compressing into a blinding Starflame Bullet. The projectile annihilated the remainder of the Bone-Devouring Swarm and crashed into the Abyssal Predator with devastating kinetic force, kicking up a massive shockwave of smoke and debris.

Luke felt the magic power draining from his reserves at an alarming rate, but his face remained impassive. Now was not the time to be stingy with his mana.

Miles away, sensing the violent shockwaves of the escalating battle, Cang Fenghua and the officials pushed their flight speed to the absolute limit.

Back at the crater, the smoke cleared. The Abyssal Predator stood its ground. The Starflame Bullet had only left scattered, smoldering embers across its thick carapace, failing to crack the shell. The sheer difference of a full major level between the Red-Eyes Meteor Dragon and the Seven-Star beast was a massive hurdle to overcome.

“Roar!”

Refusing to back down, the Red-Eyes Meteor Dragon folded its wings and dove straight into the fray, clashing violently with the Abyssal Predator. The Dark Magician Girl immediately repositioned, her staff glowing as she provided heavy artillery support.

For a time, waves of terrifying, suffocating pressure rolled out from the deepest sector of the Demon Spirit Home. The sheer intensity of the crossfire sent countless lower-level Extraterrestrial Beasts fleeing in absolute panic, stampeding away from the apex predators tearing up their territory.

“What the hell?! Did the entire Demon Spirit Home take crazy pills today?!”

Caught in the outer zones, Bei Hanyun, Wang Ping, and the other students turned pale as a tidal wave of terrified monsters surged past them. Abandoning all thoughts of hunting, they scrambled frantically to find a place to hide.