No one had time to react when the wizard charged decisively toward the Great Gate of Purgatory—for the gate clearly had not opened completely yet, and frenzied magical energy was whirling like a storm at its entrance. No sane person would charge into something like that. Lily was the first to react. She shot forward like a bolt of lightning to intercept Baptiste, who was about to fall into the gate. A white blur flashed past, followed by the dull sound of metal slicing through flesh and bone. In the instant before he was caught, Baptiste raised a hand to block Lily, causing his entire left arm to be severed at the root. Even so, his body continued falling irresistibly into the black-and-red distorted vortex.
Everyone watched helplessly as the wizard vanished into the frenzy of magical energy. His body seemed to be torn apart and reassembled countless times in an instant. Endless black smoke and ash gushed from the gate, while Baptiste's piercing laughter rang out from within the vortex: "I did it! I did it! No one can..."
The rest of his sentence vanished into a violent gale. Because the formation extracting the magic power had been destroyed, all the magical devices at the site had stopped operating. Deprived of its energy supply, the Great Gate of Purgatory rapidly dimmed as it shook, and the whirlwind raised by its collapse made it nearly impossible to approach. At the instant the spatial passage was about to disappear completely, Hao Ren took a small silver-white device from his personal storage space and hurled it toward the center of the vortex. The device flashed once amid the black-and-red storm, then vanished.
The Great Gate of Purgatory finally disappeared completely.
The whirlwind from before vanished without a trace, as though it had