Several hourglasses later.
"Jialun Bone King?"
The pitch-black sky was not part of this place's original rules. Rather, the black smoke erupting from the center of the expanded altar had dyed the entire illusory fragment black. As for those ominous, absurd dark-red Nightmare rules, they represented the Undying rebirth of the Nightmare Bone Demons—the source of power that transformed illusion into reality.
Green and Evil Crystal, the two Stigmata Wizards, floated in midair. Though there was no wind, their broad wizard robes rustled. They looked down with mysterious, profound, cruel supremacy, their aura utterly incompatible with that of the Nightmare Bone Demons.
"Wizards!?"
At the summit of the altar, a figure resembling the forest elf from before floated in the air—fair skin, pointed ears, long green hair, and enticing pale-purple lips in the dark night. Yet when she opened her mouth, the sharp fangs filling it sent a chill down one's spine.
With a whoosh, a pair of batlike bone wings spread open. In the blink of an eye, the figure completed her transformation from forest elf to Nightmare Bone King, a long whip of vertebrae gripped in her hand.
Behind her, the altar's dark-red Nightmare Power gathered, forming a giant scarlet eye with a vertical pupil that swept back and forth. Within that pupil, it seemed as though countless monsters were trying to squeeze their way out!
"By order, I guard the Nightmare passage. I was not the first to squeeze into the Wizard World, yet you actually came over to offer up your bodies. Heh heh heh heh, how should I thank you?"
The forest elf's fair, exquisitely beautiful face split into an astonishing arc, as though the bones beneath her skin might burst through at any moment.
Of course. To these Bone Demons, skin was merely a