Whether the Red Stone was real or fake did not matter. Once it represented the dream of becoming the Pirate King, it was real. What the world consciousness—or the Illusion Nightmare—wanted to stop was not Loa destroying a fake, but Loa destroying that dream.
Unfortunately, it failed.
Powerful as Loa was, his strength was still only that of an individual. He had not reached the realm of world consciousness, with all its talk of causality and the kingly path. If that violet-black divine lightning, charged with the aura of utter destruction, had struck him, he would have had no answer.
A slim chance of survival?
No. They would have died together. No one would have survived!
But Christopher Ivy—the guardian of Between Dreams, the original owner of Loa's Dragon Body, and his mother in all but blood—had reached that level of power.
At that critical moment, she told Loa to do what he had to do. And she used the golden Rune on her forehead and the vast merit she had earned helping the world ascend to hold back the divine lightning for an instant.
The Illusion Realm had granted her that power. She was bound by the Illusion Nightmare's restrictions, but those restrictions bound the Illusion Nightmare in turn.
Only afterward did Loa understand how dangerous it had been. To kill him, the Illusion Nightmare had been willing to die with him!
That world-ending thunderbolt, drawn from its very source, would have left the Illusion one last trace of life. It could have escaped total collapse and waited to be reborn. The Illusion could be remade. He could not.
Thanks to Ivy's intervention, Loa had escaped death!
And so Ivy had become the master of the Illusion Realm.
Or perhaps that was not quite right. The Illusion Realm itself