For the next full thirty seconds, Ophelia stared fixedly at the platform in the center of the laboratory, a platform surrounded by a series of black obelisks, like some Weird Ritual Altar—she could see nothing and feel nothing, but the data conveyed a clear signal:
On that empty platform, an invisible nightmare had now been born, an Avatar of Destruction bound to the real world by mortal power. Layers of gravitational fields formed the destroyer's shell, powerful Deep Blue Magic Power constrained its state in reality, and it was now stretching its newborn limbs amid rippling fluctuations. A single lick from it would be enough to instantly kill even the most powerful Sentient Being in this world.
What would happen if she stepped onto that platform now? What did the instant of Observer Effect Loss of Control look like? Would she see another face of this universe in the final second before death? Or would she instantly lose her mind and perish in madness? Could she briefly touch the "boundary" of the Magic Tide? Or would she remain unable to sense its existence from beginning to end?
These bizarre and terrifying thoughts suddenly surfaced in the virtual processing threads of the Ophelia Matrix. Like someone standing before a bottomless cliff, feeling fear yet also struck by the urge to leap forward, such moth-to-the-flame thoughts were enough to make one shudder. Yet Ophelia in the laboratory remained perfectly still. Calmly watching the platform at the center of the room, she shut down those unnecessary "thoughts" in the calculation matrix one by one. At the same time, she heard Gawain's voice: "What happened? Why did things suddenly go quiet over there?"
"...The experiment succeeded," Ophelia said after a moment's hesitation. "Three sensors returned deviation data, indicating they were affected by an unknown