In the most basic understanding, the Abyss's "destructive effect" was unconditional and unrestricted. That was the nature of the Abyss itself: neither matter nor energy, nor any form describable by the concepts of the world. Under simple observation, it appeared as a two-dimensional pattern, usually accompanied by contaminating black diffusions—smoke, dust, or other things that looked similar. Yet this black "substance" was not matter either, but a purely optical phenomenon. The Abyss damaged the fundamental rules within a certain range, distorting various optical laws and ultimately creating an effect akin to "unobservability," thus producing those black cloud-like "things." By the same principle, the two-dimensional patterns displayed by the Abyss were also merely optical phenomena and did not truly exist.
Yet few people knew that the Abyss itself was not actually "lethal."
That sounded strange, considering the countless worlds destroyed by the Abyss. Its destructive power had always been the greatest disaster in the Void, and by everyone's common sense, the Abyss ought to be something with "killing power." That understanding was not wrong, of course, but in the eyes of more specialized Imperial scientists, what the Abyss possessed was not killing power, but a kind of "guidance."
The Abyss had never directly destroyed anything. Everything infected by the Abyss was ultimately destroyed by itself: on the macroscopic level, it collapsed on its own; on the microscopic level, it gradually disintegrated. Matter progressed from disasters visible to the naked eye until microscopic particles invisible to the naked eye broke apart. Energy dissipated. Space-time fell into chaos. The order of the universe vanished completely. Until, in the end, even the World Barrier began to digest itself, and the entire world was swallowed by the Void—a typical Abyss-contamination apocalypse. The whole process began because of the Abyss, yet every step in the process