Normally, given the distance he sensed, even teleporting there would not have seemed excessive.
The Ice Crystal Palace and the Hidden Light Hall appeared to be no farther apart than two nebulae facing each other across the sky, but the distance between them was greater than the entire span of the Mechanical Divine Domain where Alvin was.
Yet as they flew past those nebulae, the distance felt strangely indistinct, and Shen Yi found it deeply unsettling.
It was as if the rules here were not what he perceived them to be, as if the cosmic system around him had been forcibly altered. The distance he felt and the distance he understood were vastly different.
That dissonance was like tiny shards of ice, silently piercing his perception of space.
Shen Yi could calculate his path and the time it took. With the Guides' speed as a reference, he should have been able to estimate the distance between the Ice Crystal Palace and the Hidden Light Hall. But when he compared those figures with the actual span of space he had crossed, the numbers refused to add up.
He felt as though he had flown for only a hundred breaths. In that time, the outline of the Hidden Light Hall, cradled by a ribbon of nebular light, had rushed from an unreachable distance to right before his eyes. Yet his Authority's innate sense of space told him the density of rules and depth of void along that route could have held several complete galaxies.
This was not merely a matter of speed. It was as though the very concept of distance in this region had been twisted, folded, or redefined by rules of a higher order.
Beside him, Xilos frowned deeply.
Shen Yi did not turn his head, but an exceedingly faint