Just before his senses dulled completely and sank into a state of near-eternal chaos, Shen Yi sensed something strange.
His remaining senses, faint almost beyond detection, caught a trace of something unusual.
He did not see it. It was a faint disturbance on a more fundamental plane of existence.
In the empty void Beyond the World, something seemed to struggle within that absolute nothingness.
Then, without warning, a spark of life appeared—faint beyond measure, yet unmistakable.
Not far ahead of Shen Yi's consciousness, a point of emerald light appeared out of nowhere.
The light swiftly stretched and unfurled into the image of a tender green leaf, its veins sharply defined.
It was not physical. It seemed more like a manifestation of a rule, the budding of a concept.
It hovered there quietly, giving off a fresh, fragile breath of life utterly at odds with the lifeless void around it.
The sudden change jolted Shen Yi's nearly frozen thoughts.
"A... leaf..."
*"..."*
"No, that's... life!"
Yet the leaf lasted only an instant.
The empty void Beyond the World, that all-consuming nothingness, seemed unable to tolerate its existence.
The emerald image quickly dimmed and turned transparent. It flickered a few times like a candle in the wind, then silently dissolved into the surrounding void, as though it had never appeared.
But in that brief instant as the leaf appeared and vanished, Shen Yi's almost entirely diminished senses caught something with their last trace of acuity. At the source of the leaf's birth, amid the nearly imperceptible ripples left by its disappearance...
Beyond Authority, beyond the Black Fog, beyond every known system of power and concept of rules, something deeper, more fundamental, and harder to describe seemed to be faintly influencing everything around it.
It was not Authority, not a rule, perhaps not