Above the Boundary Sea, shrouded in boundless darkness, a dim sphere stood motionless amid waves formed from shattered worlds.
No one knew when it had begun, but the seawater made of broken worlds had already started to be eroded by pitch-black darkness from below.
Every spray of those shattered realms was filled with dense black mist, mixed with endless, indescribably bizarre things.
As the waves of shattered realms battered the dim Realm Barrier, rotting, pus-covered flesh and writhing red hair emerged from the Boundary Sea's waves and crawled across the barrier.
The entire dim sphere was like fresh flesh drawing maggots, which writhed as they tried to burrow inside and take great bites of it.
And this sphere was the universe known as the Nine Heavens and Ten Lands.
The vast Boundary Sea was, overall, a flat spacetime that approximately followed Euclidean geometry. Yet some force akin to gravity bent spacetime, creating countless localized non-Euclidean structures—worlds whose spaces took on closed forms.
The overall form of the Nine Heavens and Ten Lands was precisely such a spherical space, wrapped in a four-dimensional spacetime bubble within the approximately flat spacetime of the Boundary Sea.
Though it contained an entire universe, it was wrapped in a four-dimensional spatial bubble, making its external projection appear extraordinarily tiny—a sphere no larger than a house.
The three-dimensional universe within its spacetime bubble had a finite volume, with a total radius of only around forty billion light-years. There was not the slightest sign of outward expansion. It was practically a stiff corpse.
Yet the sparse-matter frontier of that universe pressed directly against the Realm Barrier of the four-dimensional hypersphere.
The Realm Barrier of the four-dimensional hypersphere was like a prison, protecting and confining that three-dimensional spherical universe within it.
Even if life inside sailed to the