Crack!
The sky was dark, blanketed by storm clouds, with lightning flashing and thunder rolling.
In a sudden thunderstorm in late October, Ronan practically sprang upright from his bed.
The room was extremely dim. Wind howled outside the window, and lightning tore through the shadows, casting light inside before being swallowed up again in an instant.
Ronan was drenched in sweat, his entire body feeling weightless, as if the wind would sweep him away if he opened the window. In his Brain Palace, lightning also slashed through the void, and the External Neuron nearly burst from his skull.
He instinctively touched his head. It was still intact, but his hand bones struck his skull, causing a sharp ache. He raised his arm before his eyes and saw that beneath the wet sheen of sweat, he was little more than skin and bones, almost no flesh left on him. He had lost at least two full sizes.
Looking out the window again, he sensed Magneto-Optical Mica convulsing violently under the stimulation of pain.
At that moment, the logical judgment of his Self and the clear intuition in his heart simultaneously confirmed one thing:
Just now, he had gotten too close to the Dream Divine Abomination!
For some time before that, he had been "dreaming," but he had also been in the Cloud Top World. Like Snake Tongue's experience when he had served as a Test Subject, Ronan had entered a deeper layer of the Cloud Top World through the chaotic state of dreaming—a place that was highly likely to lead to the Dream Divine Abomination's true body, or the void where It resided.
It might sound unreasonable, but that place was already a blurred boundary between Dream and Reality. In a dream state, it was easier to drift closer to it.