No Way Out (2)

"Who are you, exactly?"

A violent surge of thought swept through. Within the Mist Labyrinth, the "sand painting," temporarily pieced together from hundreds of millions of domain fragments, shattered soundlessly. The image had been frozen on the instant when a human body twisted and swelled amid blazing, blood-red flames, until it was completely deformed and "melted."

What came afterward no longer meant much to Gong Qi. He only knew that once his physical body had reached the state shown in the image, its destruction would be irreversible.

Gong Qi still refused to believe what the image revealed, and found it even harder to believe that his utterly disastrous predicament had been brought about single-handedly by an underage youth like Ronan. In a short time, his thoughts had split apart the surrounding rolling, howling dust and mist storms countless times, seeking a clear answer to support the absurd and horrifying logic of that image. Yet no one ever responded.

He knew this state of mind was terrible, and he tried to control it. Yet the changes unfolding in another time-space, along with the deeper feedback from the Abyss Zone and from the Solidified Configuration, made the calm, steady mind he had always taken pride in tremble and crack at its deepest level, beyond his ability to suppress.

Anyone who watched their own physical body liquefy and evaporate in flames, becoming fertilizer for alien creatures, while their spirit body in another time-space suddenly turned into a wandering ghost, would probably feel the same way.

At the same time, Gong Qi had to endure the impact of the Solidified Configuration in Earth Time-Space's Abyss Zone—equivalent to the collapse of his cultivation foundation. His spirit body flickered erratically, and his vital currents repeatedly surged with turbulence. This was far more accurate than the other