Malice brimmed over, pouring down upon this world.
Red-black mudflows, thick with curses upon life and venomous resentment toward all that was beautiful, came rolling down from the opened Hole of Heaven like apocalyptic lava about to drown all living things.
"Roar!!!"
Yet just as the all-consuming Black Mud melted through the temple and surged down into the mortal world, an abyss darker than darkness itself opened a bottomless rift and drank dry the molten slurry pouring from the Hole of Heaven.
Until not a single drop remained!
Even then, that abyss was not satisfied. The reversing red-black aether transformed into a vortex that devoured heaven and earth. Its immense suction twisted space until it shuddered and wailed, instantly swallowing even the inky darkness staining the sky.
The dim sky gradually cleared, restoring its azure hue.
"Creak, creak..."
Then, amid the grinding sound of rusted mechanisms, the magic box suspended beneath the dome looked as though it had been hollowed out. Its dozens-of-kilometers-wide form shrank to the size of a palm in an instant. The luminous patterns across its six sides flickered erratically, and even its internal transformations and operations were filled with ear-piercing noise.
Clearly, this box brimming with calamity and curses had been drained completely. Not even a drop of magic power remained to sustain its operation.
Yet even so, the suction from the abyss had not stopped, like an insatiable black hole.
"Buzz..."
At once, the magic box, unable to endure such demands, made the divine patterns on all six sides tremble in unison. It drove its last wisps of magic power to the limit, transforming into a red-black streak of light as it tried to break free from that dreadful gravitational field and return to its guardian.
As a creation of the gods meant to collect