As he passed through the surface of water condensed from moonlight, Hao Ren felt a bone-chilling cold spread through every limb.
It was not a chill truly perceived by his nerves, but something that reached deeper into his soul, as if spreading outward from the depths of his consciousness. When the cold struck, Hao Ren realized that he had entered a world ruled by shadow power.
The sensation of inverted gravity and topsy-turvy disorientation vanished in an instant. Hao Ren felt as though he had flipped through the air; one moment, the world spun around him, and the next, he felt his feet firmly planted on the ground again. The scene before him quickly stabilized. He found that he was still standing in the castle courtyard, but the entire castle and the sky above had completely changed.
Everything in sight had lost its color. Varying shades of black and white outlined everything within his vision, making the entire world seem like a black-and-white photograph—dull, bleak, cold, and eerie. The castle, which had half-collapsed in the "outside world," appeared completely intact here. Not only was it undamaged, its scale had expanded countless times beyond what Hao Ren remembered. The castle courtyard had become an astonishingly vast square, filled with motionless fountains and grotesque sculptures—things that had never existed in the "outside world." The square's four towers had become four colossal spires soaring into the clouds, standing at the distant edges of his vision like four pillars supporting heaven and earth. Their summits supported a sky choked with dark clouds, and at the points where the tips touched the sky, enormous, terrifying vortices could be seen slowly turning. Part of the castle wall stretched from the eastern side of the courtyard to the western side. It, too, had expanded countless times, becoming