While Creation Goddess Lia was completely engrossed in her studies, a dark current was also quietly stirring in the deepest reaches of the Dream Plane universe, within that ancient, dark, and chaotic prison.
For ten thousand years, absolute silence had prevailed here. All the celestial bodies were as still as if frozen in ice. There were no changes in life, no evolution of galaxies. It seemed as though the river of time had forgotten this dark region of space, allowing it to remain sealed in its cold desolation, unchanged since the moment the seal was completed.
Yet this "freezing" was merely an illusion—an illusion in the eyes of short-lived mortals. On the scale of a hundred centuries, this prison had never truly been peaceful. The primordial terror being suppressed had constantly attempted to break through the prison's restraints, touching the warning boundary of the Abyss cage more than once. The guardians responsible for suppressing the prison had waged war here for ten thousand years—but most of the battles had taken place in unobservable dimensions. To outsiders unaware of the truth, all they could see were perhaps the occasional flickering changes of lonely stars, or the sudden disappearance of a patch of space dust.
A star located at the Dark Boundary hung silently alone, with no celestial bodies around it. Its orange-red surface churned with towering flames, while streams of plasma fought against the star's own gravity, erupting from the sea of fire and stabbing into the cold darkness of space like countless blinding spears of light. Yet the light emitted by the star could barely illuminate anything in this universe. Less than half an astronomical unit away, a strange darkness slowly wriggled like some mollusk or mass of sludge. It had no physical form, nor did it release any gravity