Time rewound to five hours earlier.
Instrument World, somewhere beneath Cloud Harbor City.
"Drip—drip—"
The sound of water droplets falling was like tiny needles, pricking Milk Dragon's eardrums again and again.
Milk Dragon felt as though its consciousness were a glass ball suspended in water. As it drifted and sank, haze and wakefulness became two forces of gravity, tugging at that little glass ball.
Not until the unceasing "drip-drip" of water bored into its ears did its torn consciousness slowly begin to lean one way, the scales gradually tipping toward "wakefulness."
Its consciousness rose along the direction of the dripping sound. Then, suddenly, it snapped its eyes open.
Yet all it saw was darkness so dense it could not be dissolved, as though everything around it had been steeped in ink.
Though its eyes were open, Milk Dragon's consciousness had yet to fully emerge from the chaos. For instance, as it stared into the pitch-black darkness before it, it was still wondering whether something was wrong with its eyes, or whether the surroundings had always been dark.
"Mm..."
Its throat was dry and itchy, and its eyes felt heavy. Milk Dragon instinctively tried to lift a claw to rub them, but froze in the instant it moved... Something cold and hard had clamped tightly around its wrist, biting painfully into its flesh. The slightest struggle brought the clatter of iron chains scraping together.
It tried to struggle, only to find that both its feet hung in midair, with nothing beneath them to brace against.
Its struggling produced nothing but creaking, squeaking sounds.
Being suspended in the air and bound all over instantly cleared the lingering muddle from its mind.
Only then did it realize that it had been trapped in a pitch-black space, hung and bound in midair by iron