Towering giant skeletons stood like dead, withered trees, layer upon layer enclosing an open clearing.
At the center of the clearing stood a majestic structure known as the "Myriad-Degree Nexus."
The entire building had been fused from the remains of void behemoths, carrying an aged ash-gray hue. Its polygonal dome was solid and weighty, devoid of unnecessary ornamentation.
Two femurs that reached into the sky formed a vast arched entrance, its doorway dark and deeply sunken inward.
Most horrifying of all were the seemingly endless ghostfires, pale green and light blue, spread across the bone structure. They not only cast a piercingly cold light, but also bathed the Myriad-Degree Nexus in a ghastly white grandeur.
"Let's go. Bzzzt. Master has already arrived and is waiting for you inside."
Having spoken, the Mechanical Eye floated along the long staircase formed from tibias and entered the enormous archway.
Liriel and the Decayer hesitated no longer. Stepping over fragments of bone and gray-white ash, they climbed the dozens-of-meters-long staircase one step at a time.
Each step produced a dry, fine scraping sound.
Amid the crunch of countless bone shards being crushed beneath their feet, the two soon arrived before the femur archway.
From afar, the archway had appeared merely enormous, with nothing unusual about it.
Only up close did they discover that the archway's "door" was a pitch-black screen, covered in starlike points of light. Some of the points even trailed tails behind them, like arcs of light.
At first, Liriel could not make sense of it. Then she noticed that the points of light seemed to be scattered across a black, winding map.
Quite a few points gathered together in clusters, and beside the largest cluster was a miniature image of a bone forest.
"This is a map?" Liriel looked at the