Compared with everyone else, the Realm of Stagnation in Brando's eyes perhaps seemed especially "real."
The vast ground was a patchwork of dark brown and mottled red, like a river flowing with contaminated stains. But more than anything, it was gray—the color of concrete and metal. Brando was certain he was looking at a dead city. Roads as dense as a spiderweb filled his entire field of vision. It was a city he was incomparably familiar with, not merely because of the characteristics of the era it embodied. More importantly, a black tower stood at the very center of the city, and the entire road network converged beneath it like clustered veins.
He had seen this tower more than once. But in that dream, the black tower had been nowhere near as immense as the one before him. It might have stood tens of thousands of feet tall. Even in the air several kilometers away, one could still feel the oppressive pressure it brought. The giant tower occupied roughly a quarter of the city's area. Using it as a landmark, one's field of vision could stretch for over a thousand kilometers—but even the horizon within sight seemed affected, becoming narrow by comparison, unable to contain this suffocating landscape.
The entire sky and ground were shrouded in a hazy gray, like industrial dust, or the silent wasteland left behind by a nuclear war. Everything had been killed. There was not a single living thing, and he could not even feel the slightest breeze. Yet when observing this land from outside the Realm of Stagnation, some areas might well have been swept by perfect sandstorms beyond human imagination.
After passing through the portal, Brando's mind was completely drawn to the giant tower before him. He seemed to see every line of the