Scattered currents of void air lashed against their cheeks like countless icy needles.
The instant the four of them burst out of the dust's embrace, everyone instinctively bent over, gasping for breath.
The suffocating sensation of being trapped in chaos refused to fade. Zhao Yan braced himself against a floating meteoric rock beside him and took deep breaths to steady himself. When he casually glanced back, his movements suddenly froze.
"Wait... where did that thing go?" At his words, the other three turned around in unison.
The boundless, gloomy, oppressive dust that had swallowed all four of them had neither dispersed into the distance nor contracted or changed shape.
It was barely the size of a bronze basin, lightly wrapped in specks of starlight, docile to an absurd degree.
That sensation shared the same root as the dull ache that had drilled out from their marrow while they were trapped inside the dust cloud.
He raised a hand and marked out an area the size of a washbasin. "We risked our lives smashing through a barrier, only to crash into this tiny thing?"
"This is definitely not an illusion."
Guan Qing spoke. He did not mention the word laws, but his instincts, honed from years of carrying out missions through the void, told him that this was something on the level of an origin.
"The most absurd part is that there was no warning whatsoever."
Zhao Yan scratched his chin, his eyes full of confusion. "We were traveling steadily along our route. How did we silently stumble into it?"
"Void fissures overlapped, disrupting the origin order within and completely severing perception between the inside and outside. What we saw outside was only the surface dust. The moment we stepped in, we were dragged into the layer between." Guan Qing continued.