To the naked eye, it was impossible to distinguish any difference in that spot.
Yet to an Ascender's soul, everything had undergone earth-shaking changes and reversals under the Creator's will. Calling it a taste, an aura, or some other sensation would all have been accurate.
The key was that the spaces in those two places had become completely different.
It was like a patch of black suddenly appearing in red ink, a hollow leading straight to the deepest part of an abyssal trench appearing in an azure ocean, or a sliver of sunlight shining through a torrential downpour.
Laws utterly different from Gaia's rules were at work here.
Then came a phenomenon like a miracle.
Within just a few snaps of the fingers, countless blades of grass and flowers rapidly shrank. As though time had reversed, they swiftly regressed from their full, splendid bloom until they vanished completely.
The life force overflowing within them began to contract, returning to the dying ratman on the ground through some method Huai Shi could not understand at all.
Then, the ratman Huai Shi had beheaded let out a shriek so piercing it made his scalp tingle.
The head lying on the ground rapidly changed, like putty being kneaded flat and round, molded at will. At times, it became the face of a gnoll; at other times, it turned into a shriveled middle-aged face resembling a human's.
In the end, it returned to its original appearance.
Its neck and body impossibly rejoined once more.
It floated in midair, convulsing violently as the laws within the Framework operated upon it.
Its hunched body began to swell in waves. Tentacles, blisters, tumors, and mutations across its shell continuously emerged, only to swiftly disappear. Every abnormality and byproduct was dismantled under the Creator's stripping and suppression.
Amid