Just moments ago, Paul had undergone a bizarre experience.
At first, a flash of icy blue light suddenly appeared. Before Paul could even feel the pain, Coleridge's Ice Crystal Spike had already pierced through his chest.
But instead of the expected gush of blood, a silver radiance burst from the wound.
His vision began to warp, reality peeling away in fragments like a shattered mirror. He heard Catherine and Irene cry out beside him, but their voices sounded as though they were coming through a thick pane of frosted glass. He watched as his body grew light and translucent, his fingers dissolving into countless glittering motes of light.
A sudden feeling of weightlessness swept over him, and the surrounding scene completely disintegrated. Time and space lost all meaning. He felt as though he had fallen into an ocean made of pure consciousness. There was no up or down, left or right, light or darkness, cold or warmth—only flowing thought-energy swirling around him like a nebula.
In this mysterious realm, Paul was astonished to discover that he still retained a complete consciousness. He looked down—if that concept still had any meaning here—and saw that his body was made up of countless tiny chains of runes. Each chain constantly rearranged itself, shifting and changing as it emitted a faint blue glow.
An ethereal echo drifted from afar, as if countless voices were whispering at once. Some form of understanding beyond language was directly injected into his consciousness: this was not death, but an exile into a higher dimension. The white-haired Witch's assassination seemed to have opened some strange door, casting him into this bizarre dimension that existed in the rift between matter and spirit.
Paul's consciousness gradually stabilized in this void, and his physical body slowly reappeared, eventually solidifying into an entity