The next day, waves echoed between sea and sky.
Between the Celestial Pivot and the Deepdark, countless masses of earth, stone, gold, and iron rose like a torrential rain, surging upward against the heavens, colliding with one another and grinding out endless sparks.
A vast and magnificent spectacle enveloped everything. Countless Spiritual Substances rose and shifted, while the gathered earth, stone, and phantom light constantly changed, tangling together.
Elevation and descent; Purification and impurity; Extraction-Transformation and conflict; Integration and dissolution... The essence of Alchemy erupted again and again amid countless flashes of creation.
The rising and falling tides of Spiritual Substance stabbed at every pair of eyes, making every Artisan seem like an ant beneath those mighty waves.
It was as though hundreds and thousands of hands were constantly struggling—building and destroying.
Using this creation as their medium, they wrestled against one another for control, continually suppressing their opponent's performance. Their calculated assaults against each other had begun even during the construction of the arena.
And before Heavenly Furnace and Anvil Elder, an entire complete riftworld manifested out of thin air from the void, rising from the ground. Thunder and storms endlessly shifted within it, until at last desolation and abundance flowed in turn, forming an arena modeled after the present world.
Beneath the open and hidden struggle, no one knew how many schemes and conflicts lay behind it. After constant destruction and sabotage, it was built once again.
Creation enacted for the sake of Destruction; construction carried out for the sake of ruin.
Embers and Stagnant Rot tangled and clashed, never achieving any balance. Instead, they annihilated and erased each other until, in the end, they became a patch of chaos.
After repeated material collapses and Spiritual Substance overload, it became a battlefield completely insulated against both sides, equally