When two forces of the same origin but different natures collided, the result was not the imagined storm of energy, but a tremor in space itself.
The mirror image suddenly spoke. "In your eyes, what is space?"
The voice did not travel through the air. It rang directly in Jiang Shu's sea of consciousness.
A flash of insight came to him, and he recalled the Chaos Currents he had seen in Mirror Abyss. "Space is the traces of the Dao."
"Not without reason."
The mirror image turned its fist into a finger and tapped Jiang Shu between the brows.
"Look at these again. Do you perceive anything?"
The instant its fingertip touched him, countless images exploded before Jiang Shu's eyes.
He saw the first ripple of expansion when the universe began; the curvature formed by gravitational fields as stars were born; the microscopic gaps between every cell in his body. At last, all the images converged into the crystal at the center of the ancient lamp.
It was no physical object at all, but the concept of the Law of Space made manifest.
As the mirror image faded away, all three ancient lamps went out at once. The Heart of Space flew toward Jiang Shu on its own, reassembling in his palm into a crystal shaped like a heart.
There was no fixed form within the crystal. At times it was as soft as flowing water; at others, as hard as diamond.
When Jiang Shu sent his divine sense into the crystal, he saw not memories of an inheritance, but entrances to countless parallel space-times.
In one space-time, Zhan Feng was locked in a desperate fight with the Mechanical Mother. In another, Yu Tianming had obtained the Heart of Space ahead of time.
What surprised him most was that, in