Things seemed to be getting serious.
Fu Qian had never been blindly optimistic. In fact, before loosing that arrow, he had been well prepared for how difficult this mission would be.
To some extent, the scene before him confirmed it.
If Lairding was a creation of a nightmare, then what lay beyond it was an obvious question.
As a skilled manipulator of the Clear Dream, it wasn't hard to come up with a few possibilities.
But what he was seeing now clearly fell outside his experience.
The mist wasn't the edge of the world. Beneath its veil lay a different scene, one ravaged by the passage of time.
A world—or "reality"—that matched the Witch's description far better than Lairding did.
After a full day of contact with Lairding's natives, it was clear that they had no concept of the apocalyptic catastrophe the Witch had mentioned.
They understood the time disparity between the inside and outside of the mist as a form of pollution involving time.
From their perspective, that was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
But as he'd said before, if he set aside his own position and didn't rush to argue, if he accepted that explanation for the time being...
A timeline readily took shape in Fu Qian's mind—
The apocalyptic catastrophe had happened, in the brief moment of temporal pollution a month ago...
The castoffs in the mist had been twisted into existence as a result...
Judging by the traces of sword and gun use, the people within hadn't experienced a century passing in an instant. It was more like a "nightmare," where time still seemed to flow normally...
Then the Witch had been born from the pollution and eventually found the World Within the Painting, where she imprisoned herself...
The World Within the Painting, too, had begun to