This door...
It was almost the most familiar stretch of road in the city, and Fu Qian made good time from there on.
He encountered no more clever yet bewildered ambushes like the nameless demigod's before reaching the base of the Prophet's Building.
Even the black, white, and gray didn't appear again for a while. Gray Descent had been left behind.
The biggest commotion he caused along the way was the attention his excessively flashy armor drew from the natives.
By the time he reached his destination, even that attention had nearly vanished.
The crowds of people who had been wandering here in a daze, making pilgrimages, had not thinned at all, but their attention had clearly been drawn elsewhere.
The focus of their gazes was none other than the door on the building, which they had been watching day after day.
In theory, not everyone had good enough eyesight to make out details in light like this.
But it was clear that everyone who stared at it sensed something.
That indistinct black, white, and gray brought more than just a visual effect.
That's right. This was another source from which Gray Descent was spreading, clearly centered on the "Gate of Freedom."
The metaphor he had used before seemed apt to extend now: a wound that had been inflamed for a long time had finally failed to heal and had even begun to fester.
With most people lacking the courage to step through the door, whatever lay beyond it was seeping directly out in the opposite direction.
And it didn't seem to rely much on human will as a node.
After all, the Gray Descent still hadn't spread beyond the "eye of the typhoon." There was no one in sight within its bounds.
Yet its advance was silent and unyielding,