Etched Wisdom ended, but instead of returning to any of the nodes from before, it brought him to an unfamiliar place. It felt a bit like a bug in the program.
Whoosh—
Fu Qian raised his left hand and blew on it, as if cooling an overheated gun barrel.
That wasn't entirely inaccurate. Just now, this hand had released three breaths in a row, and Three Faces was still charging.
That was right. The Sanity Value went without saying; none of his other losses had recovered, either. His condition had remained frozen at the final moment.
So had the previous state not been Etched Wisdom, but reality? Had he entered Etched Wisdom only now, which was why he'd experienced such an unreasonable leap through space?
The signs seemed to increasingly suggest that his earlier judgment might have been wrong—but that was only how it seemed.
Don't forget the clock on Tyrant's Mechanical Fist. How else could he explain the fact that time had really gone backward?
He could certainly refute his own conclusions, but he needed solid reasons to do so.
Rather than assume his previous judgment had been wrong, Fu Qian preferred to ask whether there was a way to explain the change in location and condition if it had been right—and it seemed there was.
At last, Fu Qian shifted his gaze from himself to his surroundings.
Why did a mismatch in scenery have to mean a switch between reality and fallacy?
Why couldn't he have jumped from one fallacy to another?
Everything was growing stronger the closer he got to the source. Could that mean Etched Wisdom was following Etched Wisdom? If he made that assumption, wouldn't everything suddenly make sense?
The price, of course, was an even more bleak situation.
Like falling into a ditch