Ian's figure vanished completely into that absolute darkness.
From the outside,
it was like a drop of water merging into an ink pool, impossible to find even the slightest trace of.
Behind him, the monster's ear-splitting roars, the dull impacts of its tentacles frantically battering the boundary, and its unwilling, furious shrieks of "Join us" all became distant and blurred the instant they passed through that invisible divide, as though someone had pressed mute.
In the end, everything returned to dead silence.
Without using magic to listen, nothing could be heard at all.
It was not that the sounds had vanished. Rather, this bizarre patch of darkness seemed to possess the ability to completely isolate sound, light, and energy fluctuations within and without.
Just as he had said before,
it seemed to reject all normal laws.
"This is getting creepier and creepier. So cold."
Ian steadied himself.
He floated in this void, where even his own sense of existence seemed diluted. He tried raising his wand and softly cast the universal spell, "Lumos."
Yet no light appeared at the tip of the Elder Wood wand, as though his magic had been utterly swallowed by the darkness. He tried several other illumination spells, even using Dawnlight, which contained sacred power, but the result remained the same—the instant the light appeared, the surrounding darkness mercilessly annihilated it.
It could not even create the faintest ripple.
"Absolute darkness... does it even reject the concept of light?" Ian murmured. He did not panic. Instead, his interest deepened. This was exactly what he had previously suspected.
For the moment, however, he still did not know what had caused this phenomenon.
How should he put it?
That was not even the strangest part. The strange part was that when he turned around, he could clearly see