A faint,
yet undeniably real "sense of light"
began to replace the despairing void from before.
"Hm? What's going on?" Ian stopped in his tracks and warily sensed the sudden change. It was as though he had passed through an invisible membrane, stepping from a domain filled with malice into a new region... one that was still unknown, but at least free of the pollution that had constantly sought to erode him.
As time gradually passed, the suffocating absolute darkness around him receded like the tide, replaced by a lifeless gray hue that permeated every corner.
The place had not become bright. It was more like a transition from absolute "lightlessness" to an "eternal twilight." No one knew where that twilight-like glow came from. It spread evenly everywhere, with no light source and no shadows. Everything was shrouded in an incomparably oppressive, utterly lifeless gray haze.
"At least I can stand on something solid now."
Ian lowered his head and felt it out, discovering that he was finally "standing on solid ground" again. Beneath his feet was some kind of black rock, freezing to the extreme and faintly granular. Its texture resembled the bluestone slabs he had seen in that endless corridor, but its color was darker, as though it bore endless years and deathly stillness.
He tried stomping on it hard. The rock did not budge, remaining despairingly solid.
"So, is this some sort of sealed Pocket Dimension, or a fragment of time?" Ian looked up. There was no sky, no sun, moon, or stars—only boundless space, its "vault" equally ash-gray. Of course, perhaps it was not a vault at all.
It was the boundary of this special space.
The light seeped out from that dead grayness.
His vision was no longer obstructed by darkness here, but visibility was