The instant he made contact, Benjamin's perception seemed to be swallowed whole.
His body still stood in the center of the meditation chamber, but his vision, his senses, and every bit of his understanding of the world were forcibly torn from their original frame of reference at that moment.
The physical structure of the Purgatory Sulfur Plane vanished from before his eyes.
What replaced it was a void filled with countless points of light, vast enough to seem boundless.
Those light points were densely packed, scattered across every corner of his sensory field.
Brilliant colors twisted and intertwined, forming a chaotic, dreamlike backdrop.
Every point of light was an elemental torrent, rolling, colliding, splitting, and merging within the Endless Chaotic Void... never pausing for even a moment. Against that warped backdrop, sparse points of orderly light were scattered about.
Their luminance was steady and their colors gentle, like pearls carefully arranged by an invisible hand.
Those were the planes of Wizard Civilization. Each one radiated, at its own unique frequency, a marked fluctuation declaring, "This is Wizard Civilization territory." But what truly seized Benjamin's attention was not those planes.
It was a direction at the edge of his perception.
Even after he had deliberately suppressed his perception to an extremely low level, that "light" still pierced through every layer of suppression, forcibly occupying the boundary of his senses with almost brutal dominance.
It was a curtain of pure white light.
White without a trace of any other color, white enough to make perception itself tremble.
It pressed down from one direction of his field of vision, like an entire sky burning with pure white flames slowly toppling over. Benjamin knew that he was still an endlessly distant distance away from that curtain of light; its energy shockwaves could not possibly