Xu Huo was submerged in a vast black sea.
He didn't know when he'd woken up—or whether he had woken up at all. From the moment he became conscious, he had been floating in dark water. He couldn't use his items, instruments, or abilities. He couldn't summon the Book Tower, and he couldn't sense Space Ray or Time Power at all. All he could see was a faint light shining down from somewhere above him.
Everything around him was pitch-black. He was underwater and couldn't breathe, so instinct drove him to swim desperately toward the surface. But though it seemed only a few meters away, he couldn't reach it. He drowned again and again as he swam upward, and each time he died and woke, the surface seemed a little farther away.
At first, he remembered how many times he had drowned. But as the line between wakefulness and sleep blurred, his consciousness grew hazy. He felt as though he were sinking into the Abyss. The faint light from the surface had gone from a patch to a cluster, then from a cluster to a thread. In the end, it was no more than a thin strand filtering through the water, so faint that the current might wash it away at any moment.
As he drowned over and over, he understood clearly that Dou Shengnan had gotten the better of him. The last streak of black light that had entered his eyes must have been her mental power. It was like when his shadow personality had tampered with things in District 01. He still didn't know how she had done it, but he couldn't summon his Spiritual World. All he could do was die again and again.
He had no idea how long this went on. At last, not a