The layers of the spiritual domain pressed down on Yu Lian like silent ghosts. His senses began to blur, and only the pain remained. Worse, it grew more intense.
He felt an unmistakable burning agony, as though every cell had been tossed into an incinerator. Even his marrow and blood seemed ready to evaporate.
The sensation stirred something in him.
Back then—no, in my previous run—my friends and I had launched a surprise attack on the Dawn Angel with space beacon missiles. As we passed through the warship's central corridor, the blazing fire blocking our advance caught us full on. It was spirit fire created by an alchemical device. That was exactly what it had felt like.
That was the trouble with having too much history: you were like an old man on the verge of being left behind by the times, forever slipping into memories. Wasn't that a curse of knowledge and recollection?
Stranger still, he could vaguely feel that time itself was flowing unevenly. At times it trickled like a stream; at others, it rushed like a waterfall. With every shift in time, different parts of his body—even individual cells and tissues—were subjected to completely different pressures and erosion.
He felt as though some mysterious, uncanny higher-dimensional force had split his limbs, torso, and even his organs apart, sending them to different spaces, different worlds.
If this continued, it wouldn't merely disrupt his fighting rhythm. The very integrity of his body would be denied, twisting and shattering until his body and soul disintegrated together.
This was no occult mumbo jumbo. Denying something's integrity to deny its existence, then turning that negation into a lethal attack, had long been a go-to method for psions.
Still... high-level psions usually used this trick against massive Void Sovereigns, overcoming the difference in