Reilo carefully watched the footage, recorded by the soft-bodied Gnomes' equipment, of the impurities being stripped from the Nine Underworlds Crystal.
It had happened before he and the Dimensional Swordsman arrived.
Inside an energy sphere roughly ten meters in diameter, a black crystal no bigger than a fingernail was being purified again and again by a complex energy structure. Remnants and Law Power were continually stripped away, leaving behind a substance that grew purer and clearer, ever closer to a mass of pure Law, like a wisp of black light.
As the experiment gradually neared success, a violent disturbance suddenly erupted inside the sphere.
The researchers at the site could no longer observe what was happening, but the equipment recording the experiment continued to capture it objectively.
"What is this?!"
Reilo keenly noticed that the soft-bodied Gnomes had deliberately slowed down the footage.
Inside the energy sphere, two different things appeared in an instant.
One was a creature like a wooden mechanical clock. It fused together from the so-called remnants and came into being, its face of fractured light seeming to gaze around in confusion.
The other was a tail—the same thing Reilo had briefly glimpsed in the black fog, disappearing in a flash. It snatched away the pure black light.
After that,
the hands on the wooden mechanical clock creature's body spun wildly. Then they formed a huge vortex, which vanished inside the energy sphere. Immediately afterward, Reilo and the Dimensional Swordsman appeared out of thin air.
After entering this bizarre realm, the two had recovered from their brief astonishment and tried to destroy the energy sphere from within, thereby causing this disaster.
There was no doubt about it.
The soft-bodied Gnomes inside the experimental facility hadn't noticed any of these events. They had simply taken the appearance of