The Twisted Essence

Ye Chen's eyelids slowly opened.

A world of darkness immediately unfolded before his eyes.

There was nothing here—black, desolate, and devoid of air. Everywhere was filled with an unreal texture.

Ye Chen silently watched everything before him. His consciousness received no sensation resembling suffocation; he merely felt every part of his body flooded with weakness, leaving him wholly unable to move freely. Like a drowning man sinking into deep water, he could only drift slowly and aimlessly under the pull of some invisible force.

After a long while, a few streaks of light suddenly appeared ahead in the darkness.

Ye Chen fixed his gaze on them and discovered that they formed a gray scene.

Thirty-one blurry human figures were tightly glued together by their severed limbs, then piled up like bricks and tiles into a warped high wall.

Their forms were half solid and half illusory, impossible to distinguish by the ordinary states of solid, liquid, and gas. They resembled the image of "souls" depicted in novels or illustrations.

At the sight of this bizarre thing, Ye Chen seemed to realize something. His expression unconsciously turned serious as he began examining the souls' appearances more closely.

Several dozen silent seconds passed before he finally recognized them: they were the thirty-one Clowns who had fought him earlier.

Yet Ye Chen had no clue how they had arrived in this dark world alongside him, or why they had become souls like this, because he could not recall the specific course of that battle or any of its details.

For now, Ye Chen could only tell that these mutated Clowns had not lost consciousness. Every face was twisted in incomparably agonized spasms and ferocity.

Then, a sea of crimson fire appeared out of thin air, completely swallowing the "Wall of Clowns" before Ye