The flame of the fish-oil lamp flickered silently, illuminating the patterns reflected in the eyes of the scholars, whether with excitement, shock, or contemplation.
Everyone's gaze was tightly seized by the markings at the edge.
They were ink lines that stretched endlessly, rising and falling like mountain ranges.
The lines appeared along a third of the map's edge, spreading from there all the way to the boundary of the curled, wrinkled, yellowed map, as though the fragile paper could not bear their size and weight and they had to extend beyond the world itself.
Nothing was marked within the area enclosed by those lines, unlike the islands.
It was simply blank.
What was this?
An island?
But wasn't it far too large?
The moment they saw those boundless ink lines, this question arose in everyone's minds.
It was not that they could not tell what they represented.
It was simply too enormous—so enormous that they even suspected the mapmaker had drawn it wrong.
Any island beside it looked as small and fragile as an ant.
Yet after repeatedly confirming the map's level of detail and finding an island that appeared to be Giant Tree Island, the map's authenticity became far more convincing.
The ink lines at the northeastern edge no longer looked like mere lines to them, but like an abyss tearing apart their old understanding of the world.
A silent, colossal blank that left every witness with endless room for imagination.
The entire room, along with everyone's breathing and thoughts, seemed to have been seized in an instant by the edge of the map.
Once upon a time,
even they, despite their vast knowledge, had been accustomed to seeing the world as a chessboard.
The islands scattered across the ocean were the pieces strewn across it.
For so many