Before he could react, everything before his eyes went black.
But a moment later, light returned to his vision.
Ahead, a sea of gray-black mist churned as if swallowing everything, stretching almost beyond sight.
Was that... Qingxu?
He sat blankly at the edge of the cliff, unable to come to his senses for a long time.
What had happened? Why had he suddenly ended up outside Qingxu?
Was it because of the spatial storm?
He had indeed heard of people who had been caught in spatial storms and somehow survived to return...
No!
Even so, it could only have happened somewhere within Qingxu. How could he have been swept directly outside it?
Then... was it because of that final voice?
In the last flickering images, that shadow, seeming both real and illusory...
"Captain!"
A sudden voice interrupted his thoughts. It was the early Spirit Transformation spell cultivator.
He blinked, then turned around, about to say something.
But the next instant, what he saw made his pupils contract sharply.
And it wasn't just him!
The rest of his team were there too. Even farther away, there were team after team just like theirs, with so many figures packed onto the cliff that it was nearly full.
And people were still appearing along the cliff face.
Some had even higher cultivation than he did, yet their faces were just as bewildered.
It seemed that everyone inside Qingxu had been thrown out.
"Captain, your hand..."
His hand?
The Spirit Transformation body cultivator froze, then looked down. His palm—the one that had been shredded into a cloud of blood by the spatial storm—had somehow healed.
It was as if everything he had experienced before had been an illusion.
And he was still holding the precious ore. A tiny, inconspicuous green sprout clung to it,