The Settled Battle

Ian's figure vanished completely into that absolute darkness.

From the outside, it was like a drop of water merging into an ink pool, impossible to find even the slightest trace of him.

Behind him, the monster's ear-splitting roars, the dull impacts of its tentacles frantically battering the boundary, and its furious, unwilling shrieks of "Join us" all seemed to have been muted the moment they passed through that invisible threshold, instantly becoming distant and indistinct.

Until they finally faded into utter silence.

Without using magic to listen, he could hear nothing at all.

It was not that the sound had disappeared. Rather, this bizarre region of extreme darkness seemed to possess the ability to completely isolate sound, light, and energy fluctuations between the inside and outside.

Just as he had said before, it seemed to reject all normal laws.

"This is getting creepier and creepier. It's so cold."

Ian steadied himself.

He floated within this void, where even his sense of his own existence seemed diluted. He tried raising his wand and softly cast the all-purpose spell, "Lumos."

Yet no light appeared at the tip of the Elder Wood, as though his magic had been completely swallowed by the darkness. He tried several other illumination spells, even using the sacred-powered "Light of Dawn," but the result remained the same—the instant any light emerged, the surrounding darkness mercilessly extinguished it.

It could not even create the faintest ripple.

"Absolute darkness... does it even reject the very concept of light?" Ian murmured. He was not frightened. On the contrary, his interest deepened. This matched his earlier assessment.

He simply did not yet know what had caused this phenomenon.

How should he put it?

This was not even the strangest part. What was truly strange was that when he turned around, he could