Oh, My God!

A faint, yet undeniably real, sense of light

began to replace the despairing void from before.

"Hm? What's going on?" Ian stopped, warily sensing the sudden change. It was as though he had passed through an invisible membrane, stepping from a domain filled with malice into a new area... one that was still unknown, but at least free of the pollution that had constantly sought to erode him.

As time gradually passed, the suffocating absolute darkness around him receded like a tide, replaced by a lifeless gray hue that permeated every corner.

It had not become bright here. It was more like a transition from utter "lightlessness" into an "eternal twilight." The twilight-like light came from nowhere, spreading evenly everywhere. There was no source of light, no shadows; everything was shrouded in an incomparably oppressive, utterly lifeless gray haze.

"At least I can stand on something solid now."

Ian looked down and felt beneath his feet, discovering that he was finally "standing on solid ground" again. Beneath him was some sort of black rock, cold to an extreme and faintly grainy in texture. It resembled the bluestone slabs he had seen in the endless corridor before, but its color was darker, as if it bore endless years and deathly stillness.

He tried stomping on it. The rock did not budge, remaining hopelessly solid.

"So, is this some kind of sealed-off small world, or a fragment of time?" Ian looked up. There was no sky, no sun, moon, or stars—only a boundless expanse, a similarly ash-gray "vault"—though perhaps it was not a vault at all.

It was the boundary of this special space.

The light seeped out from that ash-grayness.

Darkness no longer obstructed his vision here, but visibility was limited by the strange gray light. Ian seemed to be standing