The valley stretched on, surrounded by towering mountains on all sides. Though it was impossible to see what lay beyond those mountains, one could sense that it had already exceeded the bounds of the world. Yet the interior of the valley was extraordinarily vast.
At the center of the valley lay an enormous basin, like a miniature kingdom. The terrain rose and fell, the environment was exceedingly complex, and there were rivers, mountain ranges, and forests. All manner of living things inhabited the basin—creatures that flew through the skies and swam through the waters; it had almost everything.
Those were merely appearances, things visible to the naked eye. In truth, layer upon layer of space overlapped all around them. What looked like a normal world was, in fact, far from normal.
Many parts of the space here were normal worlds, while many others were not. Layers of space were stacked and folded together, making everything look deeply bizarre.
If someone stood within a folded space, they would feel that they were still themselves, unchanged in any way. But if another person stood nearby and looked from a different angle, that person would already have been compressed by space into a paper figure. From the side, all that could be seen was a thin sheet of paper. The problem was that, on another level, due to the principle of spatial self-consistency, they could still feel that they themselves were normal and would not consider themselves a paper figure. It created an eerie sensation.
The notebook likewise contained no record of this. Dole knew that those few people in the know might have deliberately concealed this information. And who knew how many people had laid traps here? Every year, an unknown number of people came here and were doomed by this very