"Seclusion" was boring.
Jia Xiu felt that his sense of time had become completely muddled.
There were no windows in his laboratory. It used magical lighting, with no natural light.
Natural light could not be precisely controlled, which caused trouble for certain magical experiments.
Yet the problem with being constantly exposed to a steady light source was that one's mental state could easily go a little wrong.
He felt as if he was hallucinating. His nerves were always on edge, and he would suddenly think he had seen a storm. Then, upon looking more closely, he would find that there was nothing there.
Even more absurdly, the imagined storms all took different forms. He had already imagined dozens of versions. He had probably thought about them too much, letting his subconscious project them outward.
Over and over again, it left him somewhat dazed.
And the steady lighting could not be turned off. Jia Xiu feared that without it, his vision would not be clear enough. Darkvision worked well, but it was still inferior to having illumination.
He now understood a little why countries within regions of polar day and polar night had such high rates of depression. People there clearly had no worries about food or drink, their work was not busy, and they had nothing particularly urgent to do every day. They seemed relaxed and happy, yet depression was so common.
It really was easy to become depressed.
Over the past dozen days, Jia Xiu had remained beside the Ukmak Empire's magical device, staring at the passage entrance and waiting for another chance to see the storm.
Probability-wise, if things went smoothly, that much time should have been enough to encounter it once more. If things did not go smoothly, Jia Xiu had set himself an upper limit of