After the teleportation glow faded, Lin Ye, Astria, and Leo found themselves in a space that utterly surpassed imagination.
There were no walls or floors made of matter. Beneath their feet lay transparent crystallized thoughts, and every step stirred rippling waves of memories. The walls were formed from pure concepts, their surfaces flowing with abstract symbols and geometric patterns.
"Is this the inside of the Void Ark?" Leo looked around, his Leo Mark emitting a faint golden glow as it tried to illuminate their surroundings.
Astria frowned as she sensed the space's unusual nature. "The state of balance here is completely chaotic. I can sense thousands of contradictory concepts existing at once."
Lin Ye lowered his gaze to the transparent floor beneath him, where scenes emerged one after another: streets in bustling cities, ruins on battlefields, discoveries in laboratories, embraces between lovers. They were all fragments of civilization memories that the Void Ark had erased.
"Looks like we need to find a path to the core," Lin Ye said. "But this place has no fixed structure at all."
As soon as he spoke, the surroundings began to change. The walls shifted and rearranged themselves, the original passage vanished, and a new path stretched out beneath their feet.
"This place has a consciousness of its own." Astria realized the key issue. "It's deliberately altering its structure to stop us from moving forward."
At that moment, a deep roar came from the shadows ahead. A massive figure stepped out of the darkness—it was a monster made entirely of despair, its body a sickly gray-black, hollow flames burning in its eyes.
"The Despair Beast." Leo recognized the conceptual entity. "It was formed from the despair of all the civilizations that were erased."
The Despair Beast opened its huge jaws and let out an