The Orderkeeper was like a vessel that had plunged into a viscous, freezing-black oil swamp.
Beyond the portholes lay absolute darkness. It was not that there was no light, but that all light seemed to be absorbed and devoured by the space itself. Only the faint glow emitted by the ship's engines and Purification Field barely illuminated several dozen meters around them.
It was an environment impossible to describe accurately with words.
Their view was filled with slowly writhing, swirling shadows of ever-changing forms. At times, they resembled flowing sludge; at others, congealed smoke; or perhaps a cross-section of some gigantic creature's rotting internal organs. There was no distinction between up, down, left, or right. Here, the Orderkeeper relied entirely on inertial navigation and its preset environmental model to maintain basic orientation.
Even more unsettling was their sense of time. Here, time seemed to have lost its linear flow. Sometimes it was viscous and slow, as though frozen solid; other times, it abruptly accelerated and skipped ahead without warning, causing intense dizziness and nausea. Even their thoughts became sluggish, demanding more mental effort to remain focused.
Energy consumption also rose sharply. The abyssal environment constantly eroded the shields, trying to devour all ordered energy. Even with the Purification Field at full power, it could only barely slow the erosion.
"This is the outer buffer zone of the Sleeping Abyss..." Xuan watched the wildly fluctuating data, his voice dry. "Spatial parameters have completely collapsed. The energy background's chaos level is more than ten times that of the Chaos Echo Zone. At our current consumption rate, the energy we brought will last fifteen standard days at most."
Fifteen days. In a region with abnormal time flow, it could be longer—or shorter.
"According to the star chart, we need to cross this buffer