The entrance to the Fourth Dimensional Apartment closed behind him, and darkness and deathly silence once again enveloped everything.
Knov stood alone where he was, holding the constantly swaying Pope's head in one hand while setting the heavy black case down by his feet with the other.
He did not rush to search for Bai Zhu. Instead, he raised his right index finger and lightly drew it through the empty air before him.
A black fissure as thin as a strand of hair appeared, stretching toward the depths of the passage like a taut ink line. It was a spatial measuring line materialized through his ability.
The black line extended steadily ten meters ahead, then, as it passed around a stone pillar, suddenly snapped in the middle without warning.
Knov took half a step back.
The broken black line did not vanish. Instead, it reconnected out of thin air elsewhere, its entirety shifted nearly a meter to the left, as though that section of space had been gouged out and reinstalled beside it.
He took out the high-powered flashlight he carried with him and shone its beam at the point where the black line had broken.
Under the light, the break in the black line changed again. The gap drifted along with the beam, like a reflection in water disturbed by ripples.
The distorted space here was not merely disorderly. It was alive.
Knov frowned slightly and laid down several more spatial lines around himself, attempting to divide the area into a grid and find a pattern.
After a while, he looked at the black lines before him, rising and falling as they continuously broke and reformed, then abandoned the attempt. The rules governing the distortions in this area were constantly changing. It could not be mapped at all.
He