She slowly raised her fair hand and lightly drew a line through the empty space before her with her fingertip.
Hum...
She activated the secret technique once more.
Formless ripples of time spread outward. Unwilling to give up, she began reversing the time and space of this place, tracing back from the present into the past.
She wanted to see with her own eyes exactly what had happened here before she arrived.
Hazy lights and shadows emerged, reflecting the scene from not long ago.
Amid the retracing fragments of time and space, she "saw"—
At the very moment she had stepped outside the Big Dipper Star Field and swept Scarlet Glow River with her divine sense, something had indeed existed at the bottom of the Abyss.
Yet as time passed, she made no progress.
Under her gaze, that faint, hazy sensation was like a reflection in water shattered by a tossed stone. It vanished completely out of thin air.
As though everything before had merely been an illusion.
When she used the secret technique again to retrace the past, she could no longer deduce even the vague outline of the thing that had once seemed to exist here.
It was as if what she had deduced before had been chaotic and false.
There were no unknown fluctuations here, no leaking energy, and no trace capable of settling the matter once and for all.
And that first sliver of evidence had simply disappeared, strangely and completely, from the time-image of her initial reversal.
As though it had never existed.
No matter how she retraced it, she could never reproduce it!
Was it really an illusion?
What exactly had happened here?
Her thoughts surged madly, and the Female Emperor's state of mind grew increasingly unstable.
Her fingertips trembled ever so slightly.
After