The Stone Archway over the Boundary River had changed.
By the time Serina, Mingchen, and Soundless arrived, the entire Stone Archway, along with three hundred zhang of river upstream and downstream, had been covered in an even layer of gray.
It was not a color, but the dead gray left after "information had been flattened." The river to the left should have been pale gold, toward the Shinobi World, and the rocky cliffs to the right blue-black, toward the Cultivation World. Now everything had turned the same gray-neither dark nor light, neither cold nor warm, as though someone had taken an enormous brush and painted the whole world the same shade.
The sound was even more terrifying.
Beneath the Stone Archway, river water passed through seven openings, normally producing a repeating rhythm of seven beats-the natural cadence of the "Peace River Ballad," with every interval a comma. But now those seven sounds had become one. They had not been strung together; they had been forcibly "unified" into a single flat, unvarying drone, as though someone had ironed the waves smooth.
"The commas are gone." Mingchen tightened his grip on his iron flute, his face pale. "It's swallowed the 'differences between pauses,' too. Seven beats becoming one means there are no commas."
Soundless crouched beside the river, his erosion eye-his left eye-fixed on the gray archway. His right eye was already bloodshot from the earlier battle, but it was his left that truly "saw": within the layer of rules, that gray spread like oil in both directions, bleaching the Shinobi World's Chakra blue and the Cultivation World's frequency gold into the same murky gray wherever it passed.
"Oneness of Nothingness." Soundless's voice was dry as sandpaper. "The first five were 'deprivation.' This one is 'assimilation.' It doesn't kill you, steal your