It felt as though they had passed through an invisible, viscous "membrane."
The Dawnbringer shuddered violently. Then the maddening shrieks of the void, the howling energy turbulence, and the distorting sensation of spatial folds that had surrounded them vanished in an instant.
In their place came an eerie, absolute "silence."
It was not that there was no sound, but that sound traveled here with extraordinary slowness, low and deep, as though stretched countless times beyond its normal length. The roar of the ship's engines became a long, low sigh, and the instruments' ticking slowed like an ancient pendulum.
Beyond the windows, the shifting, twisting ribbons of brilliant color and violent energy storms were gone. Instead, there was a deep, nearly frozen expanse of dark blue void. Countless enormous, irregular structures of metal and stone floated within it, their surfaces covered in thick energy crystals-the ruins of ancient buildings, immense in scale and bizarre in style. Most were badly shattered, floating silently like gravestones forgotten by time.
At the center of these ruins lay an even stranger sight-a vast, translucent silver-gray structure resembling a many-faceted crystal. It was roughly the size of a small planet, with a smooth surface and faint, rhythmic pulses of silver light flowing through its interior at an extraordinarily slow pace. It rotated so slowly that the naked eye could barely detect its movement. Countless slender, equally translucent silver "threads" extended from its surface to the surrounding ruins, forming what looked like a vast, motionless spiderweb.
There was no noticeable gravity in this region. The structure of space was unusually "rigid" and flat, and the background energy was unimaginably low. Strangest of all, the sense of time passing had become extraordinarily vague and slow. Naruto instinctively glanced at the back of his hand and found that the