The instant his fingertip touched his brow, the world did not turn black. It simply ceased to exist.
Sound, light, touch, even the tangible sense of his own existence-all of it was stripped away in a flash. Ling felt as though he had been hurled into a blender of absolute nothingness, his soul torn apart, stretched, crushed, then forcibly reassembled on a level he could not comprehend. There was no up or down, left or right, no passage of time. There was only an endless, icy "flow," seemingly composed of countless gray geometric shapes and shattered symbols.
Was this... the inside of the Sacred Lord's laws? No, it was more like their "reverse side," or rather... a garbage dump formed after that lunatic Obito's consciousness contaminated them? A torrent of information brutally scoured his fragile consciousness, vast and chaotic, filled with cold commands to "erase," "reset to zero," and "terminate." Mingled among them were countless shattered images and piercing noises-the fragments of his own memories and insane obsessions that Obito had projected into this place. Rin lying in a pool of blood, Kakashi's bloodstained hand, Konoha burning... they attacked Ling's perception over and over like a vicious virus.
It hurt. Not physical pain, but agony rooted in existence itself, as incomprehensible information was forcibly crammed into his consciousness and malicious emotions burned through it again and again. He felt like a piece of iron thrown into strong acid, rapidly dissolving.
No... I can't hold on...
Just as his consciousness was about to scatter completely, a faint silver-blue light stubbornly lit up at its core, like a lighthouse in a storm. It was the Beacon! Rather than being swept away by the torrent, it seemed to have found some kind of "interface" and began laboriously parsing and filtering the chaotic streams