The brilliant sunset glow outside the ancient castle had yet to fade.
Black Lake looked like a Black Gem, vast and smooth. Beneath the reflection of the sunset filling the sky, its surface shimmered with dark, enchanting colors. The lake water was bottomless. Faint ripples occasionally spread across its calm surface, stirred by the Giant Squid lingering at the boundary between the shallows and deep water. With its enormous, sucker-covered tentacles, it idly curled up stones from the lakebed and stacked them into oddly shaped little towers before it, patiently awaiting the guests' arrival.
Whoosh—
Carrying Zheng Qing's thoughts, the translucent Shore Flower rode a wisp of breeze and slipped lightly into the lake water, raising barely any ripples, a stark contrast to the "plop-plop" sounds made by the other thoughts.
Icy lake water closed in from every direction. Even though he was now nothing but a pure spiritual thought, Zheng Qing still felt a faint suffocating sensation that seemed to arise from some instinct deep within his soul.
He guessed that perhaps he had only recently advanced to Legend, and his True Spirit had yet to completely shed its mortal nature. Or perhaps the path of Taiyi was after all an unorthodox one, leaving him with more sensory experiences belonging to an Ordinary Wizard than those Veteran Legendaries retained.
Looking upward through the hazy gray-green water, everything above his top of the head—whether the brilliant sunset glow, the outline of Hogwarts Castle, or the beech tree shadow by the shore and the figures of the wizards—became distorted, blurred, and indistinct. Everything below him was equally unclear, dark enough that he could not tell water plants from silt.
Nearby were massive rocks coated in slick green moss, and he could vaguely make out the glowing back of the head of