"Command confirmed."
As the Sky Monitoring Instrument answered in its slightly mechanical voice, Pale Green Incantation Light began to descend from the hall's ceiling, layer after layer, like gauze curtains draping the entire hall.
The sunlight falling into the hall dimmed at once.
Dylan had excellent eyesight. Through the "green curtains," he could clearly see streams of incantation light pouring like waterfalls from rune grooves beneath the eaves outside the windows. They flowed evenly and silently down the brass exterior walls. Countless fine runes interlocked to weave those streams together, and every rune flickered at tremendous speed with every breath, every instant, as though it were alive.
He could not make out what was happening farther away.
But the enormous screen projected by the Sky Monitoring Instrument in the center of the hall showed it clearly.
Beyond the "waterfalls," concentric ripples spread from the goblet-shaped building as though raindrops had struck a pond. The ripples overlapped and interfered with one another, amplifying the disturbance until countless tiny Magic Power vortices formed. They crowded the area around Central Base, creating a vast artificial zone of chaotic Magic Power.
Dylan suspected the sea of chaos at the edge of the Xuanhuang Small World looked much the same.
As the "sea of chaos" appeared,
the air in the hall grew sluggish. Dylan tentatively spread his bat wings and gave them a slight twitch. Wisps of translucent incantation light immediately appeared in the air, clinging to his wings and winding around them like feathers. When he tried to exert force, lines of Spatial Magic incantations surfaced on the light. They turned slowly with his movements, meshing with faint clicks, as though a massive lock were tightening one tooth at a time.
"Central Base has activated its Spatial Anchor. These blocking rules work in every