Dust drifted slowly through the top-floor corridor in the wan moonlight filtering through the high windows, carrying the smell of old wood and damp lime. Compared with the twisted madness of the Rift Corridor, the mundane stillness of the real world felt strangely unreal.
I slumped on the floor with my back against the cold, rough wall, my chest heaving like broken bellows. Every breath pulled at the aches throughout my body and the hollow pain deep in my soul, where something had just been forcibly torn away. The tiny crystal bottle in my right hand was bone-chillingly cold, as though I were holding a piece of polar ice. Inside it, the Core of Silence absorbed the faint light around it, revealing an unsettling, absolute blackness.
The sensation in my left hand was entirely different. The Death Note was still warm, even more... active than before I entered the Rift Corridor? Its pulses no longer conveyed mere hunger or discontent. There was a sated languor to them now, along with a deeper satisfaction, as though it were digesting and integrating its newly acquired power. The azure Ice Crystal Mark on its cover glimmered in the dim light like a half-awake eye, cold and dangerous.
The shackles... really had loosened.
In the Rift Corridor, extracting the Core of Silence had forced me to repeatedly channel the notebook's power, even briefly let it run free, to counter the chaotic rules there. Each use had been like chiseling a tiny crack into the already fragile cage of paradox. Like a shark scenting blood, the notebook had greedily devoured the "rule fragments" permeating the corridor, its power growing at a clearly perceptible rate.
The price was the further erosion of "me." Subtler shades of emotion-a slight nervousness in unfamiliar surroundings, momentary bewilderment at my