Beyond the world lay chaos, and beyond chaos lay the Void.
And above the Void was nothing but nothingness.
Within nothingness, there was no time, no space, neither life nor death. Everything returned to nothingness.
There was no movement of air here, not even pain.
Only boundless silence and darkness, a cage so cramped that he could not even straighten his legs.
And within this nothingness, in a tiny space, a figure in blue-green robes lay curled up, watching the Recording Stone's projections flicker past before him with numb, vacant eyes, not knowing how much time had passed.
But every time the Recording Stone finished playing, the blue-green-robed figure mechanically moved his lips and uttered a number, keeping track of how many times he had watched it.
He had carefully designed this Recording Stone himself. Each playback lasted an entire day, and each time it finished, another day came to an end.
When the playback count he spoke reached over nine hundred million, it also meant that the figure in blue-green robes had been trapped in this empty Void for over nine hundred million days.
There was no concept of time here, nor any such thing as day or night. His consciousness remained lucid throughout, and perhaps the only thing that changed was the Recording Stone playing before him like a film.
He had watched the Recording Stone over nine hundred million times. Even though the film was more than twenty hours long, he had firmly committed almost every change in every detail to memory.
Time could defeat anything. Even a stone would weather into dust after a thousand years.
The blue-green-robed figure was now more like a disembodied consciousness. That over nine hundred million days of imprisonment had not caused his consciousness to collapse and dissolve into nothingness was