Renato had thought the mirror was something like a portal, a device that would take him into another space with a single step.
Yet after entering, he felt none of the warped disorientation peculiar to teleportation spells, nor any dizziness from a reversal of his center of gravity.
Instead, thick white mist filled his vision, and the temperature plummeted. A bone-chilling cold seeped through the gaps in his armor and into his clothes, spreading across his skin until a faint numbness tingled at his fingertips.
The familiar scene involuntarily reminded him of what they had experienced upon entering the demiplane. The sensation of being enveloped in dense fog, losing all sense of direction, and feeling time blur was almost identical.
This time, however, the experience did not last long. He spent less than three seconds in the gray-white mist before an immense pull suddenly seized him. His body accelerated uncontrollably in one direction, as though he had been "spat" out, flung from midair onto the ground.
His plate armor struck the floor with a dull metallic clang. At the moment of impact, his knees and elbows took the shock together.
He rolled sideways to bleed off the force, then quickly steadied himself on one knee. Holding his sword across his body in one hand, he turned his left wrist and raised a Shadow Shield before him, surveying his surroundings warily. His gaze swept every shadow that might conceal a threat.
The tower's interior was more spacious than he had imagined, roughly twenty meters across, with a soaring dome overhead. Yet its structure was dilapidated, as though a thousand years had worn it away.
Holes and cracks riddled the walls. Thick fissures snaked upward from their bases, the widest large enough to fit an entire hand, their edges crumbling with age.