After realizing that he truly could do nothing at present, Renato forced himself to calm down.
He withdrew his gaze from the city beneath his feet, frozen in a single instant of war, and focused all his attention on the White-Haired Boy before him.
To escape this increasingly chaotic and dangerous place, Renato needed to gather as much information as possible.
"Lord Rafada, can you help Klauthsura and me return to the Surface?"
To Renato's surprise, the White-Haired Boy neither hesitated nor twisted his words to impose conditions like a devil. He simply agreed.
"If the 'Ritual' succeeds, of course. Helping you return to the Surface would be effortless."
But then he added something else, calmly offering a more practical suggestion:
"However, I have no confidence whatsoever that the 'Ritual' will succeed. If you intend to teleport out on your own, head to the base of the Tower of Pure White once 'Time Stop' ends."
"That is where the demiplane's true 'spatial node' lies. The one at the top of the tower is merely a spell trap I designed..."
Renato's eyebrows rose slightly. As expected of a Legendary Mage's Mage Tower, it was riddled with traps. Even the heavily defended summit was only a smokescreen.
If the Tower of Pure White had been intact, an intruder who struggled all the way to the top would discover that they had to circle back down to the base. Renato could scarcely imagine how maddening that would be.
He nodded to Rafada, committing this information firmly to memory so he could tell Klauthsura later.
Having confirmed a means of escape, Renato took advantage of this rare pause. Putting together the scenes that had just flooded his mind and his own experiences in the Niter Kingdom, he could not help asking the question that