The towering, rotting tree underwent a dramatic change the instant the key shone.
Silver-gray miasma flowed from the many rotten holes in its trunk.
It did not come for Ye Qiyan, but covered the entire sky instead.
The bizarre eyeball satellite appeared again, as though it had sensed something.
Yet above the miasma, even as it examined the area carefully with all those eyes, it still saw nothing strange.
From the satellite's perspective, everything here remained as it had been, still filled with despair that made perfect sense.
"There seems to be something up ahead?"
The golden key returned to his hand, and a door appeared on the trunk.
Eve went ahead and pushed the door open for Ye Qiyan.
Beyond the door was no mysterious, special space, merely a room hollowed out of the tree.
An ordinary room that looked as though someone had once lived there.
Ye Qiyan walked inside.
There was not much in the room.
Most of it consisted of assorted books, and a few decorations made it fairly clear that the owner had probably been a woman.
He intended to pick one up to appraise it, but before he could touch a book,
the faint breeze stirred by his footsteps swept through everything in the room. In an instant, their original colors faded, and a second later, they turned into seemingly weightless ash that swirled through the rather small space.
The Astral Sacred Crest shielded Ye Qiyan from the ash.
But when the ash settled, nothing remained in the room.
They had been eroded.
Not just by the strange power clinging to the trunk, but also by... time.
"Nothing at all?"
The three paths in the Fork in Destiny could not possibly have been meaningless.
Wait... meaning?
Ye Qiyan suddenly realized that he seemed to