At first, Zhou Heng easily sketched the woman's rough outline.
The contours were smooth and natural. With just a few strokes, a seductive, voluptuous figure began to take shape on the sketch paper.
His twenty-six years of seal engraving had not been wasted. Zhou Heng's grasp of "form" had long since surpassed that of the vast majority of his peers in Cixin City.
But when he prepared to sketch her face and figure in greater detail...
He suddenly felt an overwhelming obstruction that came from nothingness.
It was a sensation Zhou Heng had never experienced before.
It felt neither like suppression by some power nor like obstruction by some barrier, but rather a more fundamental, more essential "denial," as though something were telling him from the very foundations of existence, "You are not permitted to observe this person."
It was like the desperate suffocation of drowning, his breath stripped away bit by bit, his consciousness sinking into darkness little by little. Yet it also felt as though he had been sealed for endless ages inside an airtight coffin, deathly silent and stifling, without any light or sound.
Then Zhou Heng lost the voluptuous, beautiful woman's face.
It was not that he could not see it clearly. He had lost it completely.
It was as though something had precisely gouged out the piece of memory in his mind that held her face, leaving only a blank void.
Immediately afterward, even the outline of her figure began to blur and dissipate. The lines Zhou Heng had just drawn with his sketching pencil inexplicably became utterly meaningless to his perception.
His field of vision began falling into darkness in an endless descent, falling and falling again...
That boundless darkness surged in from every direction, without a bottom, without an end, and without anything