When Mo Ling woke up again, he was no longer surrounded by the mist-shrouded Cloud Sea.
Dim yellow light fell upon the towering bookshelves. In the center of the antique hall stood a spotless reading table, with a neat circle of wooden chairs around it. Several people were already seated there.
"You're finally awake. I thought you'd passed out..."
Lu Youqi's voice came from beside him, and only then did Mo Ling realize that he, too, was sitting properly in a chair. He had no idea who had placed him there.
He, Lu Youqi, and Little Sprite were sitting side by side, while A'Dai and Stone Man stood blankly beside the bookshelves behind them.
Directly across from them floated a strange giant eyeball, like an inflated balloon. Its tiny pupil was staring absently at a book on the reading table.
When it noticed Mo Ling had awakened, the pupil suddenly lifted and fixed itself on him...
Mo Ling only felt a sharp gaze pass through his body, as if it had instantly seen him through completely. Information was drawn from every corner of his body by that gaze, taking everything about him back to the eyeball.
"Why does this feel so strange?"
Mo Ling had never experienced such a "tangible" gaze before.
He shifted his vision and looked through the eyeball's main body, only to find the most ordinary structures within: flesh, nerves, vitreous humor... It was no different from a normal creature's eyeball, yet it gave him an extraordinarily unsettling feeling.
It was as though some kind of "will" overlapped those ordinary structures. That will controlled the eyeball's actions, rather than the eyeball itself.
The information taken away by that gaze was passed to the will upon the eyeball. Once the information merged into that will, it became calm