The spiraling blue light passage swallowed the last ripple of energy and vanished completely into the cold, smooth ruin walls behind them, as if it had never existed.
The brief sluggish sensation, like passing through gel, faded. Ming Xin, Shadow Fiend, the Seeker, and Starlight, wrapped in Light Mist—
were gently spat out by an invisible force and landed in a new, even stranger space.
The first thing they felt was near-absolute silence.
It was not the absence of sound—in the Shadow Plane, there had never been any medium for normal sound waves to travel through.
Rather, it was a "dead silence" on the level of perception, as though even the restlessness of energy itself, the inherent "background noise" of space, and even the faintest ripples of consciousness—
had been absorbed, smoothed away, and returned to nothingness by some invisible force. This silence carried a heavy quality that oppressed the mind.
The second thing was light—or rather, the lack of it.
This was not the dimness inside the Pillar of Suppressing the Abyss, barely lit by dark-red runes, nor was it the deep darkness common to the Shadow Plane that devoured all light.
Instead, a uniform dark-gray hue, as though it emitted its own light, filled every corner of their vision.
The source of the light was unclear and directionless, shrouding everything beneath a hazy gray curtain stripped of all vivid color.
The place where they landed seemed to be one corner of an enormous platform. Beneath their feet was the same dark-gray material, neither metal nor stone, cool to the touch and exceptionally smooth.
Extremely fine dark-silver patterns, like those on a circuit board, faintly flowed across its surface, though their glow was so weak it was almost impossible to notice.
The platform stretched ahead, disappearing into the gray