Soft yet majestic silver-white light flowed like tangible liquid from the fully opened colossal gate, flooding the short transition passage.
The light was not dazzling, yet it carried an indescribable sense of purity, weight, and order, as though it could wash away every trace of filth and exhaustion clinging to the depths of one's soul.
Ming Xin stood at the edge of the light, narrowing his eyes as he adjusted to this long-lost—perhaps even never truly experienced—"purity" and "tranquility."
The emergency-opened hatch behind him automatically closed after he entered the transition passage, completely sealing off the foul and dangerous aura of the small core chamber.
Taking a deep breath of the pure air filled with the fragrance of energy, Ming Xin felt even the dull ache in his soul ease somewhat. He slowly stepped into the light.
Beyond the gate lay a magnificent space that was difficult to describe accurately in words.
It was not a "room" or "hall" in the conventional sense. The first thing that entered his perception was boundless "emptiness."
Above, below, and in every direction, it seemed to stretch to the limits of his sight, yet it was shrouded in soft silver-white Light Mist with blurred boundaries, making its actual size impossible to judge.
The space itself seemed to have no gravity. Ming Xin felt as though he were floating in an ocean of light.
And at the center of that ocean of light floated the "core" of this space.
It was an incomparably enormous, slowly rotating mass of energy formed from countless silver-white geometric structures of ultimate complexity, nested and combined together.
It was not a physical entity. It resembled a three-dimensional projection, or rather, the manifestation of some higher-dimensional energy structure within three-dimensional space.
Its shape shifted constantly, sometimes like a dazzling polyhedral star,