She clasped the Spirit Pendulum tightly, eyes lowered, saying nothing.
Viscous pitch-black seeped out from between the grains of sand, coiling around her feet and creeping upward; wherever it passed, her toes began to crumble, turning to fine sand and gravel that pattered down, returning to the tray.
Like a candle being lit and consud, she withered away bit by bit.
"There's no ti to lose, move at once!"
Jiang Tongguang nodded, gave her one last look, and led the team forward.
This was the first ti Ji Jue had seen the full view of You Sui.
Passing through the phantom-like ruin walls, they wound their way through narrow alleys; the air reeked of burning, so acrid it stung, while pale ash drifted down from the firmant like falling snow.
Verdant flas surged across the sky like tides, sending out ripple upon ripple, resembling shifting auroras and neon lights, so dazzlingly bright.
Yet they still could not illuminate this shadowed world.
Most of the surrounding buildings were already abandoned and dilapidated, yet in the darkness sothing seed to be subtly changing, impossible to fully discern.
Everything in sight was a tangle of bizarre structures sprouting like weeds, with one workshop after another crudely spliced together into shanties on the outskirts. Ring upon ring of buildings nested like concentric circles, converging toward the center; the further in one went, the deeper one sank, descending layer by layer.
And at the very heart of You Sui stood a lting Furnace towering like a mountain, erald flas billowing upward, ceaselessly drawing out the chaos beneath the Vortex, sustaining its own domain amid the storm and preserving the stability of You Sui.
The interior still retained so semblance of order, but the outskirts were nothing but a cluster of illegal structures, ramd together at random, devoid of any sense; who knew why, having already fled all the way to You Sui, they still had so many shaful things to hide in a place like this.
They moved like ants between streets and ruins, and as ti passed, those ring-like buildings seed to rotate silently as well. In the narrow alleys, the way ahead gradually warped and blurred, as though they had walked into the very deepest part of a labyrinth.
Only the pass tucked in their bosoms trembled again and again, vibrating as they passed through layer upon layer of blockades, leading them straight inward.
The structure of You Sui defied any attempt at rational conjecture; within the entire Valley of Abyss, countless buildings seed alive, and the spatial relations had grown impossibly uncanny, making it utterly impossible to chart a route by mory alone.
They rounded a corner amid the ruins and, without warning, stepped into a thronging underground plaza. Piles of materials were heaped on the stalls for selection; apprentices haggled fiercely over the value of every batch of goods, while the ones seated behind the stalls were all Puppets made from living people, their faces identical, smiles warm and cordial, yet their bodies beneath the robes were grotesque, long since utterly aberrated.
After turning right in two directions and climbing a flight of steps, everything fell silent again; the narrow corridor barely allowed them to turn around, like a blood vessel dense with branching paths that nonetheless did not interconnect.
Where they were headed was not sothing they themselves could decide, but was dictated by the resonance and pull between the passes they carried and the directions ahead.
Only the further they went, the stranger the path beca, and the more their hearts burned with tornt.
Unease.
Everyone grew taut all over, nerves drawn tight.
"Sothing's wrong…"
The craftsman leading the way suddenly halted, then, without warning, turned around; but when they looked back, they saw that at so unknown mont, only a high wall remained behind them.
Within the undulating erald flas, a cold, indifferent eye slowly manifested, gazing down from above.
The high wall abruptly rose, sealing, closing in.
Ka—
With a crisp snap and a soft sigh, Ji Jue's vision swam; before he could even react, the sealed space resounded with the sound of sothing shattering.
"Wh—"
Ji Jue jolted as though waking in terror from a nightmare, frozen where he stood, drenched in sweat, only to find himself still in the narrow alley, with a fork in the road just ahead.
It seed nothing had happened at all; everything was like an illusion.
Only in Jiang Tongguang's hand, an ancient to veined with cracks shed a single page in silence, which crumbled into ash.
"The passes for the inner layer are completely different from those in the middle layer. Change the route," Jiang Tongguang fell silent for a mont. "Let's try the gap."
The craftsman guiding them nodded without a word, turned around, and, as though trudging through a mire, led them step by step down into the shadows, into another world where black and white were reversed.
In the shadow-world between material seams, everything seed weightless; all colors had been inverted, like a grotesque negative.
Even in such a remote interstice, the darkness still heaved in faint surges; countless eyes hidden in the void erged without a sound, while blurred lines uncoiled from those pupils, sprawling out in dense, net-like tangles.
Like serpents, they spread without pattern, endlessly twining around every passerby, silently prying.
Even the slightest disturbance would draw a tidal onslaught and backlash.
Every brick and tile, every blade of grass and tree, even the flickering Illusion Light, was suffused with their presence.
The instant they appeared, an unknown multitude of eyes fixed on them, yet the countless probing lines passed straight through his body, as if through layer upon layer of phantoms.
They continued forward, not knowing how long they had walked, when Jiang Tongguang suddenly halted. "Turn back."
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