The group watched the illusion as the attacker unleashed a barrage of techniques, dark bolts laced with a strange energy. The elders retaliated fiercely.
The illusion flickered, showing part of the cave collapsing, pillars shattering. Then, the image skipped forward to the mont near the teleportation array.
The attacker moved toward the array—clearly intending to destroy it. And right before the portal fully closed, the two elders dove into it, pursuing the figure through the collapsing fra. The array broke behind them, its ’light’ shattering into a thousand fragnts.
Then the illusion ended. The darkness dissipated, curling away into smoke and fading into the corners of the chamber.
Silence followed.
"That was..." ng Bai blinked, stunned. "Incredible."
"Useful too," Lin Mu murmured. He looked at Elyon with newfound curiosity. "I didn’t know darkness could be used like that."
"Few do," Elyon said simply. "It’s a dangerous elent... but also the most honest. Light shows you what you want to see. Darkness rembers what truly happened."
Daoist Chu gave a low hum of approval. "I’ve seen many elental cultivators... but your control over darkness borders on the divine."
Elyon shrugged modestly. "It cos with experience. And bloodline."
Lin Mu turned to look once more at the broken teleportation array. "At least now we know for sure: they weren’t taken or killed here. They went after soone. Willingly."
"But we still don’t know who the enemy is," ng Bai pointed out.
"Not yet," Lin Mu said. "But we’re getting closer."
He looked to Daoist Chu, who nodded. "We’ll need to trace the remnants of that teleportation event. Soone sowhere may have felt the ripple when it happened. If we find a matching array—"
"Then we find the elders," Lin Mu finished. His sword intent pulsed faintly, sharpening like a blade being drawn.
Elyon remained quiet, but his gaze lingered on Lin Mu a mont longer. Watching him, studying him. The way he had interpreted the shard. The authority he held over the situation. The presence that emanated from him like a living blade.
This wasn’t just so disciple from the Xian Sword Sect. He wasn’t even just an elite prodigy.
This man was sothing else entirely.
Sothing dangerous.
And Elyon, for all his caution and pride in his senses, was suddenly very glad he hadn’t chosen to be Lin Mu’s enemy. But he didn’t know that the surprise Lin Mu was about to give him was far greater than anything he’s seen so far.
The chamber once again fell into silence, save for the bubbling veins of Earth Fla energy that pulsed along the walls like the slow breath of a dormant beast.
Lin Mu stepped forward slowly, eyes not on the broken teleportation array, but on the air around it—more specifically, the fractured spatial fabric that lingered faintly even now.
"I want to check one last thing," Lin Mu said, his voice calm but weighted with certainty.
Elyon tilted his head, his wolf-like ears twitching. "There’s not much more to be learned," he replied. "The shard and the mory it carried... that was the clearest trail we’ve had so far."
Lin Mu turned to him, eyes glowing faintly. "That’s only if we limit ourselves to surface traces. You said before: darkness rembers what light forgets. I want to see if that extends to spatial scars as well."
Elyon’s brow furrowed. "You an you want to extract mory from the void?"
"Not quite," Lin Mu said. "I want to see if there’s anything—shards, weapons, clothes, even flesh—that might have been left behind in the spatial tear when the elders and their enemy crossed through."
The wolfkin’s confusion deepened. "Even if that were true, we wouldn’t be able to reach it. That’s not sothing we can access. The mont that array collapsed, it created turbulence in the spatial layers. To reach remnants of that mont, we’d need to peel back the folds of the spatial fabric—essentially look into the void."
Elyon paused, his voice turning grim. "Not even Daoist Chu could manage that easily. No formation master I know would attempt it on the fly."
At that, ng Bai chuckled. "That’s true—if it were soone else."
Ashy gave a series of amused chirps and flaps her wings in laughter, perching proudly on ng Bai’s shoulder.
Daoist Chu folded his arms, smiling faintly. "Just watch."
Lin Mu extended his right hand, the invisible silver ring on his index finger pulsing with sudden power invisible to others.
A pulse of energy erged from it—one too refined and quiet to be detected by the untrained, yet it bent the very essence of space in the room. The air around the broken array shimred like a mirage as the ring locked onto a fractured imprint of the failed teleportation.
Elyon blinked, puzzled. "What is he—"
Then the void responded.
Shhhhhhrip.
A soundless tear split the air where the array had once been.
A sliver of darkness, no larger than a coin, appeared—black, absolute, without edge or border. It was not just darkness—it was absence, the space between all things. The void.
"What...?" Elyon’s eyes went wide.
And before he could even finish processing what he was seeing, Lin Mu stepped forward, placed his fingers at the edge of the rift—and ripped it open.
All that was needed was raw strength.
’How in the...’ Elyon couldn’t believe it.
The tear widened like parchnt being torn by invisible hands. It stretched unnaturally, forming a vertical rift the size of a man. From within, a howling pressure surged—like air rushing out of a sealed chamber after centuries. Faint traces of distortion and particles from the teleportation collapse drifted in the air, frozen in the fragnted veil between realms.
Elyon took an instinctive step back, utterly dumbfounded. "He... opened the void."
Daoist Chu rely nodded, unsurprised. "He’s done it before."
"But that—!" Elyon’s thoughts reeled.
His instincts scread at him that what Lin Mu had just done should not be possible.
Not casually. Not so effortlessly.
He’d t old and Elderly cultivators who could tamper with spatial formations, and even they had required rituals, arrays, or talismans to stabilize the area.
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