Chapter 242: The Secret Realm Shatters
The wind kept blowing without pause, as though this damned mountaintop had raised countless invisible little ghosts, all of them intent on breathing straight into people’s faces.
Vera leaned against a boulder, her back aching from the sharp stone pressing into it, but she did not move. The fingers of her right hand were still tapping unconsciously against her knee. Once, twice. The rhythm was slow, yet it never stopped.
She might not even have realized she was doing it. It was as if the little strength left in her body needed somewhere to go, or else the panic in her chest would grow unbearable.
Lillian had already been burying her face in her knees for a very long time, so long that her nose had grown stuffy. At last she stealthily lifted her eyelids just a little and peered out through the gap between her arms.
Rex was standing there like a stone pillar, but Lillian could see the hand hanging at his side. His fingers kept curling in, then loosening, then curling in again. He was tense.
More tense than she was.
Time was passing so damned slowly.
After some analysis, the final conclusion Vera reached was simple—
wait.
Ancient ruins like this were like little fragments that had been cut out of the river of time by great magic, then temporarily pasted onto some coordinate in the real world through spatial sorcery. You could imagine them as... independent bubbles with their own internal world, only very unstable ones.
The Witch’s final self-destruction had not been simple fire.
She had turned herself into a bomb, and what she had blown apart was the core magical source that maintained the bubble’s existence—or rather, the structure that kept it stable.
The result was that the inside of the bubble was now filled with violent, out-of-control magical turbulence, crashing everywhere, tearing everything apart. Its inner walls—in other words, the spatial structure they could actually feel—were being frantically ripped and stretched from within, becoming riddled with holes and fractures.
It would not take long. Once the pressure inside grew too great for the bubble to contain any longer—
boom.
It would rupture completely at its weakest point.
And when that happened, everything still inside this shattered bubble, whether living or dead, big or small, would be forcibly squeezed out by the chaotic spatial force released in the collapse and thrown back into the real world.
Most likely near the original coordinate where it had been attached.
In other words, somewhere around the ruins’ entrance.
In her dazed state, Lillian thought that if only she were home right now, that would be wonderful.
A warm fireplace. A soft sofa. A steaming cup of strong tea...
Even the cramped dormitory back at the academy would do, so long as it was safe.
Just as her eyelids began to droop again, sleepiness and chill rising together in waves—
the ground beneath her feet, no, the entire stretch of mountain they were sitting on and leaning against, suddenly shook.
There was no warning at all.
It was not ordinary swaying. It was something deeper, heavier, as though some invisible beast in the deepest layer of the earth had turned over in its sleep.
Lillian let out a little cry and nearly sprang off the ground.
Rex spun around at once, every muscle in his body snapping taut, his right hand instinctively going for the empty sword hook at his waist.
Vera’s tapping fingers on her knee stopped. Her eyes flew open, and there was not the slightest trace of sleep in those gray-green irises. They had become sharp enough to cut.
The trembling lasted only one or two seconds.
Then it stopped.
But immediately after that, an indescribable low hum began to rise.
From beneath the ground. From every direction. From the air itself.
It spread slowly, steadily, and endlessly upward. The sound was not loud, but once it entered the ears, it burrowed straight into the brain, making the scalp prickle and the chest tighten.
“It’s starting,” Vera said softly.
Yet in the strange silence and low vibration that had suddenly overtaken everything, her voice sounded frighteningly clear.
Bracing herself against the rock, she rose to her feet. Her movements were a little stiff, but steady.
She went first to Ilyss, who lay nearest to her, and crouched down to check her condition again.
Still unconscious.
Still breathing weakly.
But for the moment, at least, she showed no signs of worsening.
Then Vera quickly checked Eleanor as well.
At last, she stopped beside Ryan.
He still had not woken up. The little blue bird remained curled beside his hand, and with the rising hum from beneath the earth, its tiny body seemed to tremble in eerie rhythm.
Vera reached out, not to check his pulse, but to yank three extremely fine silver threads from the torn lining of her ruined coat. They were so thin as to be almost invisible. One end of each seemed to have already been tied around her own wrist.
Working swiftly, she wrapped the other ends around the wrists of the three unconscious figures—Ryan’s right wrist, Ilyss’s left wrist, and Eleanor’s right wrist.
The instant the threads touched skin, they glimmered faintly as though alive, then vanished from sight, leaving behind only a pale silver ring-mark almost too faint to see.
“Tether lines,” she explained briefly to the wide-eyed Lillian and Rex. “When the space spits us out, things may get chaotic. These should slightly increase the chance that we won’t be scattered apart. Hold on to them.”
The moment she finished speaking—
the second tremor came.
It was far stronger than the first.
Lillian felt the ground slip beneath her. Her whole body tilted sideways, and she screamed as she threw herself toward Eleanor, wrapping both arms around her waist and clinging to her desperately.
Rex staggered as well, but his reaction was faster. With a low growl, he dropped to one knee. One hand slammed against the ground to brace himself, while the other changed from a grip to a clutch, locking around Ryan’s shoulder like an iron vice and shielding the little blue bird by his hand as well.
Vera almost fell too. She had to catch herself on the rock beside her to stay upright.
And after that second quake, the surrounding world began to look wrong.
The air... was distorting.
The lines of the distant mountains began to waver and stretch. Even the edges of the stones nearby blurred and doubled. The patch of sky above, where a few cold stars had just appeared, rippled as though it were the surface of water struck by stones, transparent waves spreading outward in silent circles.
That subterranean humming grew louder and louder, denser and denser, until it seemed to become a monstrous blend of countless noises, all mixed together into a grating roar—deep booms like rocks being crushed, the groans of some colossal structure buckling under impossible strain, shrieks of energy so sharp they seemed to tear at the soul...
“Hold on!” Vera was almost shouting now. Her voice sounded broken beneath the increasingly terrifying uproar. “This whole space is collapsing!”
Lillian buried her face in Eleanor’s shoulder, squeezed her eyes shut, and held on so tightly that both her arms shook.
Rex clenched his teeth so hard the veins stood out on his forehead. Beneath his palm, Ryan’s body felt terrifyingly cold. And in the hollow of his hand, that tiny patch of blue shadow trembled uncontrollably.
The humming reached its peak.
It became a deafening roar.
And then every one of them—whether unconscious or awake—felt an immense and irresistible pressure fall upon them from all directions, a force that belonged purely to space itself.
There was no way to describe that instant in words.
It was as though their entire existence had been torn free from its place and hurled into a horrific vortex where all direction and all sense had collapsed, twisted, and been violently stirred together.
The last thing Lillian remembered was the sensation of being turned into a rag doll stuffed into a spinning drum at impossible speed, her insides flung out of place, while pure white light and countless broken fragments of color exploded before her eyes.
In her ears, there was nothing but a scream so sharp it felt as though it could rip her soul apart.
And then—
darkness.
Weight.
Void.
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