He walked through the following cycles with the formation's layered record still present in his thinking, the Law of absence in its surface stratum a lens through which everything he had encountered since the Ninth Gate reorganized itself into a slightly different arrangement.
The gap at the top of the cosmological structure was not abstract anymore.
It had been abstract when Xu Ling described it in the white room. The Celestial Domain in ruins, the Emperor gone, the Heavenly Dao seeking a replacement, the traditional path to the highest tier disrupted. Abstract, because he had been standing at Blue Star's level at the time, the distance between where he was and where any of that mattered making it feel like information about a different world rather than information about the world he was inside.
Standing in the Middle Domain, reading the realm's own geological record of the collapse, the abstraction had resolved into something concrete.
