The pressure at the bottom of the Trench of Tears was not a physical weight
alone; it was a psychological scouring. It felt as if the entire history of the
world's discarded souls was pressing against the bubble of our existence,
demanding to know why we, the "unwanted" who had survived, dared to breathe in
the place where so many others had been silenced.
The Grotto of the Third Gear was an amphitheater of crystalline desolation. The
walls were not stone, but compressed salt—billions of microscopic tears shed by
the Hallowed line, frozen into a jagged, grey-white architecture. The floor was
a carpet of fine silt that puffed up like smoke with every step, the pulverized
remains of the "wolfless" who had failed the descent. In the center, the Third
Gear—the Gear of Possibility—loomed like a massive, skeletal clockwork made of
white coral and human bone. It didn't tick; it throbbed, sending out ripples of
