The transition was like being shredded by a million crystalline teeth and sewn back together with cold, indigo wire. When the light of the explosion finally faded, Fang Yuan felt the solid, yet unnatural ground beneath his boots.
They had landed in a Null-Dimension—a graveyard of forgotten realities. The sky was a swirling vortex of grey static, and the ground was composed of translucent, obsidian-like sand that didn't reflect light. There was no air, only a thin, magical ether that tasted like copper and old memories.
Beside him, Lia was gasping, her lungs struggling to adapt to the lack of oxygen. Kaelen and Zane lay nearby, their "Hollow" bodies twitching as the chaotic energies of the Void began to seep into their empty souls.
"Master..." Lia wheezed, her voice sounding thin and metallic in this vacuum. "Where... are we? The Overlord's weight is gone, but I feel... watched."
Fang Yuan didn't answer immediately. His indigo eyes scanned the horizon. As a Rank 2: Space-Time Weaver, he could feel the threads of this place. They weren't straight or organized; they were tangled, rotting, and hungry.
Suddenly, the grey static in the sky pulsed. From the shadows of the obsidian dunes, shapes began to emerge. They were not biological. They looked like jagged fragments of broken mirrors held together by black smoke—the Echo-Wraiths. These were the remains of civilizations erased by the "Reality Erasers" of the higher realms, now reduced to mindless, starving scavengers.
One of the Wraiths, a towering mass of glass shards and void-fire, shrieked. The sound wasn't heard by the ears, but felt as a vibration that tried to shatter the soul.
"They smell the 'Luck' of the Hero and the 'Essence' of the Rebel," Fang Yuan said, his voice cold and steady. He raised his hands, and the indigo threads between his fingers glowed with a desperate intensity. "They don't want our flesh. They want our Existence."
As the first wave of Echo-Wraiths lunged with claws of fractured space, Fang Yuan realized that in this empty realm, his weaving wouldn't be enough. He needed to turn his "Hollow" puppets into weapons of the Void.