For a time—or perhaps for an eternity, as time had ceased to be a linear progression and had become a stagnant pool—Lin Yue existed only as a point of consciousness. There was no breath, no heartbeat, no weight. There was only the lingering, ghostly sensation of a hand gripping his wrist, a pressure that had been the only thing keeping him from dissolving into the bleached nothingness.
Then, the weight returned.
It started with the smell of cold ash and wet stone. Then came the sound: a silence so absolute it felt like a physical weight pressing against his eardrums.
Lin Yue opened his eyes.
He was lying on his back. Above him, the sky was a flat, oppressive shade of dull gray, like a ceiling of unpolished concrete. There were no stars, no sun, and most strikingly, no cracks. The fractured sky of the Reflection Tower had vanished, leaving behind a void that didn't feel like a threat, but like a finished sentence.
