Chapter 584 — In the Shadows

"The vast majority of the Stele's interior is sealed off, wrapped in thick layers of artificial stone and more than a dozen layers of magical material," Banner explained. "That's because tremendous energy surges within the Stele — energy that is extremely dangerous, and which must also keep its own energy environment closed to prevent the shield from losing balance. So we have to seal it away. The walls of this hall are ten meters thick, and through a gigantic magical array set into the ceiling, it maintains connections with every part of the Stele. Through this array, we can observe how things are working throughout the Stele."

As he spoke, Banner went to the silvery-white metal columns and activated one of them. Complex, esoteric elven runes surfaced across the column's surface, and with a faint humming sound, a great quantity of illusionary projections displaying data appeared in the air around the column.

Gao Yang and Suo You watched Banner's work with considerable tension. They hoped Banner would find something anomalous, yet at the same time they dreaded that they truly would discover a major fault in the Sentinel Tower — the Stele was the tower's most vital structure, and faults occurring here were almost always fatal. If the problem truly lay here...

Then the entire barrier repair and reinforcement plan would likely become a joke.

Amber also watched Banner's work for a while, but she understood nothing at all of elven runes and knew nothing of how the Sentinel Tower operated. Before long she lost interest in the matter before her and began looking around.

The repeated "visions" that had occurred today weighed heavily on her mind.

She was a slipshod girl, with a careless, carefree streak in her nature — but that did not mean she was simple-minded (though plenty of people thought so). She would not simply write off what she had seen earlier as "her eyes playing tricks on her." She was quite clear on one point, however — those things could likely be seen by her alone.

They were projections from the Shadow Realm — or rather, phenomena produced after part of the Shadow Realm had encroached upon the real world.

Was there a shadow rift here? Why would a shadow rift appear out of thin air in the natural world?

Amber frowned. She tried to relax her mind and let her innate, inexplicable shadow talent gradually take command of her senses. She breathed evenly, her gaze sweeping across the whole hall.

She began trying to observe this place through the eyes of a shadow creature.

The figure she had glimpsed below earlier was most likely a shadow dweller — shadow dwellers never trafficked with the living creatures of the material world, and indeed seemed to bear them a certain malice, yet toward her they were rather... friendly. Amber did not know whether the shadow dwellers' attitude toward her could be called friendly, but she had indeed had dealings with them before.

Those strange beings, seemingly devoid of logic, were in fact a kind of sentient life. They would not point her in this direction without cause — unless something here was disturbing the order between the material world and the Shadow Realm.

"The devices here also show everything as normal," Banner's slightly puzzled voice came from nearby. The elven mage repeatedly checked several of the Stele's key sensors, his tone full of bewilderment. "Strange... it's normal to an almost absurd degree..."

Suo You also came to Banner's side. "The sensors appear to be functioning well. What about the connection to the Spirit Mind here?"

"The connection is smooth. Wait — too smooth..."

Banner and Suo You's voices grew faint and blurred in Amber's ears.

Her hair had, without her noticing, grown very long, floating in midair as though gravity had lost its hold on it. Her eyes had turned an eerie pale gold, reflecting the black-and-white landscape of the Shadow Realm, and a writhing mass of smoke gathered at her feet, building a passage into the Shadow Realm.

She entered the Shadow Realm.

Figures wrapped in rune-cloth emerged around her, hollow and uncanny, and those empty silhouettes murmured in low voices: "You're in deep trouble..." "They've already done their damage..." "But it seems you can still delay things a little." "That has nothing to do with us..." "Only, we must remind you—you belong to this side, after all..." "Look up. Look above."

Amber raised her head and looked toward the ceiling of the hall.

Vast hatching vines and roots clung to every silver-white metal pillar, spread across the walls of the entire hall, and, threading through the cracks in the docking bay of the lifting platform, had burrowed out beyond the stele.

They seemed to connect to the pedestal below, to the earth beneath the pedestal, to the wasteland, to something far more blasphemous deep within the wasteland.

"Mother of God!!"

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