Sword of Dawnbreaker - Chapter 206 - The Shadow Realm's Big Void
After being ejected from the borderline state of the shadow realm, Amber refused to believe it and attempted to enter several more times. But each time, without change, they would fall back into the real world once they’d entered the borderline state.
By the fourth attempt, she was really so dizzy that she could no longer take it.
Gawain was also muddled by this situation (of course, it was also possible that he was just dazed from the multiple switching across the borders). He subconsciously opened his mouth and asked, “What’s going on? Your plug-in has expired?”
“Plug-in? What’s a plug-in?” Amber didn’t understand what Gawain was saying but guessed that it most likely wasn’t any kind of praise from his expression. Thus, she angrily pursed her lips. “There must be a problem with this environment! Hold on, let me take half a catty of shadow potion before we try again—— I don’t believe my shadow affinity…”
“Stop, stop, stop, don’t lose your marbles. Calm down and analyze the situation.” Gawain stopped the half-elf’s act of courting death with a wave of his hand. “Carefully sense the shadow environment in here. Then try to see if the common shadow walk or stealth technique works.”
Amber calmed down with Gawain’s prompt. She took in a breath, and her figure gradually faded in the air.
After several tests, she released her own shadow state. “The conventional shadow walk and stealth technique both have no problem. Skills like shadow fog and the like can also be used smoothly. It seems that only when entering the shadow realm would I… be affected by some kind of interference and get ejected instantly.”
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“Shadow realm… So, is the problem on the ‘other side’ then…?” Gawain offered while thoughtfully looking toward the circular ring equipment in the center of the room that resembled a magic door. Then, an idea flashed across his mind as he frowned. “Isn’t the shadow realm equivalent to a certain kind of reflection of the real world? Try entering the shadow realm outside of this room. Then check out the situation from the ‘other side’.”
“Let me give it a try!” Amber agreed and walked out with Gawain in tow. “You come over. Protect my eyes…”
Was this person taking him to be the same thing as a comments eye-shield filter[1]? Specially used to shield the ancient gods’ faces…
Gawain followed resignedly behind Amber. When they were a certain distance from the circular room, the two, as expected, successfully entered the shadow realm.
Seeing the familiar black and white visual field emerge before his eyes and seeing Amber’s figure switch to an elemental enchantress-like form unique to the shadow realm, Gawain instantly heaved a sigh of relief. “Gave me a scare. I’d thought that your plug-in had really expired…”
“The things you say are really weird. I can’t understand them at all,” Amber muttered and then grabbed Gawain’s arm and walked towards the circular hall in the shadow realm.
They strode toward that ancient door, yet after passing through it, what they saw was merely a plain circular hall.
No divine flesh, no concealed research facility. There weren’t even the extra doors and windows and passageways. There was nothing here at all.
Amber curiously surveyed the surroundings. “Strange… It’s just an ordinary hall. Why was there interference…? And this interference is so funny. We just had to slightly make a bypass, and we could enter…”
However, Gawain immediately sensed an incongruity upon examining their surroundings. “No, I don’t think we were able to bypass it.”
He lifted his hand and pointed to the center of the hall. “That circular ring equipment is gone. There are scratch marks left on the ground.”
In the hall in the real world, the most conspicuous thing was the circular ring equipment in the center of the room. However, here, the ring that was as tall as three to four meters had disappeared. In its place were ragged marks on the ground, as well as a huge piece of ground that had been dug away in whole ——there was no doubt that something was once there.
“Other than the laboratory where we encountered divine flesh previously, the shadow realm and real world basically maintained a state of corresponding projection, and according to the marks left on this ground, we can tell there also ought to be a circular ring here. But it’s gone now.” Gawain frowned as he moved towards the ground that had been dug away. “Look at the measurements here, they should match the base of the circular ring.”
“Someone came to the shadow realm and stole the door on this side?” Amber’s thoughts on this were intriguing. “Nice skills…”
“No one would steal a magic door like they have nothing better to do.” Gawain glanced at Amber. “I believe a certain force had torn through here and ‘shifted’ the items that ought to be here to another place. Entering the shadow realm from the circular hall in the real world should have brought us to the side of the corresponding circular ring, and when we walked into the shadow realm from the corridor outside the room, we could only see this empty ‘inner hall’. This is some kind of misplaced projection…”
Amber didn’t know how Gawain had thought of all these either, but after some consideration that her reasoning was impossible, she followed Gawain’s train of thought. “So what does that kind of ‘interference force’ do?”
Gawain frowned, leaving his thoughts to unravel. “Perhaps it’s for the sake of stopping unauthorized people from bypassing the ‘magic door’ and arriving at a certain place… Only by passing through the correctly matched ‘magic door’ can someone arrive at the correct location. Other than that, it is either one is unable to enter the shadow realm, or one can only enter this empty hall. The Gondor Master Mages back then often used such means to encrypt important treasure vaults.”
“In other words, if we want to figure out exactly where the correct corresponding location is, the only method is to repair that circular ring in the actual world?” Amber lifted her brows. “This is outside my knowledge…”
“Not only outside your knowledge, I’m afraid no one in the territory can interpret such complicated ancient magical equipment.” Gawain shook his head regretfully. “The circular ring ‘outside’ isn’t some simple magic circle, but complex magical equipment including a mix of magic circles, ancient composites, and Gondorian magic techniques. For a thingamajig of this level and depending on the current standards of spellcasters in the territory, I don’t think we’ll be able to deal with it at all.”
Amber stuck out a tongue, feeling that she was truly powerless to render any help in this aspect. Then, she sauntered and casually wandered about the circular hall.
She glimpsed here and there, pulling out her small dagger occasionally to scratch at the runes on the walls or the ground. However, when she rounded to the opposite end of the hall, she suddenly stopped.
She noticed that there was a black crack on the arc wall —— the crack wasn’t very wide, but branched out to many crevices; the crooked lines covered the entire wall in her sight.
She curiously reached out a finger and touched that crack.
Gawain was examining the residual rune marks on the ground of the hall when he suddenly heard a continuous cracking sound coming from nearby. He lifted his head in shock to take a look, and the scene before his eyes startled him.
Far from the entrance of the hall, an arc wall that was initially intact but now crumbling was covered with extensive black cracks. The sturdy ancient concrete was falling off in pieces, as if there was a boundless abyss outside the hall swallowing up this structure!
And Amber who stood before the wall seemed to have been frightened by this sight. The ground beneath her feet had already cracked open slightly, but she obliviously remained in the same spot, unmoving!
“Watch out!”
At the most critical moment, Gawain dashed forward with a yell and pulled Amber who was in a daze back. The two of them retreated to the entrance of the hall before they stopped, and Amber only exclaimed at this moment, “Damn, the wall collapsed with a poke of my finger!”
Gawain held on tightly to Amber’s arm as he paid attention to the collapse of the hall. He was prepared to retreat anytime, but he quickly realized that the collapse had merely extended to a quarter of the hall and stopped —— though it was massive, it ended unusually quickly.
However, the sight after the collapse of the wall and ceiling had him frowning hard, and an odd and bizarre sense surged into his heart.
The outside was total darkness, pitch black as if the world had vanished and the universe was quiescent.
“What… is that…?” Amber was so nervous that even the pitch of her voice had changed, and what had her even more tense was standing by and watching Gawain walk towards the area of collapse. “Hey! Be careful!”
Gawain was indeed very careful. He cautiously came to the edge of the collapse in the hall and looked out into the space outside the wall.
Behind the wall ought to be the Dark Range’s heavy and thick layer of rock and soil, but there was only darkness and nothingness in Gawain’s sight — complete pitch black filled his vision, as if everything in the world was abruptly broken off outside of that boundary.
But he narrowed his eyes and observed carefully. Finally, he caught some extremely distant and extremely blurred things in the darkness.
He saw that there seemed to be a rising and falling outline of “land on the opposite shore” in the extreme far end of the dark space, while a thread of something faintly glowing could be seen high above in the distance; that was like daylight. Even in the empty darkness, he could still make out some floating things: they seemed to be huge boulders and islands that had lost their gravity and were floating and tumbling in the air.
Gawain finally realized what was with the darkness before him: this wasn’t some “end of all things in the world”, but an unprecedentedly massive “void”.
The scale of this void was so huge that it’d exceeded the distance in which the human eye could still receive light. Thus, it gave one an illusion of “everything vanishing”, but the shadow realm’s unique “illuminated environment” deemed that there wouldn’t be absolute darkness here. Thus, Gawain could vaguely recognize the things in the void.
He casually took out a magic crystal, infused magical power to active this crystal, then tossed it into the distance.
The crystal emitting a bright glow flew forward upon leaving his hand. It was originally capable of lighting up a spacious room, but after entering that big void, it was immediately reduced to a speck of insignificant light —— as the surroundings lacked reflective surfaces, its glow appeared so minute that it was nothing worth mentioning.
This confirmed Gawain’s guess.
“Is this… a cave?” Amber also boldly followed over. She looked at the sight before her in shock and noticed that the thread of daylight that was high up and extremely far away. “It seemed to lead directly to the ground surface up there? This cave… How big is it?!”
“Let’s put aside the size for now. Sir Byron had been burrowing inside the Dark Range for such a long time. The corridors that he’d explored include the corresponding area of this void before us —— in other words, this void absolutely doesn’t exist in the real world’s Dark Range.” Gawain unraveled in shock. “This void is only restricted to the shadow realm… If this wasn’t naturally formed, then it could only be the doing of some forces beyond mortal imagination…”
Amber finally came to a realization at this point. “So, I wasn’t able to enter the shadow realm previously, not because of the interference of some magic door, but because this area… does not correspond with the real world. The dislocation here is overly severe?”
“…I don’t know,” Gawain admitted that he was also at a loss right now. “I only know that we probably won’t be able to get to the bottom of this mystery here… unless we can repair that circular ring equipment outside. Otherwise, it would be impossible for anyone to figure out what exactly the ancient Gondor Master Mages had been doing here.”
Amber rubbed her arms that were beginning to be filled with goosebumps. “Eek… In any case, I can’t stay here any longer. This place is too strange. I think the correct thing to do is to quickly get out of here.”
Gawain let out a breath. “I quite agree with your opinion this time.”
[1] When there are disturbing images in a video, spectators activate their ‘comments eye-shield filter’ to cover up the image as the comments move across the screen
