In the aftermath of the Peak Nascent Soul breakthrough, the physical world looked remarkably different through Lin Xiao’s panoramic senses.
Before his ascension, Lin Xiao saw his environment through a combination of fluid pressure sensors, omnidirectional sight reception, and sound shakes. He saw the world as matter—solid stone, boiling liquids, churning air, and swirling currents of spiritual qi.
Now, as the newly steadied earth-heat fire spun steadily at the center of his dantian, an entirely new layer of reality peeled open before him.
He was seeing the fabric of space itself.
Because the underground cave sat at a deep earth-shaking crossroads ten thousand feet beneath the land-wide mantle—and because the sudden extraction of billions of calories of earth-heat energy had caused a drastic nearby mass-energy shift—the surrounding space-folding metric was visibly warped.
To Lin Xiao’s eyes, the air was not empty space. It was a rich mix of taut, invisible threads of gravity curve. Where the dense dark rock walls stood, the threads bowed inward. Where the deep void vents plunged into darkness, the threads stretched thin, resembling ripples across the surface of a still pond after a pebble has been dropped into it.
Huh, Lin Xiao thought, tilting his semi-clear blue-and-amber body sideways as he examined a cluster of shimmering spatial lines hovering just three feet in front of his nose. That looks suspiciously like non-Euclidean shape. It resembles a topographical contour map, but instead of height lines, it’s showing how heavy things pull on the room.
