Beyond the jagged rim of the cosmic tear, the true ruler of the Void Sea was awakening.
For seven thousand cycles of the outer cosmos, High Sovereign Xylarion had slumbered within the abyssal deeps.
He did not possess a physical body of mortal flesh, bone, or refined spirit essence.
Xylarion was an ontological anomaly—a conscious singularity born from the collapse of twelve ancient star systems before time was recorded by mortal scribes.
His presence in the outer dark was measured in tens of thousands of void nautical leagues.
When the scout corvette and the ten-thousand-eye dreadnought failed to return reports from the Aethelgard breach, Xylarion’s cosmic awareness stirred from its timeless stupor.
Through the black tear in the mortal veil, a colossal iris began to unfold.
It possessed no biological eyelids or veined tissue.
The pupil was a swirling vortex of anti-light, ringed by concentric bands of dark matter that ground together like tectonic plates in an earthquake.
The eye was larger than the entire continent of Aethelgard itself.
When it blinked open against the void boundary, the atmospheric pressure of the mortal realm dropped by seventeen millibars in a single second.
High in the heavens, the stars did not merely flicker.
They began to lose their depth.
From the highest observation balcony of the Astral Observatory, Chancellor Valen stood paralyzed.
The heavy brass telescope slipped from his numb fingers, clattering against the polished marble floor tiles and shattering its primary crystal lens into glittering shards.
Valen did not bend down to pick it up.
He could not tear his terrified gaze away from the horrifying spectacle unfolding across the outer firmament.
"Look at the moon..." Valen whispered, his voice trembling so violently his teeth clicked together. "Look at the outer moon of Selene!"
Beside him, Vice-Chancellor Morgana was clutching her carved spirit staff with white knuckles.
The outer moon, a rocky sphere of ancient silver stone that had orbited Aethelgard for countless epochs, was losing its spherical volume before their eyes.
Its craters, ridges, and mountainous shadows were smoothing out, pressed flat like a wax seal stamped under a hydraulic hammer.
"The Z-axis..." Morgana stammered, reading the frantic mathematical equations scrolling across her brass astrolabe. "Chancellor! The third dimension of space is collapsing! The spatial metric tensor in the upper firmament is degrading from three dimensions to two!"
"Dimensional Flattening..." Valen breathed, sheer terror chilling the blood in his veins. "The ultimate extinction weapon of the Deep Void! In the ancient forbidden scrolls of the Star-Origin Sect, it was recorded that when the Sovereign of the Outer Dark arrives, he folds entire solar systems into sheets of painted paper!"
In the upper atmosphere, the flattening wave was spreading at three hundred leagues per second.
Clouds that drifted into the boundary suddenly lost their fluffy volume, becoming razor-thin geometric polygons that slid across the sky like paper cutouts.
The three Abyssal Star-Whales, sensing the approaching wave of absolute compression, let out a distressed subharmonic wail.
Their vast blue flukes beat against the thinning aether, retreating into the lower protective bubble of the Seventh Spire.
Up in the orbit of Solitude Spire, the 108 parked dreadnought moonlets shuddered violently.
Grand Marshal Vane-Talon clutched the brass binnacle of his flagship as the ship’s artificial gravity fluctuated erratically.
"All hands, brace for planar impact!" Vane-Talon bellowed through his speaking trumpet. "Raise the solar deflection shields! Do not allow the planar boundary to touch our hulls, or we will be flattened into iron foil!"
High Sovereign Xylarion’s psychic consciousness resonated through the void rift.
It sounded like grinding continents, an overwhelming psychic pressure that forced cultivators across the kingdom to drop to their knees in agony.
*MORTAL DUST,* the abyssal voice reverberated through the fabric of reality. *YOU HAVE CONSUMED MY SCOUT CRAFT. YOU HAVE SEDUCED MY STAR-WHALES WITH FALSE WARMTH. NOW, YOUR WORLD SHALL BE PRESSED INTO A FLAT DRAWING UPON MY WALL OF TROPHIES.*
Down on the Seventh Spire, the strange planar compression was beginning to affect the physical environment.
Up on the roof beam, Patriarch Ao Cang attempted to let out a ferocious draconic roar of defiance.
Instead, the great black dragon discovered that his long whiskers were flattening against the copper downspout like strips of black parchment tape.
Ao Cang tried to turn his head, but his neck felt as stiff as a painted canvas.
Down in the cabbage patch, Lord Nether-Bane stopped in mid-stroke with his iron rake.
The ghost king turned to look at his spectral corsairs, only to see that their ghostly chests had flattened into two-dimensional silhouettes.
"Blimey, Cap'n!" one of the ghostly sailors shouted in a thin, reedy voice. "Look at my cutlass! It looks like a cardboard stage prop! I’ve lost me belly!"
"Silence, ye two-dimensional scurvy dog!" Nether-Bane hissed, though his own jaw felt strangely rigid. "Maintain formation! Hold the cabbages!"
Meanwhile, on the cedar porch of Solitude Spire, Felix Vance was sitting comfortably at the wooden table.
Under the front left table leg, the Sovereign Heart Seal held the cedar frame rock-solid against the floorboards, completely unbothered by the cosmic distortion.
Felix had just finished peeling a crisp winter apple with his small pocket knife.
He flicked an apple peel into the compost bucket near the railing.
To his mild surprise, the spiral peel didn't bounce or curl at the bottom of the bucket.
It landed completely flat, like a red watercolor drawing stamped on the bottom of the pail.
Felix blinked.
He picked up the AetherDeck with his left hand while chewing a slice of apple.
Suddenly, the screen of the AetherDeck flickered with strange, jagged distortion lines.
Felix paused mid-chew.
He frowned down at the display.
"Wait a minute," Felix muttered, leaning forward and tapping the glass screen with the knuckle of his index finger. "What happened to the aspect ratio?"
On the screen of the AetherDeck, the floating 3D avatar of his mountain spire looked bizarrely compressed.
The cedar trees, which usually swayed with smooth procedural animations, looked like flat paper sprites from a 1993 arcade platformer.
The garden cabbages looked like flat green stickers pasted onto a grey canvas.
Even the floating blue UI icons were squished sideways, stretching horizontally across the screen like taffy.
Felix squinted at the interface.
"Are you serious right now?" Felix grumbled, shaking his head with deep exasperation. "The graphics driver just had a stroke. Look at this nonsense."
He hovered his finger over the squished status icon.
An Inspector HUD tooltip popped up, completely distorted into an ultra-wide horizontal banner.
【System Error: Graphic Render Pipeline Anomaly】 【Anomaly Type: Forced Planar Orthographic Projection】 【Source: External Rogue Process Attempting To Override Z-Axis Buffer】 【Inspector Warning: An untrusted background task is attempting to compress your spatial canvas into a 2D bitmap. If left uncorrected, character assets will lose all depth geometry and render as flat 8-bit sprites. Recommended Action: Adjust graphic display resolution and reset the viewport matrix.】
Felix rolled his eyes and let out a long, weary groan.
"Every single indie game has this exact bug," Felix complained to himself. "The developers release a fancy new lighting update, but they don't test it on different monitors. Then you plug in an ultrawide screen and the whole engine forces a squished 4:3 stretched resolution."
He took another bite of his apple and chewed slowly.
"I hate playing in stretched 4:3," Felix muttered. "It makes all the characters look short and fat. My hammock looks like a pancake."
Beside him, Lyra Ashford was trembling violently.
Her sword hung limp in her hand as she stared at the sky.
The upper horizon was folding inwards, forming a colossal crease that looked like a sheet of dark paper being folded in half by an invisible cosmic giant.
The sunlight coming through the crease was splitting into two-dimensional rainbow ribbons.
"Senior Brother..." Lyra whispered, her voice barely a breath. "The universe... the heaven and earth are losing their depth! The Great Sovereign of the Void is flattening the firmament into a tomb!"
Felix looked up from his apple.
He looked at the sky, noticing how the clouds looked weirdly flat and pixilated around the edges.
"Yeah, I see it, Lyra," Felix said casually, wiping apple juice from his thumb with a cloth napkin. "The rendering engine is bugging out. The vertical sync is totally desynchronized. Give me ten seconds, I'll go into the settings menu and fix the display ratio."
Lyra’s breath caught in her throat.
She stared at Felix with stunned disbelief.
Fix the display ratio?
The Master spoke of the cosmic folding of space itself as if it were a simple adjustment of an artist’s easel!
Felix tapped the gear icon in the top right corner of the AetherDeck screen.
Felix looked at the options.
"If we're fixing it," Felix said, smiling faintly, "we might as well go with Cinematic 21:9. I love ultrawide gaming. You can see the whole valley without turning your head."
He placed his thumb firmly over [2. CINEMATIC 21:9 ULTRAWIDE MASTER].
High above in the outer dark, High Sovereign Xylarion’s planetary eye glowed with malicious triumph.
*PERISH IN THE FLAT PLANE, INSECTS!* the void entity roared.
Felix pressed the screen.