The spatial tear hovering three feet above the gravel didn’t look like an ordinary training fissure. It looked like a jagged, flickering black zipper pulled open in the middle of thin air. Through the rip, cold, howling winds from the chaotic Nether-Void poured into the tiered arena, smelling of frozen copper, ozone, and dead stars.
Around the fissure, the white dragon-bone marble warped and twisted, stretching like warm taffy under an unanchored gravity slope. Six thousand fighters in the stone stands scrambled backward, shrieking in panic as their robes were tugged toward the black tear by a sudden, violent vortex of spatial suction.
“A Nether-Void Maw!” an ancient formation elder screamed, clutching a stone pillar to avoid being pulled into the sky. “The curse has awakened within the Sacred Lands!”
“Hold your magic charms!” another elder wailed. “If the void rip expands, it will trigger an uncontrolled chain reaction that will collapse the entire mountain into the deep pit!”
A young scion dropped his defensive jade shield. It watched in horror as the heavy ancient object was drawn toward the event horizon, stretching into a thin needle of green light before vanishing forever into nothingness.
Amid this landscape of terror and gravity collapse, Frank didn’t grab a magic charm. He didn’t activate a Void Saint domain. He simply walked up to the edge of the spatial tear, stopped twelve inches from the howling black void. Then he pushed his aligned safety glasses up the bridge of his nose.
