Beyond the Great Boundary Pylon, the earth ceased to behave like stone.
Lin Tao stepped out from the star-iron shadow of the obelisk, his boots crunching against the final fringe of quartz gravel. Before them stretched a narrow promontory of dark shale. A jagged tongue of rock fifty paces wide that jutted out into the empty void like the broken prow of a sunken galleon.
He stopped three paces from the pylon’s stone base.
Something was fundamentally wrong with the rock beneath their feet. A deep, jagged fissure ran across the promontory from east to west, appearing roughly four feet wide. But when Lin Tao looked down into the gap, his brain struggled to parse the visual input.
The crack had no depth.
It wasn’t filled with darkness, nor was it choked with rubble. It was simply an absence of shape. A pure, two-space-folding line where the rock texture of the northern side failed to meet the southern side. Looking straight down into the fissure, Lin Tao didn’t see rock strata, roots, or earth. He saw through the ground entirely. He looked directly into the matte gray skybox that lay beneath the world.
Tie Shan stepped forward, his heavy brows furrowing as he halted beside Lin Tao.
