Linde's mental projection, like a point of condensed ultimate darkness, silently descended upon the coordinates described by Narosh—the end of the Howling Abyss.
The landscape here is twisted and bizarre, with black, jagged rocks like struggling ghostly claws piercing the gloomy sky. The air is filled with an indescribable smell, a mixture of sulfur, decay, and pure nothingness.
The light here becomes ambiguous, as if greedily sucked up by some force, casting long and distorted shadows.
Just as Naraku said, this place must be a heavily guarded forbidden area by the Shadowbinders on ordinary days.
But at this moment, under the will of Lind's arrival, all the guards—those assassins and sentinels who were proficient in shadow-mapping and whose auras were almost integrated with the environment—had already held their breath and prostrated themselves on the cold, rough rock ground in the most humble and respectful posture.
Their black attire made them look like naturally raised shadowy lumps on the ground, and they even suppressed their breathing to the extreme, for fear of disturbing or offending the being about to arrive in the slightest.
The entire area was eerily silent, with only the eternal wind howling like the wails of countless souls coming from the bottom of the abyss (which is probably the reason for the name "Howling Abyss"), and... a low, sucking sound coming from the even deeper area ahead, where the light was completely distorted.
Linde's spiritual entity ignored the prostrate mortals and focused its "gaze" directly on the abnormal area.
It was a huge, irregular spatial rift.
It is not suspended in the air, but rather like an ugly scar, directly branded on the rock wall where the abyss meets the earth.
The edges of the crack were not smooth cut surfaces, but rather constantly wriggling and twisting, like the wound of a living creature. Sometimes it oozed a viscous, asphalt-like dark substance, and sometimes it collapsed inward, emitting a suction force that caused the surrounding space to fluctuate slightly.
Inside the rift was absolute darkness, so deep that even spiritual energy seemed to be trapped.
But it was not a deathly blackness; within it, countless indescribable shadows seemed to writhe, coalesce, and separate, emitting cold, thirsty, and frantic whispers that directly affected the level of consciousness.
The persistent, mind-numbing sucking sound emanated from this opening, as if the other end was connected to a greedy, all-consuming stomach.
This is the "boundary" where the Shadow Abyss and the Prime Material Plane erode and permeate each other, a dimensional wound that bleeds continuously and never heals.
Linde's spiritual form slowly drifted closer.
The closer they got, the more pronounced the corrosive power originating from the Shadow Abyss became.
Ordinary creatures, even those of the Gold rank, would likely suffer a mental breakdown or have their souls torn apart by the invisible suction force if they approached within a hundred meters of the rift without special protection, turning into food for those on the other side of the rift.
The Shadowbinds, prostrate on the ground, trembled even more violently, stemming from both their instinctive fear of the rift and their utmost awe of the unguarded, dark being who had approached it directly.
Linde stopped in front of the rift, just inches from the writhing edge. He could clearly "sense" the details of two different dimensions of rules clashing fiercely, annihilating each other, and strangely coexisting here.
[Deconstructing the Halo] It unfolds silently and at maximum power, no longer targeting any specific creation, but rather the "region" itself, the "crack" itself.
A massive, chaotic amount of rule information flooded into Linde's perception like a burst dam.
The boundary between matter and void, the anomalous flow of energy, the subtle warping of dimensions, and that unique "Shadow Abyss property" that seems capable of corroding the very foundation of existence...
Any ordinary person, even a master of the Golden Rank Shadow like Naraku, would have their consciousness overwhelmed by this massive flow of information, and might even have been assimilated by the whispers of the Shadow Abyss.
But Linde's spiritual core, like the deepest, most unfathomable black hole, calmly received, contained, and began to rapidly analyze all of this.
The negative energy source within him, transformed by the system and far more refined and abundant than the energy dissipating here, made him almost completely immune to the corrosive influence of this place.
His "gaze" pierced through the edge of the writhing crack, attempting to glimpse the deeper mysteries of the Shadow Abyss.
Just then, something unexpected happened!
It seems that the approach of Linde's overly "massive" and "heterogeneous" spiritual body stimulated the existence on the other side of the rift, or perhaps his unbridled "analysis" triggered some kind of instinctive counterattack mechanism.
The continuous sucking sound suddenly stopped!
Immediately afterwards, the crack suddenly contracted inward, then expanded violently!
Glug... Pfft!
With a nauseating sound like the breath of a monstrous creature from a swamp, a massive mass of viscous "darkness," composed entirely of pure Shadow Abyss energy and chaotic will, was spewed out!
The darkness twisted and deformed rapidly in the air, emitting a sharp and piercing shriek of the soul, transforming into a huge, deformed monster covered with constantly opening and closing pupil-less eyes and illusory claws!
It has no fixed form, but is more like a condensed, malevolent shadow storm. The energy fluctuations it emits far exceed those of any Shadow Abyss creature Linde has encountered before, and even approach the threshold of the Radiant Gold level!
This is the "powerful native Shadow Abyss creature" that Naraku mentioned, one of the guardians (or symbionts) of the Rift! It sensed Lind's "provocation" and launched a direct attack!
The monster let out a silent roar (which directly affected the mental level), and with it a dark storm that could freeze souls and erode reality, it pounced on Lind's mental projection!
Even with their heads bowed, the Shadow Binders crawling below could feel the suffocating, terrifying pressure and the stinging pain on their souls. They were all terrified and almost couldn't help but flee.
However, faced with this fierce attack that would have made even legendary experts take it seriously, Linde's mental projection did not even ripple.
Just as the deformed shadow monster was about to pounce on him, he slowly... "raised" his "hand" made of mental energy.
There was no brilliance, no grand scale.
It is simply the application of mental power, yet it carries the implication of absolute control and near-rule-based authority.
The shadowy monster that pounced on them seemed to have crashed into an invisible and intangible barrier, yet it was absolutely insurmountable. Its violent charge came to an instant halt!
Its pupil-less eyes, which were opening and closing wildly, all "widened" at the same moment, revealing an extreme, instinctive fear!
Then, in the gentle, loose clenching motion of Linde's "raised" hand—
Pfft!
That powerful Shadow Abyss monster, which was close to the Radiant Gold level, couldn't even let out a wail. It was like a bubble being squeezed and burst by an invisible giant hand, instantly collapsing and annihilating inward!
The pure Shadow Abyss energy and chaotic will that constituted its body were forcibly crushed and reduced to the most basic particle stream by a higher and more essential negative force. Then, like a gentle stream, it was silently absorbed by Linde's mental projection without even a ripple.
It was as if he had simply brushed away a speck of dust.
Dead silence.
Even the wind howling in the abyss seemed to pause for a moment.
The Shadow Binders crawling below stiffened, forgetting even to tremble.
Although they couldn't fully "see" what had happened, the sudden disappearance of the terrifying aura that made their souls tremble, and the fact that the being still calmly hovered before the rift, were enough to explain everything.
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