Alex stared at the fractured sky, each section of which seemed to be angling in a different direction, based on how slanted the silver walls were. Those fractures constantly shifted too in a rather random pattern, constantly changing from one position to another.
Through them, Alex could sometimes see the sun a little to the left, and sometimes to the right. The shifting space shifted the position of the sun in the sky as well.
‘Shadow Dance,’ Alex thought, realizing why his shadow danced so much during noon. ‘This is what it was.’
There was still some distance between him and the fractured space, so he wanted to go closer. Fractured space or not, he needed to go beyond it to see what lay on the outside.
Alex understood that it might be dangerous to go up there, but he felt confident in himself. He had 3 Spatial Daos now, namely the Dao of Space, the Dao of Teleportation, and the Dao of Spatial Expansion. With those, he hoped to survive whatever danger there was above him.
It turned out, his hopes had no power there.
The moment Alex flew into the spatial anomaly, he felt his body being pulled in all directions. He immediately employed his Space Dao to keep everything around him intact, but that had been a fool’s errand.
The anomaly was far too strong for someone even as strong as him to survive through it just on mere Intent.
Alex could tell that he was being teleported around constantly as the shattered space moved. His vision was filled with the silver light, his senses swallowed by Space aura.
He couldn’t even tell which direction was up anymore. He was forcefully dragged around to the point where all he could think about was leaving.
He kept flying in various directions, trying to get out of this, but no matter how much he flew, he seemed to be stuck there forever. Now that he had entered this space, exiting seemed impossible.
The only thing he could do was try and protect himself in this place.
Nothing happened to Alex as he used his Intent to cover himself in Dao of Space and Spatial Expansion. However, he didn’t know how long he could do this.
How long could he protect himself?
The constant teleportation was the one thing he couldn’t stop from happening. Even though he could stop the space he was in from teleporting, the other spaces still teleported with it, bypassing Alex’s Intent.
The constant movement and pulling reminded him of being in a storm untethered, whipped around in all directions by the wind. Only, the wind in this instance was the broken space.
Alex had felt this sensation before. It was the same thing he remembered feeling previously when he first came to Hell. Back then, he had been so tired that he hadn’t been able to pay attention to anything.
And even as attentive as he was right now, he still found himself unable to do anything else but survive this. Even keeping track of anything around him was impossible.
Alex hoped he would be dropped by the anomaly at some point, but it seemed he wasn’t so lucky. Even as he protected himself as much as he could, he was still juggled through the sky for hours.
Alex was quickly using up his Intent and at some point, he wouldn’t be able to use it anymore. In the end, he decided to rely on an instinct.
Because he hadn’t died the last time he arrived, he decided to take the chance. He decided to let the shimmering sky deal with him as it pleased.
Alex dropped all protections around him.
Immediately, Alex felt cuts all around him, but he didn’t bleed. The cuts were in space itself and so incredibly sharp that he barely needed to heal any amount at all in order to return to how he was.
The pain was there, however, with each cut, and with there being thousands upon thousands of cuts in every other instance, his body was in an incredible amount of pain.
The cuts were thankfully superficial and only seemed to target his limbs that were being flailed around. Everything above his thighs and below his neck was more or less safe aside from a few cuts here and there.
Sometimes, the cut happened in different spatial fragments, so part of his limbs that were cut off would disappear to some other location, likely never to be returned to him.
Alex closed his eyes and ignored the pain. Even as a million cuts shredded his body apart, he let himself get taken to wherever the anomaly wanted to take him.
Alex waited first for what felt like minutes then what felt like hours. At some point, his body had been cut apart so much that all of the Qi in his body had been spent up to heal everything. After his Qi was used up, Alex couldn’t heal so easily, so the wounds now lasted on his body. His body was whipped around in every direction for so long that he feared he was never leaving this place again.
However, at some point, the cuts vanished, and regular gravity took over him, pulling him down.
Alex was finally falling.
He opened his eyes immediately and saw the ground below him, clad in darkness. He tried to keep himself afloat, but he had used up all of his Qi.
Alex thought of using his Intent to keep himself afloat, but using that much Intent would knock him out, in which case the situation would be the same.
So, he just braced himself and took the fall head-on.
He landed on top of a dune, scattering sand into the air, and continued flying toward another one. He landed halfway up the second dune and was stuck nearly 2 meters in the sand.
Alex clawed his way out of the sand, his arms and legs still bleeding, unable to heal.
As he walked out, he took a deep breath to relax, but it seemed he wasn’t exactly done with everything.
His arrival had stirred the local beasts and they were all coming toward him.