Abyssal darkness...

What was the darkest place imaginable?

Most people who lived ordinary, uneventful lives would probably answer without hesitation that the darkest places were the deepest parts of the oceans, where sunlight never reached no matter how long it traveled downward.

Others might say the underground depths beneath worlds, places where the concept of light itself seemed nonexistent.

But in truth...

Even those places still possessed traces of illumination.

Deep beneath the oceans, strange creatures emitted faint glows to lure prey toward death. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

And within the underground depths, magma rivers flowed with burning radiance of their own.

The true answer...

Was here.

This place.

This endless true void beyond existence.

Creaaak

"..." Blokan slowly turned his head while maintaining his usual caution, despite the fact he could not even see the tip of his own nose.

There was no light whatsoever.

Not dim light.

Not distant light.

Nothing.

An absolute darkness so complete it felt almost physical.

Yet despite his blindness...

He could still feel something.

Something massive.

Something moving around him.

A beast.

And "around him" here did not refer to a distance of meters or even kilometers...

Blokan extended his soul sense toward the moving creature, tracing its motion carefully until it had already crossed a distance comparable to the gap separating a sun from its planets.

Yet even after such distance...

He still did not feel remotely safe.

Because that thing was the size of a planet.

No...

More accurately, it looked large enough to devour one whole.

"Althera..." Blokan raised his voice while reinforcing it with soul force so it could travel properly through the unnatural void. "This adult space beast isn’t simple."

Bang Bam

Not far from him, at what could only be considered a "short" distance in this realm, roughly equivalent to a light-hour away, the sounds of battle continued endlessly.

"Do you want me to break the loop? You need to stall it longer!" Althera swung her short sword violently, her voice barely escaping her mouth. She sounded like someone trying desperately to speak underwater. "Believe me, you won’t enjoy facing what I have over here either!"

Then she thrust her sword toward a certain direction.

She was currently surrounded by fourteen young space beasts.

Fourteen.

The monsters moved with terrifying speed through the darkness, alternating attacks and defenses continuously, never allowing her even the slightest opportunity to recover.

They attacked from every direction.

Claws.

Teeth.

Tails.

Condensed energy blasts.

Every single opening became another assault.

But...

Even if they actually gave her a chance to breathe, what exactly could she even do?

Catch her breath?

There was no air here.

Not even the faint atmospheric traces normally drifting through ordinary cosmic space existed in this place.

The leaking particles escaping planetary atmospheres, the tiny remnants Nexus States and Law Dominators could usually exploit to survive...

None of it existed here.

What else could she do?

Eat?

Restore the flow of blood within her body?

Absorb energy from Pearls since there was absolutely no ambient energy around her?

None of that would be easy.

Because in truth...

Every one of those functions relied upon Heavenly Laws to regulate them.

And those laws were absent here as well.

The fact they could move at all...

Fight...

Speak...

Even think clearly...

All of it was being forcibly sustained using the energy reserves they carried into this realm through the gate eighteen hours ago.

And those reserves were already nearing depletion little by little.

The moment their energy approached exhaustion...

Yes, merely approached it, not even fully depleted...

Their hearts would stop beating.

Their blood would freeze inside their veins.

Their bodies would collapse completely.

Because the laws regulating those biological processes simply did not exist here to maintain them automatically.

At this very moment...

Every heartbeat they experienced was being forced manually through sheer power and will.

"Oh no," Althera suddenly sensed something before sharply pointing in a particular direction. "One of them escaped the repetition loop!"

"Understood!!"

Aser instantly forgot he was supposed to conserve energy.

The moment he sensed a young space beast slipping past him while charging directly toward Blokan, he roared furiously into the darkness.

"Get back here!!"

Swooosh

Aser summoned a planetary bow into his hands.

The massive weapon unfolded with radiant force as he instantly pulled the string backward.

Blazing power condensed around the arrow.

Even within this endless darkness, the arrowhead glowed like a miniature star.

Then he released it.

"....RRAAAAAA!!"

An agonized roar exploded from the darkness ahead.

Then...

Nothing.

No shockwaves spread outward.

No blood scattered.

No corpse appeared.

It looked as though Aser had fired directly into the darkness itself.

As though the abyss had simply swallowed the attack whole.

But that silence did not last long.

Whooosh

Aser shot through the abyssal darkness toward that direction at terrifying speed, the surrounding void twisting around his body as though trying to swallow him whole.

The planetary bow in his hands disappeared back into his spatial ring while he immediately pulled out a serrated metallic disc covered in soul inscriptions before throwing it downward beneath himself.

The spinning disc released faint waves that spread through the darkness like ripples through black water.

The moment Aser sensed the thick blood spreading across his body and drifting around him...

He finally began seeing something.

A crystal.

"Gahh!" Aser instinctively raised his arm to shield his eyes from the overwhelming brightness.

At this moment, Aser resembled an ant standing before a moon...

The crystal was unbelievably massive.

Its size perfectly matched that of a young space beast, a gigantic structure floating silently in the darkness while radiating terrifying pressure in every direction.

Even after the creature had been exhausted inside the Repetition Loop...

Even after endless cycles of battle had worn it down...

The energy contained within the crystal still felt absolutely monstrous.

Pure.

Violent.

Ancient.

Just standing near it made Aser feel as though his body was being crushed beneath invisible pressure.

...These were the responsibilities the four of them had divided among themselves after the first catastrophic battle beside the gate, once they succeeded in dragging the greater beasts deeper into this realm.

Blokan’s task was the most dangerous.

He continuously attacked the three adult space beasts while leading them farther away from the others, or at the very least forcing them to remain separated using the Complementary Law of Reflection.

He could not truly defeat them.

But he could redirect them.

Delay them.

Confuse them.

And in this battlefield, that alone was priceless.

Althera, meanwhile, focused entirely on controlling the young space beasts.

Her personal domain, the Repetition Loop, continuously trapped the monsters inside recurring chains of events and repeated combat sequences that gradually exhausted both their minds and bodies.

Every cycle weakened them further.

Every repeated injury eroded their defenses slightly more.

Every moment spent inside the loop consumed precious energy they could never replenish in this lawless void.

Meanwhile, Aser remained free.

His task was mobility.

Collection.

Interception.

He gathered crystals from slain beasts.

Collected samples of flesh, blood, organs, and anything remotely valuable.

Whenever a young space beast escaped Althera’s loop, he intercepted it personally.

And if a new juvenile beast appeared...

He dragged it directly toward the loop.

There, the creature would become trapped within a repeating vortex of battle and exhaustion until its defenses weakened enough for execution.

After that...

Killing them became dramatically easier.

As for the most difficult position of all...

That unquestionably belonged to Morgana.

Because among the four of them, she was technically the weakest, merely a Seven-Star Soul Mistress.

Because she possessed dozens of soul creatures capable of fighting on multiple fronts simultaneously.

And because her soul sense possessed the greatest range among them all...

A range that expanded even farther within this pure void due to the complete absence of interfering laws and spatial resistance...

Morgana had been assigned responsibility over the corridor’s defensive line itself.

She constantly pushed the majority of nascent space beasts away from the gate so they would not recklessly pile through it and devour Holak in a single bite.

At the same time, she intentionally allowed only a limited number to approach at controlled intervals.

A flow.

A manageable rhythm.

And whenever a young space beast approached her position...

She immediately warned Aser so he could arrive and guide the creature toward Althera’s Repetition Loop.

That was their four-person formation.

Simple.

Brutal.

Efficient.

And thanks to those perfectly divided roles...

They managed to survive for a full eighteen hours inside this impossible realm.

Eighteen hours without natural laws.

Eighteen hours without rest.

Eighteen hours of forcing their own hearts to continue beating through sheer willpower and stored energy.

During that time, Aser alone had already filled thousands of spatial rings with flesh and blood.

Massive spatial sealing containers had also been packed with enormous crystals harvested from the fallen beasts.

The amount of resources collected here in less than a single day could shake entire sectors if revealed publicly.

And thanks to this near-perfect formation...

They should have been capable of remaining here for an entire full day.

Right now, they were capable of—

"Hmm?"

Far away, Morgana suddenly narrowed her eyes.

She had been observing her soul creatures as they forced dozens of cowardly nascent space beasts backward, preventing them from recklessly rushing the corridor gate.

But then...

She sensed something.

Something approaching from the depths of the abyss.

At first, it merely felt distant.

A vague pressure.

Then her expression slowly changed.

Her soul sense immediately focused entirely in that direction, probing deeper and deeper into the darkness.

Her brows furrowed tightly.

And instantly...

Her already pale face became even whiter.

"A nest..." she whispered quietly.

Not a wandering group.

Not scattered beasts.

A nest.

Then her soul force exploded outward as she screamed across the endless darkness:

"A massive nest! Millions of space beasts are approaching, and there are at least twenty adult space beasts among them!!"