"Martha! My dear Martha! Is that you?"
Jamos's voice was filled with emotion as he gently walked up to the woman in the black dress, seemingly about to reach out and turn her by the shoulders.
Back on the carriage, Leilin's eyes shifted slightly, but he made no move to stop him.
The situation was very strange, and he needed someone to scout ahead.
Jamos applied a gentle force, and the woman in the black dress's body turned toward him.
What he saw was a face with no features — only a black vortex where a face should have been.
Whoosh! With a look of terror frozen on his face, Jamos's entire body was stretched into a thin black thread, twisting and spiraling continuously before being swallowed into the vortex on the woman's face.
The whole process was extremely swift — almost completed in the instant Leilin was about to act — yet it played out with startling clarity. Leilin could still vividly recall how Jamos had been drawn out, little by little, into a thread over a dozen meters long before being dragged into the vortex on the woman's face.
This sensation of time distortion made Leilin nauseous enough to retch.
And his heart sank immediately.
"This is no mere spirit entity! It's something far more advanced and terrifying — a higher-dimensional existence I can't yet comprehend…"
In that instant, Leilin recalled records he had read in ancient texts archived in the Chip. In the primordial era, battles between two high-ranking Wizards could sometimes not only destroy land and sea but even rupture the barriers of time and space, causing phenomena of dimensional and temporal dislocation.
And in such places, many bizarre and grotesque beings were often born.
Some of these beings were extremely weak — even a third-tier apprentice could easily destroy them — while others were so aberrant as to be horrifying, capable of extinguishing the radiance of a Morning Star Wizard and sending the stars in the sky plummeting from the heavens!
"This woman in black dress is merely a manifestation. Once certain conditions are met, the vortex on her face activates and devours anything within reach…"
Leilin reached his conclusion in an instant: "My strength right now is far too feeble, and this manifestation before me is clearly not of the weakest variety. Without any concrete information, fighting such a manifestation head-on would be foolish. Run!"
In the next instant, his figure dissolved into black mist and vanished from midair.
A flash of dark light appeared in the distance, and Leilin's silhouette materialized several hundred meters away, shooting outward in a black arc.
"Woo woo!"
But immediately, the woman's shrill wailing rang out in Leilin's ears, its pitch even more piercing than before.
Leilin was stunned to discover that his direction had been eerily reversed — he was now hurtling straight toward the woman in the black dress.
Crack!
The woman rose to her feet, splitting apart from the crown of her head downward into two halves, enormous razor-sharp teeth bared along the seam, her entire body transformed into a colossal gaping maw.
Boom! The titanic mouth clamped shut with a thunderous crack, and a vast wall of darkness swept in to engulf everything.
……
It felt as though he had plummeted from an impossibly great height and slammed into the ground.
Leilin's entire body shuddered as he regained consciousness.
"Just now? That woman swallowed me!" The final image had been far too shocking — the black-dressed woman's maw had expanded without limit, ultimately swallowing heaven and earth itself. Even a Morning Star Wizard likely couldn't achieve something like that.
"Where... where am I?"
Leilin rubbed his head and stood up, surveying his surroundings.
Dim, cramped, with corners thick with cobwebs, not a single piece of furniture in sight — not even a window or a door.
It looked exactly like a sealed, claustrophobic basement.
Beside Leilin, Wilin and Jenny lay on the ground as well, eyes tightly shut. They appeared to have fallen unconscious and would need a considerable amount of time before they could wake.
"A deeper layer of illusion!!!" Leilin's expression turned deadly serious.
"If the three-way crossroads I saw at the very beginning was the outermost layer of illusion, and the woman in the black dress was a deeper one, then this place — this is the third layer!"
Illusions! And powers related to dreams — Leilin didn't have much experience with either. But according to legend, in the primordial age, the Wizard World had once conquered a vast world whose experts were all masters of dream and illusion arts. Through the power of dreams, they could accomplish virtually anything with ease, and were even worshipped as gods by the ignorant inhabitants of other planes!
And from the fragmentary passages in ancient texts, Leilin knew that the deeper the layer of illusion, the harder it was to escape.
"I have to get out of here! Three layers of illusion — that's already incredibly dangerous!"
Black flames ignited instantly in Leilin's palm. "Shadowfire Ball!"
The black fireball slammed into a corner of the basement, instantly blasting open a deep, yawning hole.
"First, I need to understand the basic structure of this illusion realm!" Leilin rubbed his chin. For this kind of power, he had no better method than to first comprehend it, then look for a way out.
Leilin jumped down into the dark cavern...
"The 193rd time! I'm still back here!" Leilin looked down at Janey and Weilin, still unconscious on the ground, his expression exceptionally grim.
"Through experimentation, I've already figured out the approximate triune structure of this place. Sure enough, with each deeper layer of the illusion, the triune structure becomes more unstable, until it finally collapses..."
If the triune structure here collapsed, there were only two possibilities: falling into an even deeper layer of illusion, or his soul being unable to withstand it and being directly devoured by the illusion's master!
"I've tried everywhere else. This place is all that's left!"