Leylin stared blankly at the crater before him, his hands still frozen in the posture he had assumed while casting the spell.
Where the Astral Gate had once stood, only a field of wreckage remained. Terrifying arcs of electricity and other radiation still flickered here and there, quickly suppressed and isolated by Chip's commands.
The Astral Gate's detonation had been devastating, but its severity depended on the target. Against Leylin, whose Comorin Scales had already reached the fifth-stage reinforcement, the shockwaves could not so much as scratch him — the blast had even left the area behind him completely unscathed.
Still, the loss of the Astral Gate and the coordinates he had previously obtained stung.
Setting aside the enormous quantity of Astral Stones required to construct the gate — with the Bloodline Warlock Alliance backing him, Leylin could gather enough given sufficient time — the loss of the Dream World coordinates was a significant blow.
"Failed, then..." Leylin sighed, seemingly expelling all his frustration and other negative emotions. When he raised his head again, his eyes had turned completely calm.
"Losing the Dream World coordinates is what it is. Relying on a piece of tissue from some aberrant creature to pinpoint the coordinates was always a bit far-fetched. Besides, that bizarre world is far too powerful for me to explore at my current level..."
Leylin shook his head and ordered, "Chip, clean this place up!"
He turned and walked out of the laboratory, but as he pulled open the door, his pupils contracted sharply.
"This is...?" Before him stretched an enormous desert. Three oddly-shaped suns hung in the sky, their searing waves of heat continuously rising.
Shh-shh! The yellow sand ground beneath his shoe soles with a faint rasping sound. Leylin looked around in every direction — desert as far as the eye could see. Half the top of a structure protruded from beneath a sand dune, like the upper floors of a collapsed building. The surface showed unmistakable signs of aging, eroded by who knew how long of exposure to the elements.
"Chip! Scan!" Leylin picked up a signboard that had fallen near his feet. The text on it was illegible to him, yet it carried a faint sense of familiarity.
The black signboard was light in his hand; a slight squeeze and it groaned in protest, threatening to shatter into countless fragments at any moment.
Chip's blue scanning light swept across it and delivered an instant conclusion.
【Carbon-14 dating estimate: 21,982 years, 11 months...】
"Something from over twenty thousand years ago?" Leylin rubbed his chin and casually tossed the signboard aside.
Crack! The pitch-black signboard hit the ground and immediately crumbled into a shower of fragments, some even reducing directly to powder.
"What exactly is this place?" Leylin looked up. The three eerie suns still radiated their blistering heat.
In the sky above this region, there were indeed three suns. The leftmost one was an irregular, twisted shape, like a circle that had been wrung many times over. The middle sun still retained its round shape, but its perimeter bristled with countless tentacle-like protrusions that were deeply unsettling.
As for the rightmost sun, it was a complex polygon, and the light it cast seemed tinged with hues of some other color.
Leylin turned around and saw his Astral Laboratory standing alone, its door still open, though its surface was also aging rapidly.
Sheets of silvery metal corroded and flaked away moment by moment, transforming his newly built laboratory into something that looked as though it had deteriorated to the point of abandonment.
"What's going on? The metal I used for the laboratory's exterior was a corrosion-resistant alloy, renowned for its durability..."
Leylin's gaze swept back and forth, but he could not find anything around the laboratory that bore any resemblance to his previous castle.
The way things looked, it was as if he had somehow transported his entire laboratory through the castle.
"Could it be... that this is the Dream World? Or did an accident with the Star Gate send me to some other world?"
A flood of hypotheses flashed through Leylin's mind in an instant. He took a deep breath and stepped back into the laboratory.
Bang! He slammed the door shut.
"If I had been transported to some other world, I would certainly have felt the sensation of spatial transit. The only place I've ever experienced that could take me away without the slightest sound or sensation is one — the Dream World!"
A phantom silhouette of the Comorin Snake Emperor materialized behind Leylin.
The noble Comorin Snake Emperor opened its amber, slit-pupiled eyes and swept a wary gaze across its surroundings.
"Come on!" Leylin yanked the door open once more. The light of the Eternal Flame poured down around him, illuminating a network of small paths that connected the Bloodline Laboratory to other structures within the castle.
Leylin raised his head. The fractured, cosmic void that was the hallmark of Morning Star Space immediately filled his vision.
He looked again at the surface of the laboratory. Those signs of aging had long since vanished, as though everything he had seen before had been nothing more than an illusion.
"Master!" At Leylin's mental command, several metal golems materialized before him.
The Chip instantly interfaced with the golems and received all of their data, confirming that Leylin was indeed within the castle of his Morning Star Space.
"Interesting!" A glint of keen fascination surfaced in Leylin's eyes.