Adin could not stop now.

  The abyss of darkness that pierced vertically beneath Mimos's feet was terror itself. It was a vast void that devoured every trace of existence, a grotesque force that paralyzed the reason of anyone who dared to face it.

  He had to see the end of that abyss. Following the current of unpleasant, lukewarm air being sucked into the hole, Adin's gaze sank deep.

  His heartbeat, beyond his control, thrashed sharply against his ears.

  Adin took the Sollet from his pocket and scattered it gently into the air.

  Sshhh...!

  The silver powder danced elegantly as it caught the artificial light. The Sollet emitted a light dozens of times more intense than usual as it was drawn into the dark hole.

  In that moment, a flash erupted.

  Flash—

  For a heartbeat, the gravity of the ground inverted. Adin's body passed through the marble floor of the terrace and began to be sucked uncontrollably into the hole beneath.

  "Shooo—"

  It was a massive subterranean interior.

  The vertical space, stretching beyond sight, was filled with a grotesque resonance. A tremendous suction pulled Adin's entire body downward. The darkness surrounding him was not merely an absence of light; it pressed against him with a heavy weight, as if trying to erase the very form of all that existed.

  Adin surrendered his body to a sensation that felt as if time had stopped.

  It was the exact same silence he had felt in the past when he used the Sollet to hide in the depths of time while fleeing Chairman Jin with Nar. It matched that familiar feeling perfectly. This was not Mimos's shadow, but a sense of depth—or perhaps height—of 'stagnant time' opened through Mimos as a medium.

  Adin floated in the void.

  His falling body came to a halt at a certain point. Beyond the walls where up and down could no longer be discerned, a familiar landscape unfolded. Outside the transparent wall, the Monolith—the symbol of Ivory—was visible. There, the time of countless people flowed like a river from one point to another.

  Within that flow, parts of those times—flashes, instants, moments—were being slowly drawn into this place.

  The peaceful daily lives people enjoyed, fleeting joys, fragments of trivial memories... they became invisible threads of yarn, entering without anyone noticing. The moment they touched the center of the cylinder, they erupted in blue flames and burned away without a trace.

  Sizzle—, Crackle.

  Incineration.

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  It was clearly an incineration. Adin stood inside a massive furnace that extracted the energy of flowing time and returned it to nothingness. Layers existed due to the differences in the time that had flowed in, but these were moments that could never combine or flow.

  "What on earth..."

  "What... is this place?"

  "Adin? Adin..?"

  A sharp voice pierced his eardrum.

  The moment Mimos's hand touched his shoulder, the darkness of the giant shadow shattered like glass. Adin stumbled, regaining the sensation of the cold terrace. The Mimos before him still wore the smile of a harmless gentleman, asking if he was alright, but Adin could not offer any answer.

  As if shaking off the gaze he felt behind his back, Adin hurried back to his room.

  The silence in the room was chilling.

  Adin sat on the edge of the bed, gasping for breath. The afterimage of that grotesque underground space stretching into Mimos's shadow, witnessed through the Sollet, remained burned onto his retinas. It was no mere hallucination.

  The unpleasant, heavy pressure remaining at his fingertips made him feel as though he had just peeked into the world's most secret chamber.

  Adin began to piece together the scattered fragments in his mind.

  What was that place...?

  Originally, time flows like a river. The gravity of the universe that marches toward aging and death without a single exception. It is a sublime providence that no living being can defy.

  But Ivory is now directly defying that providence.

  This is a refined white paradise where there is neither death nor the decay of aging. How did they stop the river of time? Someone must have found the answer in that terrible pressure emitted by 'stagnant time.'

  At that moment, Adin remembered the instants that screamed and burned inside that cylinder.

  Moments of extreme pain or ecstatic rapture are bound to hold concentrated energy, as if time has subjectively stopped. Surely, the system someone created was secretly sucking in those thick, viscous instants from all over the world. And they were being stacked layer by layer, creating a massive vertical axis within the shell known as Mimos.

  It was the principle of a giant reservoir.

  Even flowing water, when gathered in massive quantities in one place to form great depth, creates pressure at the bottom that crushes and halts all surrounding flow. The tens of thousands of years of stagnant time piled beneath Mimos's feet had driven the time axis of all of Ivory into the ground with that heavy pressure.

  Yes...!

  In the end, Mimos's vertical shadow is an anchor...!

  A pitch-black, heavy anchor that binds us to a narrow segment called the 'present' so that we do not drift away toward the end of time—toward destruction. As long as that anchor holds, people will enjoy a peace that does not age, but in exchange, someone's precious life was being incessantly incinerated inside the anchor to add to its weight.

  I stared at myself in the mirror, my hands trembling.

  This paradise was a massive state of stasis maintained by sacrificing someone's moments.

  And I had become the sole survivor who witnessed the deepest darkness of that anchor.

  Who on earth did this, and for what purpose?

  Who was the one who designed this massive stasis? Was the hand that decided to support the weight of this paradise by incinerating the moments of others an act of mercy to save us from ruin, or a cruel obsession to lock us in an eternal prison?

  Adin stared at his pale face in the mirror.

  If someone had dropped this foul anchor to prevent the downfall of humanity, should I call him an enemy or a savior? If this massive deception is the only lifeline keeping us alive, is my act of digging for the truth justice, or the beginning of another destruction?

  He had to know.

  He could not yet tell if the designer was an ally or a foe. But one thing was certain: the terror that his own existence might already be recorded upon this elaborate blueprint drawn by an invisible hand.

  Why did he allow me this glimpse.. Why was I the only one to see this vertical abyss through the Sollet...

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