Adin stared at the Mimos from a distance.

  The chilling equations from Yan’s library echoed in his mind. Those cold hypotheses, once tossed out with indifference, were no longer mere theories. They had become a noose tightening around his throat.

  The realization that the serenity they enjoyed was anchored in someone else’s cremated future settled in his chest. It was a heavy, nauseating dissonance.

  He had to see it.

  The pressure to witness this ominous truth before humanity was buried forever in a vast gutter constricted his breath.

  Adin approached the Mimos standing at the edge of the plaza.

  Usually sensitive to his surroundings, the Mimos was currently engaged in a heated discussion with a passing Node. It was oblivious to Adin’s approach.

  Veiling himself from the creature's gaze, Adin pressed his body against the edge of the grotesque sunflower shadow stretching at its feet.

  Now was the moment.

  Adin took a pinch of Solet—the finest powder—from his pocket and scattered it into the air.

  The grains of Solet shimmered with a faint light, resonating with the Mimos’s shadow for a fleeting heartbeat. As Adin stepped forward, the solid ground transformed into a pit of pitch-black darkness.

  It snatched him downward.

  A violent roar erupted.

  The sound of air being severed followed as his body began to plummet into a vertical void.

  To his surprise, the initial darkness was smooth. The air at the entrance was cool, and Adin’s body sliced through the empty space as if he had become a weightless sheet of paper.

  This much was familiar. It was the same sensation he had felt during his first brief entry.

  Just as he began to enjoy the speed, thinking it was manageable, the density of the environment shifted without warning.

  Viscous. Adhesive.

  The space was no longer gaseous. As he descended, the particles of darkness turned into a thick syrup, clinging to his entire body.

  Every time he flailed his limbs, a tar-like viscosity shackled his muscles. His descent slowed agonizingly, the weight of the darkness pressing down on him with crushing force.

  "Ugh... my body is too heavy!"

  He screamed instinctively. "It’s like something is pulling me from below!"

  But even his voice was swallowed whole by the sticky gloom.

  The darkness then evolved beyond liquid into coarse, jagged particles.

  Gritting. Gnashing. Scraping.

  In the mid-section of the fall, the ‘Ashes of Time’ Yan had spoken of manifested as sharp physical entities. They raked across Adin’s skin without mercy.

  With every breath, the fine ash invaded his windpipe and deep into his lungs, carving them from the inside. A thick, metallic taste of blood welled up in his mouth.

  His lungs felt as if they were being incinerated. He could not breathe.

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  At the peak of his agony, the space pushed Adin to his absolute limit.

  The surrounding pressure twisted unnaturally as he entered the ‘Knot of Gravity’—a section where spacetime itself spiraled like a tightened cord.

  Cracking. Splintering.

  Adin’s shoulders and spine began to bend at angles physically impossible for a human frame.

  His internal organs clung to the velocity of the present, while the gravity surging from below forcibly dragged the future’s time. It was attempting to tear his body apart.

  "My body... it’s twisting!"

  A piercing tinnitus, like the screeching of metal, erupted in his ears as his cranial pressure hit its ceiling. As his vision flickered with the color of blood, Adin lost all resistance.

  His consciousness faded into a cold void.

  Drip. Drip.

  In the gap of frozen time, only the rhythmic sound of cold droplets hitting the floor echoed hollowly.

  A blade-like wind brushed his cheek. Only after a silence that felt like both an instant and an eternity did the fragments of his senses begin to piece themselves back together.

  The chill against his skin pulled him back to consciousness.

  His mouth was still filled with a thick, metallic fluid. Every bone in his body ached as if it had been shattered and fused back together.

  Adin pushed himself up with trembling hands.

  The ground was covered in the debris of incinerated time. Black dust whispered soundlessly with every movement.

  Adin looked up.

  The vertical pillar of darkness stretched infinitely upward, still weighing down the city with its overwhelming gravity.

  But his gaze stopped elsewhere: at a single shadow curving smoothly beside that massive vertical column.

  It was not a jagged crack.

  To add even greater force to the vertically plunging gravity, time had been artfully warped into a sleek, 'Curved Path of Time.'

  This was the visual proof of Yan’s hypothesis.

  Like a giant slide, or a bowstring drawn to its limit to concentrate power, the path stretched toward the deeper reaches of the abyss in a graceful arc.

  It did not lie flat like a common shadow. It flowed through the air to assist the vertical pressure, creating a grotesque current of gravity.

  "So this is it..." Adin whispered. "Another path of gravity made by slightly bending time."

  Adin stared at the strange pulsation generated by that smooth curve.

  To expand the overwhelming force falling vertically, an invisible architect had hidden this second entity of power deep beneath the abyss.

  Adin’s Solet emitted a low hum, synchronizing with this new path.

  He stepped cautiously onto the sleek darkness, his feet carrying the cold dampness of the floor.

  The sensation was peculiar.

  It did not feel like walking on a rough surface, but rather like gliding over solid, frozen black glass.

  This path was the essence of the 'Curved Time' Yan had described. Vertical gravity is immense, but if it only pours down in a straight line, it eventually strikes the floor and scatters.

  The curve was different.

  Yan had said it: it is not the straight line, but the curvature that maximizes power.

  By rotating the pouring time along this gentle arc, the architect amplified the gravity, creating a perpetual, massive acceleration.

  Adin walked deeper into the inner side of that elegant curve.

  The arc was so gradual and smooth that he could not tell if he was veering sideways or walking upside down. He felt as though he were swimming silently through a graceful black river.

  The sound of his footsteps on the ash-covered floor was muffled here.

  He stopped for a moment to find a rhythm for his breath.

  His ragged gasps reflected off the curved walls, circling his ears. The air was unnervingly stagnant. There was no wind, yet the texture of the air against his skin held a sharp pressure, like a bowstring pulled taut.

  Drip. Drop.

  From somewhere deep in the abyss, the sound of unidentified droplets echoed.

  The intervals were so long that the time between one drop and the next felt endless. Even sound could not maintain its natural speed under the weight of gravity here.

  "Can I... even go back now?"

  A sudden fear gripped him as he turned to look behind.

  There was nothing.

  The path he had walked, the floor he had been slammed onto, the vertical pillar of darkness—all were gone.

  Only pitch-black gloom and a silence that pressed against his eardrums remained. The weight of the atmospheric pressure as he turned was like an invisible hand pushing against his chest.

  The past no longer existed.

  There was no choice but to follow this smooth curve forward.

  Adin swallowed hard, his throat dry and burning, but he could not stop.

  Whatever awaited at the end of this elegant arc was the truth he had to face.