Leilin stared at the massive crater before him with vacant eyes, his hands still frozen in the posture he had assumed while casting the spell.
Before him, where the Astral Gate had once stood, there was now nothing but ruins. Terrifying arcs of electricity and other residual radiation still flickered here and there, but the Chip quickly directed them to be extinguished and isolated.
The explosion of the Astral Gate had been devastating, though its severity depended on who was caught in it. Against Leilin, who had already achieved fifth-level enhancement of the Comoin Snake Sovereign's Scales, the shockwaves of the blast couldn't so much as scratch him. Even the area directly behind him had been largely preserved.
But even so, the loss of the Astral Gate—and the coordinates he had previously obtained—still stung.
Setting aside the enormous quantity of Astral Stone required to construct the gate in the first place, at least gathering enough wouldn't be impossible given time. With the Bloodline Warlock Alliance backing him, it was merely a matter of collecting sufficient resources. However, losing the coordinates to the Dream World was a far more significant blow.
"Failed, then…" Leilin let out a long sigh, as if expelling all his lingering frustration in that single breath. When he raised his head again, his eyes had turned calm and steady.
"Lost is lost. Relying on tissue material from an anomalous creature to track down coordinates was always somewhat fanciful thinking. Besides, that bizarre world is far too dangerous for me to explore in my current state…"
Leilin shook his head and gave the command: "Chip! Clean this area 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 a vast, desolate wasteland. Three bizarre suns hung in the sky above, their scorching heat waves rising relentlessly.
The crunch of yellow sand grinding beneath his shoes produced a faint, gritty sound. Leilin looked around in every direction—nothing but wasteland as far as the eye could see. Half-buried beneath a sand dune nearby, the top of some structure jutted out, like the roof of a collapsed building. The surface bore obvious signs of extreme aging, worn down by countless years.
"Chip! Scan!" Leilin picked up a fallen signboard from near his feet. He couldn't read the writing on it, yet it carried a strange sense of familiarity.
The black signboard was surprisingly light in his hand. With even the slightest pressure, it creaked ominously, as if it might crumble into countless fragments at any moment.
The Chip's blue scanning beam swept across it, and the result came back almost instantly.
[Based on carbon-14 dating, estimated age: 21,982 years and 11 months…]
"Something from twenty thousand years ago?" Leilin rubbed his chin, then tossed the signboard aside.
Crack! The black signboard shattered the instant it hit the ground, breaking into countless fragments that crumbled further into fine powder.
"Where exactly am I?" Leilin looked up. The three anomalous suns still blazed overhead, radiating oppressive heat.
The sky above this region held three suns. The leftmost one was an irregular, twisted shape—like a circle that had been wrung and distorted countless times. The middle sun had retained its circular form, but its outer edges were ringed by writhing tentacles that made for a deeply unsettling sight.
As for the rightmost sun, it was a complex polygon, and the light it cast seemed tinged with strange, additional colors.
Leilin turned around and saw his Astral Laboratory standing there in isolation, its door still hanging open. But its surface was visibly aging as well—silver metal plates corroding and flaking away in real time, turning his newly constructed laboratory into something that looked as though it had been abandoned to decay long ago.
"What's going on? The alloy I used for the exterior is supposed to be renowned for its corrosion resistance…"
His gaze swept back and forth, but he couldn't find anything around the laboratory that resembled the castle he knew.
From the look of it, it was as though he and his entire laboratory had been transported wholesale out of the castle.
"Could it be… this is the Dream World? Or did the Astral Gate accident somehow carry me to a different world entirely?"
A flood of hypotheses surged through Leilin's mind in an instant. He took a deep breath and stepped back inside the laboratory.
Bang! He shut the door behind him.
"If this were some other world, I would have felt the sensation of spatial transit. The only world I've ever experienced that could transport me so silently is the Dream World!"
Behind Leilin, the phantom image of the Comoin Snake Sovereign materialized.
The noble Snake Sovereign opened its amber slit-pupiled eyes and scanned the surroundings with a gaze tinged with wariness.
"Let's go!" Leilin yanked the door open once more. The warm glow of the Eternal Fire spilled in, illuminating familiar pathways connecting the Bloodline Laboratory to the other buildings within the castle.
Leilin looked up. The fractured cosmic void characteristic of the Morning Star
He glanced at the laboratory's surface—the signs of aging had completely vanished, as if everything he had just witnessed had been nothing more than a hallucination.
"Master!" At Leilin's mental command, several metal constructs walked over to him.
The Chip instantly interfaced with them, confirming that Leilin was indeed inside the Morning Star Space castle.
"Interesting!" A spark of genuine curiosity flickered in Leilin's eyes.
He considered for a moment, then returned to the laboratory once again.
When he pulled the door open, the desert landscape and its strange, grotesque suns reappeared before him.
But something had changed since his last visit. Slender yellow-green weeds were pushing stubbornly through cracks in the stone, and the collapsed ruins of buildings were now draped in climbing vines, brimming with unexpected vitality. Even in the distance, small shrubs had taken root and were growing with quiet determination.
"The life energy here is much denser than before—as if thousands or even tens of thousands of years have passed!" Leilin narrowed his eyes. The three bizarre suns now cast greenish light downward, making him deeply uncomfortable.
"Chip! Scan!" Returning to the spot where he had discarded the signboard, Leilin found that the black signboard had not shattered at all. It sat exactly where he had left it, and the cracks on its surface were even fainter than before.
[Ding! Based on carbon-14 dating, the item's age is 1,328 years and 7 months…]the Chip reported promptly.
"But last time the analysis showed over twenty thousand years, and the signboard was completely destroyed on the spot…"
Leilin stroked his chin. "This kind of temporal distortion, combined with these bizarre surroundings—it really must be the Dream World. Only this absurd, nightmarish world could produce a phenomenon like this…"
"But… last time I entered as a disembodied consciousness. This time my physical body has entered directly. What does that make this—my real body stepping into someone else's dream?"
"Where exactly is the boundary between reality and illusion?"
The deeper Leilin probed, the more he realized that the Dream World harbored secrets beyond imagining, and that not a single one of its mysteries was something he could solve in his current state.
"And this strange shifting—is it a space-time wormhole? Or the refraction-point effect from the Morphell Spatial Theorem?"
Watching the vines creeping across the laboratory's surface, Leilin stepped inside, closed the door, then pulled it open again—finding himself back in Morning Star Space.
"Designate this area as Special Priority One! Complete lockdown—evacuate all adjacent buildings immediately! Ensure all anti-radiation and anti-contamination runes are inscribed!"
Leilin issued the orders at once.
The metal constructs sprang into action immediately, the commotion even rousing Fleri.
"Darling, what happened?" Fleri stood in a loose nightgown, looking groggy.
"It's nothing—just an experiment that ran into complications. Radiation contamination is increasing. You should relocate, get as far away from this castle as possible…"
Leilin stepped forward and took Fleri's hand in a comforting gesture.
He didn't fully understand the situation yet, but it was clear that after the explosion, his Astral Laboratory had undergone an even more mysterious transformation—it had become a bridge connecting this world to the Dream World. Every time he passed through, a spatial shift occurred. This phenomenon immediately captivated Leilin.
Moreover, the ability to travel to another world without expelling any energy—if other Wizards learned of this, they would surely lose their minds with envy.
Thus, using the excuse of a failed experiment and leaking radiation contamination to seal off the area was entirely necessary.
Still, the root cause of it all remained a puzzle.
"Was it the owl's feathers? The explosion of the Astral Gate? Or did both factors interact to produce this even stranger transformation…"
Leilin rubbed his chin.
Regardless, this accident was a stroke of fortune. Not only had he recovered the coordinates to the Dream World, but he now had a channel that could connect the two worlds at will.
"However, this can't last forever!"
Leilin recalled a particular spatial theory. Right now, the
"That's all the more reason exploration must be accelerated!"
Leilin's heart burned with fervor.
The Dream World—the most mysterious and unfathomable of all worlds, one that had once invaded the ancient Wizard civilization. Its very existence defied categorization: neither wholly material nor wholly immaterial, born from the collective dreams of all sentient beings, yet possessing power of extraordinary magnitude.
Setting everything else aside, if he could locate the dream of even one ancient Rule Wizard and obtain that Wizard's understanding and comprehension of the Laws—that alone would be an incalculable treasure.
Before Leilin's eyes, a vast treasure vault had revealed itself.