Chapter 944 — The Eye of the Storm
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
In a flash, a host of questions and conjectures about the Eternal Storm flooded Gaoyang's mind, and before he could open his mouth to question Metzen about any of it, she had already made several consecutive climbs—and under her powerful arcane control, the dragon's vast silhouette pierced through the thick cloud layers, through the invisible arcane boundary lines, through the layer of static arcane equilibrium so familiar to humankind...
"We've entered the turbulence layer," Metzen's voice came suddenly from ahead.
Gaoyang instinctively walked a few steps toward the edge of the dragon's back and gazed out over this atmospheric space still so unfamiliar to humanity. He saw that the endless sea of clouds had already fallen far below the dragon's wings, becoming a vast expanse of white, while the earth and the ocean were shrouded in that gauze-like mist, their boundaries and details blurred. He cast his gaze around, and all he saw was a sky that looked clear and bright, with slanting sunlight streaming down from above the cloud sea.
At first glance, this place did not seem as dangerous and chaotic as he had imagined.
Yet very quickly, he noticed that a great many abnormal halos were floating around Metzen's enormous body—layer upon layer of faint light was being kindled out of thin air at the edges of her wings, forming ring after ring of ripples along the boundary of her magical shield and spreading everywhere through the air, as though the dragon were soaring through an ocean that had been invisible all along, an ocean stirred by some external force, so that its "waves" were made manifest and became those anomalous halos.
Gaoyang was certain that no such phenomenon had occurred at all while Metzen was flying through the static arcane equilibrium layer!
Amber, meanwhile, had raised a hand to her brow and was gazing at the distant spectacle. She seemed not to have noticed the halos around Metzen, and merely marveled at the openness and grandeur of the place: "Whoa—this place... this place is so vast it's almost frightening... It feels like one step out there and you'd melt into the sky forever..."
"Unfortunately, for humans, one step out there would only mean a fall back to earth," said Virodai, who had scarcely spoken until now, breaking her silence at last; it seemed this vast, lofty sky had drawn her attention too. She rose from where she had been sitting all along and swept her gaze across the distance. "...It's more 'calm' here than I expected. I had thought the turbulence layer would be a far more violent place."
"As a matter of fact, outside my protective barrier, the air currents and the arcane flows really are violent—it's just that the eye can't see them," Metzen said. "Did you notice those halos at the edges of my wings? That's the arcane power of the turbulence layer scouring against my barrier. From the top of the static equilibrium layer upward, the arcane density grows higher than it is near the surface, but it also becomes harder to control—and the most dangerous factor of all is that every turbulence is 'invisible.' Just like the scene before you now: it looks perfectly calm, but in truth turbulence is everywhere, and it will only show itself when an outsider slams into it headlong and is burned into a torch by the arcane power."
Amber thought it over and delivered her heartfelt assessment: "Mother of gods..."
Gaosong's thoughts, however, drifted of their own accord toward a direction that might seem strange to others: "If the arcane energy level grows stronger the higher you go in the atmosphere... then wouldn't the 'star-world' beyond the atmosphere have the strongest arcane environment of all?"
Metzen was silent for a few seconds, then shook her head. "That I couldn't say... Between the stars... who knows what it's like between the stars?"