Daniel stepped onto the final stair, and suddenly the space collapsed without any warning or gradual change. There was no explosion, no light, no grand transition or anything like that. There was only a moment of standing… and then, in the next moment, standing itself lost its meaning.
He appeared in a space that could not really be called ground.
The surface beneath his feet was constantly changing, sometimes cracked stone, sometimes ash, sometimes something like the compressed bones of a dead world.
There was no sky, yet there was no emptiness above him either. Layers of dark light, broken fragments of time, and shadows that flowed like water moved up and down. Everything was in motion, but nothing had a destination.
"The further I go, the weirder this Pagoda gets," he muttered to himself. This Pagoda was very different from the Pagoda of Death. There, the Pagoda system had been built in a much more orderly way.
