Early the next morning, before daylight had broken.
Jared stood by theke and watched the dark sapphire water rise and fall in the morning wind.
Overhead, the aurora had already faded out of that deep blue-violet it wore at night. It had turned back into that pale color again, like an old strip of silk washed so many times all the richness had been worn out of it, drifting across the sky without a sound.
Gwendolyn stood beside him. She had changed clothes for today.
Instead of the in white dress, she wore a close-fitting ice-blue diving suit that traced every line of her lean, long frame.
Her long hair had been tied high and fixed in ce with the white jade hairpin. It left her pale neck and the clean lines of her corbones fully exposed.
In her hand, she held a pearl the size of a fist. A dim blue glow spilled from it.
The light wasn''t harsh, but it had a sharp, prating quality to it, like it could shine all the way down to the deepest part of theke.
"This is the waterward pearl."
She handed the pearl to Jared. "Keep it in your mouth, and you''ll be able to breathe freely underwater. Voidreturn Lake is bottomless. The farther down you go, the greater the pressure gets, and a normal cultivator''s protective qi won''t hold for long."
"I don''t need this. I can move in and out of the open sea whenever I want..." Jared didn''t think he''d have any use for the waterward pearl.
He''d stayed in the ocean before. What was one littleke supposed to be?
"The sea you''ve been in was just an ordinary sea. This is Voidreturn Lake. It isn''t something an ordinary sea canpare to. If you want to show off and insist on not taking it, then fine, I don''t have to give it to you." Gwendolyn made a move to take the waterward pearl back.
"In that case, I''d better take it."
Jared snatched the waterward pearl in one grab.
It felt icy in his hand, its surface smooth as a mirror.
He did as she said and put the pearl into his mouth. A cool current rushed out of it at
once, slid down his throat, and poured into his lungs.
His whole body seemed to clear up from the inside out.
"Stay close to me." After saying that, Gwendolyn leaped into theke.
The way she entered the water was so clean and graceful she looked like a waterbird returning home. Not even a ssh rose.
She slipped soundlessly into the dark sapphireke and vanished beneath it.
Jared drew in a deep breath and jumped in right behind her.
The instant he hit the water, the waterward pearl took effect.
A thin blue film spread over his body and sealed theke water away from him.
Thatyer wrapped him like an invisible cuirass, wiping out every bit of pressure. The water was much colder than he had expected.
Even with the waterward pearl protecting him, that chill still reached him, cutting straight through to the bone.
It wasn''t just cold water. It was an ancient cold, steeped in countless years, as if thiske had never once known warmth since the world first began.
With that biting cold pressing in on him, Jared was suddenly d he had taken the waterward pearl after all.
Gwendolyn was not far ahead of him. In the water, her ice-blue suit almost disappeared into the dark around her. Only the white jade hairpin holding up her hair gave off a faint glow, like amp showing him the way.
One in front and one behind, the two of them kept diving toward the depths of theke.
At first, there was still light.
The aurora overhead and the Worldtree''s golden radiance spilled down through the surface and turned into swaying pirs of me in the water, like holy radiance falling from a cathedral ceiling.
But the deeper they went, the dimmer that light became, weaker and weaker.
Before long, there was nothing left around them but pure darkness. He wouldn''t have been able to see his own fingers in front of his face.
Jared could only follow the glow of Gwendolyn''s white jade hairpin to keep his bearings.
Then the water around them began to change.
The water around them stopped feeling like ordinaryke water.
It turned into something thicker, heavier, more like a dense liquid he had to force his way through, as if he were swimming in ck ink.
The blue membrane cast by the waterward pearl started giving off a faint sizzling sound inside that heavy liquid, like it was bearing down under massive pressure.
"We''re almost at Voidreach''s territory."
Gwendolyn''s voice suddenly sounded right beside Jared''s ear, clear as if she were speaking to him face-to-face.
She was using mindborne speech.
The moment her words ended, Jared caught something ahead of him shifting.
It was the faintest tremor,ing up from deep under thekebed, passing through
the thick liquid and into his body.
It was so slight it was almost impossible to notice.
But the force packed inside it made Jared''s heart m once against his chest.
It was a heartbeat.
A heart so huge it was hard to even picture it was beating in the depths below, slow
and steady, each pulse carrying impossible weight.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Every beat made theke water quiver.
Every beat made the blood in Jared''s body vibrate with it.
"It''s awake."
Something tightened in Gwendolyn''s voice.
In the darkness ahead, two clusters of golden radiance came on.
At first they were tiny, like two distant stars.
But they kept growing. Brighter and bigger, until they looked like two suns rising out of the ck.
When those two lights had grownrge enough to throw illumination across several hundred yards around them, Jared finally saw what he was looking at.
Eyes.
Voidreach''s eyes.
Those golden eyes hung in the darkness, each one dozens of yards across, bigger than any building Jared had ever seen.
There was nothing in those golden
pupils. No ripple of feeling, only a
kind of indifference that seemed
older than time itself, as if they were
looking at two ants that had wandered into a giant beast''s nest.
And behind those eyes, the outline of Return to the Void began to emerge.
It was too vast. So vast his field of vision couldn''t hold it.
All Jared could see were patches of dark sapphire scales. Each one was the size of a house, and under the golden light they threw off a deep, Cold sheen.
In the gaps between the scales, dark red light flowed through, like molten fire surging inside cracks in stone.
Return to the Void''s body twisted and coiled on, stretching into the deeper darkness
at the bottom of theke, with no end in sight.
"Don''t be afraid," Gwendolyn''s mindborne speech sounded in Jared''s ear again. "It won''t harm us. But it will... test us."
A test?
Before Jared could react, one of Return to the Void''s eyes shifted slightly, and that golden gaze fell on him.
It came down on him like a mountain. Even his soul seemed to shake under it.
It wasn''t pressure. It was something deeper than that.
Under that gaze, there was nowhere to hide. Every secret he carried looked stripped
bare, as if he had been seen through from the inside out.
Voidreach''s gaze stayed on him for three breaths.
Then it looked away.
Those golden eyes slowly closed.
At the same time, a deep rumble rolled up from the bottom of theke, like the earth
itself groaning.
The rumble grew louder. Then closer.
The wholeke started shaking violently.
Jared felt thekebed under his feet splitting open.
A crack spread out from the ce where Voidreach slumbers, ripping to both sides.
It kept widening. It kept driving deeper.
Blinding white light poured out of the crack.
It wasn''t sunlight, and it wasn''t an aurora either. It was something
older, more primal, like the fir
strand of light when heaven and earth first opened.
"Now!" Gwendolyn grabbed Jared by the wrist and dragged him straight toward the
crack.