The light closed around him.
Not physically. He was still standing on the platform, still in contact with the gate's surface through his palm, still in a body with weight and temperature and the three-beat rhythm of two heartbeats and a mountain's pulse. None of that changed. What changed was the space he was occupying, which was no longer only the platform.
The gate had created the condition Xu Ling had described, and the condition existed in the space that overlapped with the platform rather than replacing it. He was in two places simultaneously: the physical platform of the mountain's interior zone, and the space the gate had constructed for the assessment.
He looked at what the space contained.
It was not a monster. It was not a cultivator. It was not a mirror version of himself or a will construct or any classification he had encountered in the deep zone's five conceptual encounters.
It was a situation.
