The corridor ended not with a door, but with a simple step up into open space.
Lin Tian took that step, and the world opened around him.
He stood on a circular platform of seamless black stone, polished to a mirror finish. It floated in the center of a chamber so vast its walls were lost in a haze of soft, blue-white light. Above, below, and all around, points of light shimmered like stars caught in a slow, eternal dance. It was less a room and more a pocket of captured night sky, the air cool and tasting of ozone and old, old power.
In the very center of the platform, suspended in mid-air without any visible support, was the source of that power.
