The being beyond the prison moved.
Reality did not simply crack, nor did it fracture along its established fault lines. It broke. It was a clean, catastrophic structural failure, like reinforced glass shattering beneath the blow of an absolute, unstoppable hammer.
The perfect black line spanning the width of the heavens widened by a single, agonizing inch. That single inch nearly brought about the total liquidation of the physical world.
### The Weight of the Primordial
Across the continent, mountain ranges collapsed into heaps of gravel. Mighty rivers instantly reversed their flow, their waters churning backward in defiance of gravity, while the local space-time fabric folded inward like crushed silk. Below the floating plaza, the academy's ancient foundations—built to withstand centuries of high-tier magical warfare—groaned under a localized gravitational pressure that should not have existed under any known law of physics.
