Vast. Twisted. Chaotic.
That was how the gods would describe the space they currently occupied.
Moments ago they had been fighting the Goddess of Magic and her divine chosen. Yet in the blink of an eye everything around them changed.
No longer were there familiar blue skies and white clouds, nor the familiar land of Wang Yang below, only the lonely, familiar stretch of Colchis Island hung isolated in this alien expanse.
Yes. After repeated probing and confirmation, Zeus and the other gods had to admit, helplessly, that just now they had all been pulled into another space in an instant.
To them this place was terrifying and unfamiliar.
It was a boundless place of chaos; in every direction the eye could not find an end. The vastness contained almost nothing, and there was no gravity.
The absolute lack of reference points made it almost impossible to tell which way was which.
Worse still were the time-space storms that raged through this space.
Twisted time and space were everywhere; vortices of time and space could appear at any time in any location. Even divine bodies could only barely resist that terrible distortion.
Most terrifying of all, in this realm the gods could not sense the existence of their own divine domains, in other words, they could not call upon the powers of heaven and earth afforded by their divinity.
It was as if an administrator with root privileges on one server had stepped into another server, his admin rights were completely void.
That meant every move, whether offense or defense, had to exhaust their own power.
And the energy in this world was wildly violent and chaotic, nearly impossible to harness, as if the universe's disorder had all concentrated here.
Though the gods did not know where they were, Alaric was unusually familiar with it.
This was the Sea of Chaos.
If a world is an egg formed by the convergence of forces of order, then the Sea of Chaos is the discarded chaos thrown outside the shell, wrapping the egg's exterior yet utterly distinct from it.
But whatever from within the egg enters into that chaos has no exception, it perishes.
As ruler of the Greek pantheon, Zeus had been through countless wars; his throne had not been inherited lightly but taken with blood and fire, the reward of innumerable battles.
Yet not even a battle-tested deity like him had ever seen this scene.
What kind of method could drag so many gods at once into a strange world?
Had some outer godly system invaded?
Finally, from the human mage before him and the goddess behind that resembled one who controlled everything with a serene face, Zeus understood.
It must be their trick.
"So this is your move? Human?" the God-King snarled.
"Ah, you guessed right," Alaric replied politely with a nod. "Welcome to the Sea of Chaos, my world. My Reality Marble."
Reality Marble, the magic that manifests the caster's inner imagined landscape.
Once activated, this magic transforms the surrounding space into a completely different scenery.
It is a subtype of conceptual manifestation: the caster's inner world is concretely shaped and invades reality as a boundary.
Zeus did not know the term "Reality Marble," but his long experience and divine intuition told him this magic was deadly dangerous.
Especially here, where they could only use the divine power stored in their bodies, and the chaotic energy contained none of the elements their offices governed.
The gods thus had no capital for prolonged fighting; on top of that, they had to be constantly on guard against the omnipresent time-space storms, or they would get hurt by a single slip.
Inside this space, without replenishment from heaven and earth, injury meant losing the ability to resist.
"Charge! Finish it quickly!" Zeus roared, leading the assault on Alaric.
Not knowing exactly what a Reality Marble did, he nevertheless reckoned: kill the caster and the magic should end.
With that thought he launched a sudden assault.
The Sun-and-Moon Goddess instantly drew and loosed in support from behind.
A shaft of gold and a shaft of silver, two arrows brimming with divine might, flew left and right toward Alaric.
The golden arrow aimed straight at Alaric; the silver one was strangely off-course, if Alaric didn't dodge, the silver would collide with the gold and both would nullify each other.
Clearly one of them was throwing the fight; their aim was skewed.
Alaric noticed this too, but he did not let the two arrows simply strike. With a casual gesture,
Two divine arrows smashed against a suddenly materialized golden composite polygonal shield, producing a tremendous explosion.
Yet the divine blast did not break the field, it was perfectly absorbed.
Even Zeus' full-force thunderstrike failed to punch through.
"What… what power is this?" Zeus ground his teeth, dizzy from the field's recoil. "This… it's absolutely not magic… there is… some kind of will inside it."
"This is an AT Field," Alaric explained with a smile.
"You could also call it a 'Wall of the Heart', a barrier that separates one's self from the self and from the objective world."
"???"
Zeus was baffled by Alaric's words.
Alaric shrugged with amusement at the bewildered God-King.
"Well, if you don't understand, that's fine. Just know this: it's a power from other dimensions."
"Other dimensions? Don't be ridiculous!" Zeus refused to accept it.
"Using other-dimensional power? Who do you think you are, a creator god?
Never mind whether other dimensions exist, even if they did, not even a creator god could harness that power. Don't push your jokes so far!"
"Don't listen to his nonsense," Hera gripped the furious God-King's sleeve. "That human, he speaks nonsense to throw you off balance."
"I didn't expect you to believe me," Alaric said, shaking his head and showing a faintly malicious smile.
"A few local gods clinging to their own domains, what can you do? However, before I fully unleash it I'll tell you this: although my Reality Marble cannot perfectly manifest the Sea of Chaos's full power, it still has special functions."
"Within this Reality Marble, I can fully display the essence of magic: the power of fantasy and miracle.
Any other world that exists within the scope of my imagination, I can fully materialize."