The boundary was the architecture of Nascent Soul Late and beyond.
It was not capable of being argued with.
The boundary exhaled him.
'Exhaled' was the accurate description — the pressure differential resolving outward, the void behind him opening to accept the mass of a Nascent Soul Mid cultivator that had been pressing against a wall it did not yet have the cultivation to breach, the specific physics of being returned to your proper dimension when the dimension you've attempted doesn't want you yet.
He hit something soft.
The impact registered in his back first — not pain, the dragon-scale fortitude handling the collision with the patient disinterest of structural materials that had survived a fifty-thousand-year dragon's death — and then the smell arrived.
Wet earth. Old forest. The green-black smell of vegetation that had been generating its own ecosystem for long enough that the air was as layered as the soil.
His eyes opened.
