The Dawn of the New World

"What's done is done," Baba Jezda waved him away, "Go, we must cover as much ground as possible before they detect our presence."

"Yes!"

Elder Taisi extended his hands forward to knock randomly on empty air. After the third knock his skin blistered and followed by a soundless explosion was covered in a thick bark-like armor.

He strode forward on the fractured bridge, surrounded by all manners of strange anomalies on both sides.

With nowhere else to go, black holes were birthed before being immediately ripped apart by the amalgamation of the torrent of relentless energies populating this realm. This gave birth to puzzling phenomena that could not be explained away with rational thought.

At one point Hao Xuan even found his own reflection running away from him as they went deeper in.

The bridge appeared to have been made out of some crystalline material that was partially see-through. And whatever this crystalline material was, it gave them some much-needed protection from the horrors that swam through the air just a few meters away.

The bridge went on and on in a straight line cutting through the entire realm, not only giving them shelter but also leading them directly to the temple.

Some parts of the bridge were broken but the rest still hovered in space at exactly the same distance from one another while everything else revolved around them constantly changing and shifting through reality itself.

Hao Xuan's gaze was pulled towards a small 'creature' that just looked like a bunch of motes of light held together by invisible threads. It was moving around curiously from one anomaly to the next and when it 'sensed' his gaze its lights dimmed.

It 'turned' towards him.

It didn't have any eyes so it was difficult to tell if it was actually looking at him but the lights were all focused in his direction.

It flew over and began moving parallel to him as if they were walking side by side.

"Don't look at it for too long," Lord Yami swiftly warned, "You don't want it to get attached."

"What is it?"

"They are the remains of the consciousness of some of the higher beings that participated in the first battle. No singular physical form can survive such an intense onslaught of energies that is present here. After some time the physical form is shaved away if there is nothing left to tether it to outside this realm and that is what becomes of them."

"Then...how will you fight when they find us if it is that dangerous?" Hao Xuan questioned the process, "Or will you only fight on the bridge?"

If reality itself was being broken down outside of this bridge then how could anyone survive there?

Lord Yami chuckled, "Haha, we won't be fighting in the physical forms. When it is time we will have to summon our astral forms since only they can manage to hold together long enough under such intense powers."

Hao Xuan closed his momentarily to go through some of the memories from the other lifetimes until he came across one that had some information on it.

'Astral forms, also known as 'Astral Bodies' are akin to second forms that powerful beings can create to traverse not only the ether but also some of the other worlds since not all realms are able to support the basic physical bodies we are born with.'

'They are thought of as extremely powerful armors for an individual's soul and are a reflection of their innermost desires. The shadow realm, the mirror world, and the dream worlds are all good examples of places where it would be safer to traverse with the astral body rather than the physical.'

Hao Xuan had no prior knowledge of it because one had to be at least a saint lord with a powerful enough soul to be able to create and control the astral form. Not to mention that it required an obscene amount of resources to make even a small astral body let alone something bigger.

He glanced at the people around them.

'Everyone other than me, Max, and Claudia should have extremely powerful astral bodies correlating to their power levels. I wonder what they look like?'

The only one whose astral form he had actually seen up close was 'Ashura of the Six Paths' and it was terrifying. He had not only managed to survive in the underworld for countless millenniums by its power alone but also lorded over an entire section of it...

As they moved closer to the temple the surroundings began to slowly change from the likes of abstract paintings to something more akin to contemporary art, still just as ludicrous but at least somewhat based in reality.

Instead of empty spaces with strange shapes and colors, they began looking more like landscapes with some missing aspects of reality.