The room was steeped in darkness. Zhao Yingkong sat silently on the edge of the bed, legs crossed, pouring all her consciousness deep into her mind. Within that awareness, save for her own minute presence, her entire being had dissolved completely into the surrounding blackness. After an immeasurable span, Zhao Yingkong finally opened her eyes and rose quietly. Approaching a certain spot near the bed, she pulled up an iron chain from the floor. With a gentle tug, a passage leading to a basement immediately appeared. Even the entrance to this cellar was designed with such a strange, almost perverse subtlety, betraying any conventional notion of what a young girl might possess.

The entire basement was equally shrouded in darkness. If the lights were to be turned on, one would see the space filled with wooden pillars, each about a meter high and half a meter in diameter, arranged densely and without discernible pattern throughout the shadowed space. At the very center of this maze of wood stood an iron pillar shaped like a human figure, its surface marred everywhere by deep gou