"My name is Graham," the man in the recording started speaking. "I'm surprised you people actually care about my name. None of you bothered asking me that before."
The room Graham was in was dark and with barely any furniture. The only thing there was the chair Graham was sitting in and that alone told Alex nothing of where his father was or what he was doing.
"Why do you two keep speaking in my head?" Graham asked. "It's annoying, just use your words."
Alex couldn't hear anything other than his father, so he realized that the ones that were recording the scene were cultivators that had spiritual sense. In all likelihood, they were people in the Saint realm.
Alex started getting excited and Happy. Finally, he found his father. Those years of investigations had paid off. Someone had finally found—
'Wait,' he thought. There was something wrong here. The box that this information had come with had been way too similar to the one sent to him by an assassin before.
An assassin who knew about his father.
There was a conspiracy going on in here that Alex wanted to find out more about it.
"This is a farce. Why the hell would I tell you my wife's name?" his father suddenly got angry. "You bastards deserve nothing from me."
'He's angry,' Alex realized. 'He's not in a good situation. Where is he?'
Just then, Alex saw his father's eyes go wide. "How do you know my son's name?" Graham spoke in the recording. "Bastards! What have you done with my son?"
His father jumped towards the people recording, but he saw a hand suddenly move from the right and force his father down with their Qi.
Alex felt a pang of anger when he saw that. They were treating his father like a prisoner. No worse, they were treating his father like a slave.
His father must have heard something in the recording that made him stop struggling. "I can meet my son?" he asked. "When? Where? How?"
He waited for an answer and frowned. "What the hell is the Sundering Sanctum?" he asked.
"Yes, I will go there. If I can meet my son, I will go to this damned Sanctum all you like," his father spoke.
A very distorted, hoarse voice finally spoke in the end. "If you want to meet your father, he will be entering the Sanctum too. You can meet him there."
The recording ended after that, not a single word more. Suddenly, the talisman burst into fire in his hand, but Alex wasn't in the headspace to care about a little burn in his hand.
His mind was going crazy trying to understand everything that was happening.
"Are you okay, young man? Your hand is burning," one of the elders said as they came to put out the fire. However, when they saw the clean hand that wasn't hurt in the slightest, they were slightly surprised.
It didn't look like he was protecting himself, so his skin not being burned was certainly not an everyday scene for them.
"What's wrong? You look worried," the old woman Yao Ning said.
"I— I am," Alex said, his voice quivering a little. He was finding it hard to keep himself from shaking, both in anger and fear.
"What did that talisman say?" another one of them asked.
"It was a recording," Alex said. "Of my father."
"Your father? Someone found him?" the elders asked.
Alex shook his head. "I don't think he was found," he said. "He looked fine physically, but the anger he had… my father doesn't get angry so easily, so he must hate them very much to get angry like the way he did in the recording. I think he's being kept somewhere, against his will."
"Whether that's to extort me of my recipes, or to use against me, I don't know," Alex said. "But one thing is certain, whoever it is that knows about my father, they want me to go to the Sundering Sanctum."
"What? You can't go there. That's a dangerous place where we can't keep you safe," one of them said.
"Yeah, if you go there, you will be away from us for months," another one said. "That is too long a time period to keep you away from us."
"You guys can't enter the Sundering Sanctum?" Alex asked with a surprised look. "Is there a sort of restriction or did you make an oath?"
"It's just too dangerous," one of them said. "Even us 10 are not entirely safe in there because of the uniqueness of that place."
Alex nodded. "But I must go either way," he said. "This is my one chance to find my father. They mentioned he was going to be there, but I highly doubt it. They will instead send the assassins after me, I'm sure of that. I will get my answer from those assassins if no one else."
He looked at the elders and saw that they were about to argue against him again, trying to keep him from going, especially since the chance of his father being there was none anyway.
"Seniors, I know you are looking out for me, and I appreciate that. However, this is my father we are talking about. The only reason I have not bothered finding a way out of this continent is that I had yet to find my father. So, if you think you can keep me from going after this one thread I've found in years, you underestimate my motivation."
The 10 old men and women looked at each other, not knowing what to say. They couldn't understand the urgency and importance of the task the same way as Alex felt it, but they could respect it.
"Fine, but you will have to be very careful," one of them said.
Alex nodded. "I know," he said. "I'm not looking to die just yet. I have too many things that depend on me to just go and die."
"Alright, let's plan what you can do then."
The 11 of them went back into the palace and started talking. At the same time, they sent a message to the association leader back in the City of Many Flowers to ask where he acquired the package from.
When the reply came, Alex couldn't help but sigh. The leader had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.
'It's definitely the assassins then,' he thought.
He continued talking with the elders who told him more about the Sanctum so he could prepare.
Alex learned about the Sanctum's history and how it was a normal secret realm with a massive towering Sanctum in the center of the secret realm.
However, as time passed, the secret realm began shrinking and after a while, the Sanctum was all that remained.
Now, even that was showing signs of coming out.
He returned back to his room after the conversation.
"Someone must have not properly set up the space-stabilizing formation," Godslayer spoke suddenly as soon they were back in his room.
"You're up?" Alex asked with a hint of surprise in his voice. He was awake most of the time these days but chose to go back to sleep as there was nothing else to do for him. "What do you mean by space stabilizing formation?"
"That's what you need to keep a spatial pocket from collapsing if it is not originally a very stable one," Godslayer said.
"So someone set up the formation badly? You can tell that just from the little information?" Alex asked.
"Yes," Godslayer said. "Unless something external is interfering with the spatial pocket, which is impossible to happen in this realms of mortal, there will only ever be two reasons why a spatial pocket will collapse."
"First, someone set up the Space stabilizing formation badly," Godslayer said. "Second, someone didn't set it up at all."
"In the case of the second one, if there was no such formation, the space, once started, would crumble to become nothing in a matter of hours. However, since it's crumbling but very slowly, it is absolutely because the Space stabilizing formation is not performing as well as it should," Godslayer said.
"So, it's keeping the space inside from crumbling as much as it can, but its not working as well. Is that it?" Alex asked.
"Yes," Godslayer said. "You will have to be careful when you go on such journeys. If the space is crumbling, it's certain to leave cracks even on the space that hasn't already crumbled yet. Those cracks can be very sharp and tear you to pieces before you even know it."
Alex nodded. He knew how sharp space could be. He was not going to mess with it.
"However, with your Dao, I don't think you will have to worry much about the space cracks," Godslayer said. "However, if there are cracks and crumbling space, that means there are likely void gates that have formed in there too. You will have to be extremely careful not to fall into those."
"Void gates?" Alex was surprised and confused. "What's that?"
"Void gates, it's what the name suggests," Godslayer said. "It's a gate that leads to the void.'
"What's… a void?" Alex asked curiously.
"It's a dimension outside of our own reality, one that is very hard to reach," Godslayer said. "But if there are cracks in space there, it's likely there will be gates opening to them."
"Dimension that can only be reached from a cracked space?" Alex's eyes went wide when he realized what he was referring to. "That thing from back in the Ancient Battlefield?"
"You've seen the void?" Godslayer's voice held some shock in it as he spoke.
"I think so," Alex said. "I have looked into a world of silver and purple past a crack in space, that left me with a deep sense of dread."
"Yup," Godslayer said. "That's the void alright."
