The thread pulsed once against Ren's wrist.
It was thinner than a hair and it held his fist as if the fist weighed nothing. A moment before, that hand had unmade Radiant commanders and Vampire Ancestors. Now it hung in the air, a hand's width from its target, and would not go further.
Ren turned God's Eyes on the thread and tried to take it apart.
It wasn't mana. It wasn't miasma. It wasn't the clean power of a Divine Beast, which he had seen once in his life and never forgotten. It had no grain he could read, no structure to find a fault in. It had the strength of steel and none of steel's nature. The nearest word he could find for it was a sentence. Someone had said 'You stop here', and the world had written it down.
The air changed.
