My first impulse was that I'd been dragged into another Palace—that is, the manifestation of a person's distorted desires on a real, tangible place. I'd say that it should be impossible, but we already encountered a Palace after the Metaverse had allegedly dissolved.

[This likely all sounded so absurd, and Akechi snorted wryly at the prospect.]

But the Metaverse is a parallel, cognitive world that is activated via an app that no longer resides on my phone, and this world feels much too grounded despite its ruinous state.