It took him a few more seconds, or at least he assumed it to be seconds, he wasn't really able to tell if time was even passing at all, his mind already having lost all touch on reality, barely hanging on using the constant counting that now rung in is subconscious.
In truth it was quite ironic how fast the counting which he had started out of sheer boredom had become a vital part of how he was continuing on in this eternal hell, of how it had become the perfect way to tether himself to time, to tether himself to the passing and continue on walking through this place while counting higher and higher, while accomplishing something, or at least while believing that he accomplished something, however small it may be.
Truly, it was incredibly how fast it had happened, barely having taken a few hours before he was practically unable to stop and even able to start developing the mana sense while he had been completely blind and having turned into a constant watch after just a few more hours, culminating in this, the constant counting that he now trusted, the counting that had lost all sound within his mind, having turned into more of a click, a something, than anything else, but still a sound the could understand, a number he knew by heart despite not even caring about it right now, well, at least not thinking about it consciously in the moment.
Nevertheless he was now within reasonable reach and had attained a reasonably slow rotation that he should be able to warp himself onto the 'floor', whatever it might be in truth, without any danger he thought to be worth noting or was able to sense, resulting in him clenching his teeth and beginning to call for the active to activate itself, something that he now realized had given the actives their names.
Fairly obvious in hindsight, but well, that was just how the mind sometimes worked, hiding knowledge oh so obvious in plain sight, however small it may be, not that it mattered to the current chaos who was still trying to cover his own terror and anxiety at the thought of falling into the endless nothing that might be waiting below his very feet and losing everything he had attained until now, with the leisurely way he was thinking and analysing everything he could right now, something he had begun to do within the endless realm before, the realm in which he had been riding the beast and falling for at least two days, a long time to spend alone, be it that a longer time might not be as worse as the shorter one because one just stopped thinking at some point from what Cades knew.
He landed safely, though he did bash his head into the metal railing that consisted of a multitude of thin but powerful sticks stretching upwards, connected to, well, a railing, resulting in a simple railing everyone should have seen at least once in their lives, though Cades was more so focused on staying conscious right now, after having been in nothing for so long, and finally having something to be lying on without any danger, it was truly exhilarating, kind of, scary, actually..
For a few seconds Cades just laid there, on the cold, stone ground, something that would've normally surprised Cades, especially the one that now laid there, the one yearning for action after he had been stuck in the trash for such an eternally long time, after a time that had seemed ever so much greater within the mind than outside of it, something that might even be applying right now, further messing up his mind.
In truth, he was just exhausted, he had been running around fighting his other self, he had fought against two relatively powerful though still weaker opponents at once, he had fallen for an entire day, he had been holding on for his dear life onto the back on a gigantic morbid butterfly for another day, and then he had jumped into the goddamn light, running towards the place some might claim to see in their end, the place one should only run to when one knows it's the end, or perhaps just a simple wall of light.
After a few seconds he stood up nevertheless, sensing that the railing was about three dozen foot away from the inconsiderably huge cylindrical tower of what was probably a light source extending upwards from his current location, with the tower even extending far, far, further downwards, into the endless abyss that was presumably white with how many of these infinite towers there probably were, something that Cades was destined to find out quite soon, as soon as he tested his new theory, be it that he had known it for a bit longer, but he just wanted to test it out, hoping that he might even like the information that'll be returned to him.
Had his eyes not been closed this entire time he would've closed them now, as he tried it out, trying to thin out the layer of mana he had constantly been sending out and retrieving within his natural mana reach to utilize that which he called mana sense, trying to manipulate it into a wave and thin it out enough to cover a wide area.
Honestly speaking, Cades had expected the first try to take quite some time seeing as he had taken so long to even remotely learn about how to use the mana sense that was so easy to learn now that he thought about it, but perhaps because of the time he had spent researching his own theories about it, never really putting them to work, he was quite adept at doing this already, resulting in him succeeding at the second try, the first one ending with him just having wasted some of his mana, be it only a relatively miniscule amount of about one fiftieth of his total power.
At first Cades was ecstatic with what he saw, with what he felt from the intermittent return of some of the waves that came back from some closer other towers, at the speed of sound, taking a few dozen seconds each and the closest turning out to be about eight hundred feet away, but then he began to realize some things and 'see' something he definitely did not like.