After his father dragged Jon home by his ear, he sat him down at the kitchen table to berate him. His father was a towering man, surely over two meters tall, while Jon's meager 1.7 meters made him seem small in comparison. His mother stood silently beside his father as he spoke:
"We are a family of science, not magic. From the very beginning, we were the first chosen of the Void, and since then, none of us have ever been deemed valuable enough to be bestowed with essences. And yet, you want to destroy everything we’ve built? We hold the largest body of non-magical scientific knowledge this world has ever seen. Do you truly believe your so-called friends don’t want this knowledge for themselves, to build their own wealth? Are you so naive? Our grotesque wealth does not come from letting people work our land. No, it comes from selling extremely potent poisons—poisons that cause the body to rot from the inside out, undetectable by magic and reproducible anywhere. We may be the most influential family behind the curtain, second only to those with abnormally strong individuals among them."
His father leaned forward, his voice lowering. "But your little adventure, your reckless desire to dismantle our family’s foundation, could be the single worst thing you have done to yourself. You will meet the Void on your eighteenth birthday, which, if I recall correctly, is in just a few hours. The prophecy says nothing about this event, but we know that every other branch of our family was eradicated by these encounters. In the beginning, some speculated that these moments held the potential for blessings from the highest entity, but clearly, it did not value them enough. So until then, you might as well study some chemistry. It may help you stand in better favor with the Void."
Jon stood up silently and made his way to the laboratory, but he couldn't concentrate. His mind raced with the implications of his father's words. There had been others like them—other families who worshipped the Void—but they had been eradicated. Why would a powerful entity want scientists in the first place? What did it gain from isolated families who manipulated events behind the scenes with chemicals so deadly that a single exposure could kill? If their knowledge was so vast, why limit it to non-magical sciences? If they had harnessed magic, their poisons could be exponentially more potent—perhaps even lethal to those beyond Bronze rank.
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Centuries of scientific progress, and all they had to show for it were poisons capable of exterminating small cities. But nothing beyond that. Nothing that could challenge the truly powerful. The story his family had upheld for millennia didn’t make sense. Perhaps those families hadn’t been destroyed by the Void at all. Perhaps they had been taken into service by kings who recognized their true value. What if this was all just some elaborate joke by a powerful entity that enjoyed experimenting with entire bloodlines? Whatever the case, surely no godlike being—let alone something beyond the gods—would concern itself with low-level genocides in some magical backwater it didn’t even control.
He sat there, lost in thought, staring into the middle distance. His father’s voice snapped him back to reality.
"Come down. It's almost time."
Jon left the laboratory and made his way back to the kitchen, where he sat down at the table. His eyes fixated on the clock. What if it was real? What if the Void truly was an all-knowing entity that destroyed the very families it had created because they had strayed from the path set for them millennia ago?
As they waited for midnight, time seemed to stretch endlessly. The air was thick with tension, so heavy it could almost be grasped. The last few seconds crawled by, each tick of the old mechanical clock echoing through the room like the footsteps of something unseen, approaching.