Lurona city [southern shores of Fuminao Legacy Kingdom], local time [1794.01.??]
Darkness.
On the border between dreams and oblivion, something stirred.
In the timeless space of a mind aborted.
A smidge of a white static interposing over the endless void was evidence enough – an awareness had awoken.
The static discoloration was eerily distorting its perception, even when subdued, replacing the patches of darkness in random flashes – as if trying to deny nonexistence.
Something, whatever it was, was perceiving a place impossible. It had time while it shouldn’t. It could see without eyes, although, only nothingness was filling this place. A nothingness that one could touch.
None should exist in space defined by the lack of existence. Yet, the awareness understood – it was an outliner. Because it was.
The space was infinitesimal, yet infinite in nature. The smallest of things to touch, yet as big as a planet at the same time.
A feeling he almost forgot. A feeling that was indescribable. One of the rare experiences that he remembered from the time when he was a child. It accompanied him daily back then, but it was something the adults couldn’t understand. Even when he asked to solve this obvious paradox happening in his mind, he was ridiculed at best and disregarded entirely at worst.
Because, how can you explain an existence of an object, imaginary or not, that feels small and, at the same time, as large as a house?
The awareness froze in its wake suddenly, noticing that this… train of thought… wasn’t a part of the universe surrounding him. It also wasn’t a part of him a moment ago.
It thought that it understood what had happened, though.
It used memories. Or maybe, received memories? Regained memories? Created memories?
Memories of a person that he was.
The context of its being widened; the white static intensified.
He could finally confirm that he didn’t exist only in this emptiness! Wasn’t a child of it. There was more to him!
It focused on the alien information cascading from an unknown place.
It stayed silent, waiting patiently.
As so, it relaxed, just as it was before.
There was no reason to pursue the elusive thoughts. They would come when they were ready, just as a moment ago.
And, surely, they did.
After the awareness remembered about them, the static expanded and other dimensions raised: a whisper of a sound, a lick of a touch, a whiff of a smell…
With its newly-found curiosity, it waited for more to come. And, soon enough, more memories were flooding in.
It took time. But the awareness wasn’t privy to that concept just yet. All it knew, was the fact that time should exist. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be able to proceed and… exist.
Another paradox that flew over its head.
The timeless space with time? Not interested.
~~~
Slowly but surely.
Piece by piece.
Zeph Einar started reforming his being from the fragments arriving.
What am I again? he asked himself, constructing a first coherent thought in a language he didn’t know the name of yet.
He couldn’t feel his body nor his Soul, but he knew they should be here.
That’s not an afterlife, for sure…
He would suspect he was made of Will at the moment, if not for the fact that it couldn’t sustain a mind. He knew because once in the past he tried testing it. The thing was just not made to compute, in any way or form.
Then again…. I am, he realized with dread.
~~~
The reconstruction was finished, he was sure.
The stream of memories had stopped some time ago. Although, from what he now understood, his existence was still an impossibility.
Even after recognizing the blackness for what it was – the Nether space – he couldn’t find even a piece of his Soul.
Strangely, he was horrendously calm despite that. He couldn’t find it in himself – the emotions that he knew should surface.
No surprise. No anger. No anxiety. Nothing. Merely, a calm calculating mind that had no place to be.
Whether it meant that he was dead, dying, or a construct that copied the original, it didn’t matter much to him. There were, of course, other possibilities but none of them were sound according to the knowledge he had regained.
Also, no Soul meant no System. It was the strangest of things – operating without System-granted Passive Enhancements. And not because they were simply absent, but because the cornerstone – his Soul – didn’t exist here. The clarity of thoughts was lost, as was the near-perfect memory.
Intuition and other small voices in his head be damned, but he felt like an eight-year-old child without his brain reinforcing his memory by drawing from his Soul directly. He couldn’t even remember how to properly extract agarose – the basic of the basics in his old line of education and work on Earth.
So many things were lost to him right now that he didn’t feel whole as a being.
The fact that he didn’t have a body didn’t help, too. From what he could tell, his awareness was just that – an ephemeral emanation without an anchor. Initially, he thought he was like a bead of light, or maybe even a humanoid-shaped gaseous cloud. But he quickly learned that no such thing took place.
There was only the endless blackness, the white noise discharging randomly all around, and him to witness all of that gloomy glory.
Time was relative, he knew. Especially because of the lack of points of reference. He couldn’t know how much time have passed.
Yet, he felt it was too long. The… reconstruction of his being took ages in his mind’s eye. Or rather, in the emulation of a mind that he was, as he didn’t have a brain.
How am I even processing things? He wondered wordlessly, scanning the void for the umpteenth time. Aisha said that even high Undead required dedicated structures in their Soul to be able to process information a body… And I have nothing. Literally…
After reflecting for a moment longer, he shrugged mentally.
Time to test things a little I suppose.
Consciously this time, he tried to move a finger – despite not having one, he still remembered how to do that. No feedback.
He tried to access his Soul to read memories. It failed, as expected.
Focusing, he Willed his mind to destabilize—seeing as it was in a perfect balance, he could as well do the opposite of mind stabilization—without any effect. His body, whatever it was now, stayed unaffected. He didn’t notice even the slightest fluctuation in his direct vicinity. Excluding the white static, of course. But he was sure it was just an artifact of his flawed perception, not a physical thing.
He mentally berthed out. Seriously… what am I? What is this place?
He tried turning around. Slowly, consciously, and with a clear goal in his mind – unlike at the beginning when he trashed around wildly like a kid on a sugar rush in Disneyland.
Surprisingly, he felt that it worked. Strangely, though, he didn’t receive any visual cues – the static overlapping the darkness never changed. He simply knew that he was moving.
What a trip… maybe I am dead after all.
Using the same method, he tried to move forward.
He quickly noticed that something was keeping him in place. Unperturbed, he increased the… mental pressure.
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The invisible chains started stretching. The reality itself seemed to bend. Not visually, but unexplainably he could tell.
Not seeing any better solution to his existential problem, he squinted his nonexistent eyes, focused, and pushed with more force.
The uneven fight lasted for barely a few seconds before the first ‘chain’ gave up. Then, the cascade reaction started, and he was free.
He shot out from his prison like a bullet, moving at speeds incomprehensible to his addled mind.
Panicking, he fought to stop himself. And, as if the world around could hear his thoughts, he immediately lost all velocity, pausing mid-void at once.
He was dizzy—if that feeling could even be described as such—from the sudden… no, an instant deceleration.
Jeez… Should I treat it like a lucid dream?
He looked back, in the direction of his supposed prison.
To his surprise, he saw something. On the canvas of the perfectly black nothingness, an even darker shadow existed. It was broken and raged. A scrunched canvas with a hole surrounded by flapping rags of matter. It all moved and revolved as if pushed by a nonexistent wind.
Okay… how many colors of black are here again? he asked himself, disbelieving what he was seeing.
On the ruptured mess of a shape, a lighter line of black was painted. It was angled and he could not see the end point from his position.
Moving around the strange emanation, in a safe distance of course, he traced the line until he found its end.
It ended exactly at the sharp end of a fold, pointing into the void.
Looking in that direction, he saw nothing.
He shrugged again. What better he had to do here?
Ah, right, he remembered. He read enough fantasy novels in his life to not take this chance lightly.
Moving closer to his ex-prison, he started testing the waters.
He couldn’t grab or consume the strange matter, probably because he lacked the necessary body parts to do so. Actually, he couldn’t even push it – he just phased through it. Thankfully, the prison didn’t activate again, but he felt like using a free cam in a game. It was an unpleasantly boring experience.
He tried to meditate and… well, see the world around him without looking. He couldn’t even close his eyes in the first place, but he had to try.
It took a lot of time. He knew about seventeen different meditation and relaxation techniques and he was persistent enough to try them all.
Nothing worked, thought. He couldn’t feel anything different. Going into a trance, becoming absentminded, forcefully focusing on one sense… doing all of it, he felt like he was merely pretending. There was some truth to this feeling – he was trying to execute techniques that required, at least, a body. The poor imitation he was doing right now—even if he also knew of mental techniques and tried to use them—led him nowhere.
Hmmm… Not working, huh? Then, maybe…
Next, he tried several mental visualizations. Devouring, siphoning, channeling – you name it.
But there was no energy. Nothing he could interact with. Even when he could see that there was something.
After a few more minutes, he gave up.
If that’s Nether, it should be possible to move it with Mana – they are repelling each other, after all, he shook his imagined head in disappointment.
Turning in the direction pointed by the bleached strip again, all he saw was the deep nothingness; as expected.
With a mental sigh, he forced himself to accelerate in the direction pointed by the daub.
After a moment, he turned around to see the shadow of his prison while still accelerating in the original direction. He wanted to have a point of reference, now that he could see something here.
But it was not to be.
He moved further and further away. The shadow started disappearing from his sight.
The white static started to intensify, too. He even started to hear the characteristic noise – not unlike one produced by an old TV that lost signal. It raised his hackles.
Am I moving away from the allowed area? he asked himself. The space felt less and less like an infinite one, this whole situation resembling more of a bad horror game than a reality.
But before he could question his life choices, something entered his peripheral vision. Looking up, he saw a… large sphere. Maybe.
It was hard to distinguish from this distance. The white noise wasn’t helping either.
Moving closer, he traced three distinct cords stemming from it and leading further ahead. He changed his trajectory forward and sped up. Slowly, three more spherical outlines started emerging from the uniformity of the black world.
His face, if he had one, would pale.
The spheres formed a giant tetrahedron, and he was moving right into the center of this… construct.
This time, he didn’t even notice when he stopped moving.
Despite his surprise and the newly regained memories, he wasn’t afraid – just startled. His mind was as calm as it was at the beginning of this journey. He still felt some apprehension when getting close to the structure, though.
It was slowly orbiting around its center of mass. The spheres were connected to each other, forming a monumental framework. It was hard to define sizes and distances here, but he was sure those spheres should be as large as the Earth’s Moon going by his… well, relative size.
Huh? Relative? he blinked in his mind. If it’s like a lucid dream then…
Just as how he moved himself earlier – by suggesting the context to the world around – he did that again but for his size.
Very quickly, the tetrahedron started shrinking in his view. His ‘transformation’ lasted until he reached half its size. But after that, he felt that his body—whatever it was made of—was losing coherence.
He shrunk himself a little to be on the safe side.
Now, he could see the structure in all its glory. The range of his perception enlarged along with his imagined body.
He circled it a few times, also looking around for other structures. There was nothing there, though. The tetrahedron itself was as boring as it possibly could.
He shrunk himself to his original size and floated to the center. Even if he suspected the preparator, what could he do? At least he was still existing in some way. If it wanted him dead, he wouldn’t be here. Also, if not for the directions, he would have been lost twice over.
And he would rather die now than drift endlessly in this empty space. He knew his mental limits – a few years here would probably break him. Madness wasn’t pretty – he brushed against it a few times so he could tell. There was still a small chance that he could learn more about this strange place and make use of it, but he wasn’t going to bet on that possibility.
When he arrived at the exact center, the whole structure started turning white. A rolling mist of unidentified nature was filling the shape.
He waited patiently for the next hour or so—it was really hard to determine the flow of time in his state—before the process ended.
There was a movement in the void. Slow at the beginning, but quickly gaining in speed and intensity. The darkest of black and the whitest of white started to float towards him, congregating right before his face.
A miniature humanoid silhouette started forming.
The blackness seemed to seep deep, forming the being’s core, while the white took most of the surface.
Experimentally, he tried to change his relative size, but the thing stayed the same in his eyes – a humanoid shape of the size of a hand at most.
Finally, it finished manifesting. Despite the obvious purity of its skin, he knew quite well how deep the shadows were reaching.
Again, his emotions were subdued. Or rather, they felt like a projection instead of a real thing. His mind was tranquil despite the memories forcefully replaying before his eyes.
The ruthless and feral devouring of a Soul. The dissipation of the Will of the individual. The primal hunger of the predator.
Those things weren’t able to instill fear right now, even if he accepted them as his true memories.
“You pass,” said a childlike voice as the being before him finished materializing. It had no face or any distinct features. Just a miniature of a woman clad in white, with hair longer than her body and moving according to its own will.
He frowned. “It was a test,” he realized.
“Three. There were three tests. Recovering – a test of resilience and integrity. Freeing oneself – a test of strength and compatibility. Finding this place – a test of perception and resonance,” she said, bobbing up and down happily. “You passed all three, and easily at that!” she exclaimed excitedly.
His imaginary frown deepened. “How… No, what would have happened if I didn’t find this place?” he asked accusingly.
Seeing this being, he knew he should act delicately. He could tell, somehow, that she wasn’t fully here. Just her shadow, at best. Yet, speaking in terms of dimensions, he felt like a two-dimensional doodled picture looking at a seven-dimensional masterpiece. Again, his senses here didn’t make much sense, but he learned to trust them to some degree.
Despite that, his anger was hard to ignore – the only palpable emotion he could feel. This whole scenario was ridiculous.
“The fragment in your soul is going to self-destruct soon. It won’t hurt you, but you have a limited time here,” she said innocently, moving her hands behind her back. “If you didn’t manifest, you would awake in…”—she tilted her head slightly—“a week? Maybe.”
He mentally blinked. “Wasn’t that an attack from Jaekandu?”
“It… wasn’t. Kinda. It would serve his purposes by disabling you, I suppose. By the way, only three days have passed. You are faster than I expected.”
He ignored the last part but he had to agree with her statement. Being unconscious for a few minutes would be enough to disqualify him – it was as good a method as any to win in the Duel.
But something in her wording bothered him.
“Can you be more precise? How wasn’t that an attack?”
“He used an artifact my thrall gave him. It wasn’t meant to harm.”
“Hmm?” he mentally blinked. “If you are what I think you are… Wouldn’t it be easier to just give it to me earlier? Or come to me personally, for that matter?”
She sighed, her form bending down in resignation.
“After you fled to the city, you became inaccessible… But let’s start from the beginning,” she said, straightening up. “I am dying.”
Zeph started opening his imaginary mouth to speak.
“To the Nether.”
He paused.
“I am… how should I call this?” She scratched her head. “The me, the one you see, is just a miniscule fragment of my true being. I brought with me the Nether infection but a part that was subdued already.”
He nodded.
“I found you in the Brenn forest. Custur is trying to help me find a way to survive, you see. He informed me when you entered his territory. The old goat can’t stop to admire my true form, hehe,” she giggled shamelessly.
Zeph immediately froze. “Wait, wait, wait!” he would grab her shoulders to shake her if he could. “Are you telling me that he was responsible for most of that fiasco? Huh?” He realized there was more to it. “Is that strange trial he is giving his people a part of it? And what happened to the hungry beast that eat the Soul of the Adeptus Miu? Wasn’t that you? You didn’t seem… reasonable at all.”
She shrugged nonchalantly. “Is that what you call Miureallval? It almost sounds like you were friends,” she asked with an empty mirth.
“That doesn’t answer my questions! You two are responsible for the deaths of so many…”
She sighed. “I don’t care what Custur is doing, it’s his territory. And what can you expect from a facsimile projected into the lower realm? It’s obvious that it would eat him – that fragment of me was overtaken by the Nether instincts almost immediately. But you were going to die back then, so I had no choice. When I tasted your unique Magicules… You are the first person… that could maybe help… I had to intervene.”
Zeph’s nonexistent face darkened. “You don’t care. About the fact that the two of you are using the people on the coast near High Peak of Brenn for your own purposes?”
“Heh,” a mischievous smile, made entirely from a firm blackness, bloomed on the empty face of the strange entity. “Yes, but you know nothing. Bearing a part of my burden can help them. Not only people, but the world at large. Any guesses as to why?”
“Because you are infected with the Nether… yet, still conscious?” he asked, still glaring at her.
Her small head bobbed up and down vigorously. “Exactly that! However, that doesn’t change the fact that I am going to die soon… And most of the Onjis fear what is to come after I do.”
Zeph’s mind whirled. There was so much to unpack and even more to ask.
“Again, why didn’t you just ask instead of playing those games?”
She shook her head. “I can’t manifest here easily. And the System would rather see me dead and dissected. The more people are around, the more is the risk. If not for the Custur’s information, resources, and influence, I wouldn’t even try to search for help on this stratum. If you weren’t in his domain, I wouldn’t interfere.”
Zeph grimaced internally. This whole situation was out of order. “Leaving the Onjis’ plans aside. Why did you agree to disable me during this Duel Tournament? And why, for the gods’ sake, are you searching for help on the lowest stratum?”
She pouted and crossed her arms. “And how else could we safely apply the artifact? My thrall tried once to approach you before you returned to the city but the System noticed the activation.”
Zeph’s eyes would widen if he had any right now. She was talking about the white tetrahedron that showed up during the trip back.
“Lately, I have gained a few more helpers,” she said absentmindedly. “It’s not normal to meet Faen on this stratum, so each manifestation has to be obfuscated. With Custur’s nagging, a number of people agreed to fulfill a mission.” She looked straight into his eyes. “To bring my fragment to you in secret. At all costs…”