The moment my fingers brushed the fragment, I braced for the usual skull-splitting headache that usually came with touching Unknown God fragments—like getting mentally dropkicked by the universe.
But the pain didn't come.
Instead, a blinding light swallowed me whole.
Oh no. Not again.
The sensation was weirdly familiar, like being flushed through a glowing cosmic toilet. Kind of like the time I got yanked into Mythica on my first day as an intern and landed face-first in a field of sentient mushrooms.
Here we go again.
I hit the ground face-first with the grace of a dropped potato. The floor was cold, hard, and unreasonably smug about it. Pain bloomed across my forehead like a regretful tattoo as I groaned and peeled myself off the ground.
Light gave way to space. Endless, vast, starless space.
Darkness stretched in every direction—an endless, echoing nothing, like I'd just belly-flopped into a void with floor privileges.
And then I saw it.
