Darkness. Not the graduated dark of night, but an absolute, all-consuming void. Erika felt he wasn't lying on anything, yet neither was he falling. Just… suspended in this vast, black silence.
Silence… No. Not quite. It was a deeper stillness, as if the very concept of sound had been sucked away. All he could 'hear' was the absence of his own heartbeat and a hollow, rushing roar in his skull—like blood pumping through a vacuum.
His body felt strange. No pain. Instead, a uniform, all-encompassing pressure. Not from a weight on top, but from the black space itself—an elastic, cold sac wrapping and squeezing him from all sides. Gentle, yet relentless. Precise. Holding him at a perfect, unbearable equilibrium—aware of every point of contact, yet not crushed, not suffocated. Like sinking in a bottomless fluid of perfect density.
He tried to struggle. He willed his arm—an arm that seemed to both exist and not exist here—to swing forward in a punch.
No rush of air. No resistance.
His fist plunged into what felt like the thickest syrup, or absolute nothingness. The force had no target, offered no feedback. It was a horrible, gut-wrenching sensation—like sprinting with no ground beneath his feet.
But then, something stranger happened.
Though he'd felt no impact, the moment his punch completed, the uniform pressure in front of him… vanished for an instant. A hole punched in the confinement. And instantly, the pressure from all other sides intensified.
Imbalance.
In this anchorless void, that difference in pressure acted like a slingshot. He was flung backward, tumbling uncontrollably end over end through the black.
The void spun, streaking and blurring. No up, no down. Just dark and violent, helpless rotation.
He tumbled for what felt like both an instant and forever. Then, ahead in the endless black, a different region appeared.
Pure white. Blinding, flawless white, torn savagely against the consuming dark. Where they met was not a line, but a shimmering, undulating 'surface'—a turbulent zone where light and dark bled into each other, constantly shifting.
His wild flight was carrying him straight toward that disturbance.
Just before he hit the shimmering boundary, a cacophony of sound—sharp, alive, grating—ripped through the absolute silence.
"Baa! Baa-baa! Baa—!!"
Sheep. Many sheep. A dissonant chorus, devoid of rhythm, pure mindless noise.
The sound came from the white side.
Erika's 'body' struck the wavering boundary. The 'surface' offered no resistance—a sensation like passing through a cold, slick membrane—and he was plunged into the white.
The light was painfully bright. He floated in the white space. Below stretched an endless, white… plain? It was crowded with sheep.
They looked ordinary—woolly, heads down, some chewing on nothing, some pacing aimlessly. But every single one was emitting that constant, monotonous "baa-baa", merging into a sea of maddening sound.
Then, the sheep nearest to him lifted its head.
As it did, its face melted and reformed like soft wax—
It became Anna's face. Her familiar, pure, sorrow-tinged expression. Her mouth opened and closed. The sound that came out was: "Baa… baa…"
Erika's heart seized.
Another sheep looked up. Wolfgang's stern, hardened face. Tight lips, sharp eyes. "Baa!"
Another. Hong Bo's face, etched with pious benevolence. "Baa-baa…"
Balthasar's greedy visage. The Silent One's featureless blank. Morrison's excited, gleaming eyes. Kaelen's smirk. Lun Qin's cool beauty. Even the blurred face of Cecilia, the Technical Brother who had died in the Sanctum…
Faces of everyone he knew, everyone he'd crossed paths with, rose from the flock, replacing sheep's heads. Each face was perfect, bearing its true expression, yet every mouth produced the same shrill, mindless bleat. "Baa! Baa-baa!"
They 'looked' at him with familiar eyes. The noise was a tidal wave, drowning him. The white space, the cacophony, the familiar-yet-warped faces… it formed a scene of supreme, soul-shaking absurdity and horror.
"NO—!!!" Erika screamed a soundless scream in the dream, a spike of pure, debilitating shock lancing through his mind.
"Hgh—!!!"
He jolted awake.
The phantom baa-baa seemed to echo in his ears for a second before being drowned by his own ragged, painful gasps and pounding heart. Cold sweat drenched him, clammy and freezing. Staring up into the darkness, the sensations from the dream—the pressure, the helpless tumbling, the bone-deep wrongness of those familiar faces bleating—still had his heart in a vise, making him tremble uncontrollably.
What… was that?
Before he could even process the nightmare, or remember the fall from the book-tower, a new, more tangible anomaly gripped him.
The ground was moving.
Not shaking. Rising. A smooth, swift, steady ascent, as if the platform of books and dust he lay on was a giant, silent elevator. The weightlessness was subtle but unmistakable. He was being carried up, fast.
A faint whoosh of displaced air filled his ears. The soaring, book-lined walls began to stream downward, faster and faster, blurring into dark streaks. The once-distant, lightless ceiling above was rushing to meet them.
Ascending. They were rocketing up the impossible well.
What's happening?! Is he back? Where's—
Through the confusion and fear, a familiar, acrid smell cut through—cigarette smoke. Harsher, more real than the dream-bleats. It jerked his senses back to the present.
Erika struggled to push himself up on the rapidly rising platform, wincing at the pain, and looked around.
He saw Loren first. The noble was standing now, pale and disheveled, but his spine was straighter. He stood close to the scruffy man.
The man was there beside Loren, same grimy work clothes, his unruly hair stirring in the updraft. He stood with his profile to Erika, a freshly lit cigarette between his lips, staring upward with utter indifference to their velocity, as if riding a common lift.
Sensing Erika's stare, the man slowly turned his head. The lethal impatience from before was gone from his eyes, replaced by a deep, fathomless apathy… and perhaps a thread of cold satisfaction, a troublesome chore completed.
"Awake?" His voice drifted over, laced with smoke, devoid of inflection. He didn't wait for an answer—seemed not to care—and casually pulled something from his coat. Without looking, he tossed it toward Erika.
A small pouch, made of dark, coarse, durable cloth. It landed with a soft, solid thump near Erika's hand.
Erika caught it, puzzled. It had weight. Inside, many small, hard, jagged things shifted with a faint rustle-click.
He looked up, questions in his eyes, but the man had already turned back to his cigarette, gazing ahead as if he'd tossed away a piece of trash.
Wary and confused, Erika carefully loosened the leather thong and poured the contents into his palm.
Dozens of irregular metal fragments. Most no bigger than a thumbnail, some grain-sized. Dull, scarred, edges blackened as if by intense heat—clearly violent debris.
But what made Erika's breath catch: on these seeming scraps, a faint, steady energy glow pulsed. Not the man's strange power. This was the clean, metallic gold of the Sanctum.
Remnants of micro-circuits? And still charged…
Why give me these?
Erika's head snapped up again toward the man's back. The ascent was slowing. The blurring walls resolved into clear shelves. Above, the architecture seemed to change—no more endless shelves, but the suggestion of an open platform?
Before he could think further, the motion stopped. A soft thud of settlement.
They had arrived. The 'top'?
The man exhaled a smoke ring. "We're here." He turned, his gaze sweeping over the pouch in Erika's hand, then his face.
Clutching the pouch, its contents humming with discordant energy, Erika felt swamped by confusion and weariness. Pain, exhaustion, nightmare aftershocks, the sudden ascent—it all blurred into a numb haze. But one sensation burned through the fog with crystalline clarity: the emptiness. A deep, cellular hunger. His Marks, his very bones, felt scraped dry, aching with a thirst more fundamental than thought.
It was the instinct of a man dying of thirst spotting a muddy puddle. As the unstable but tangible energy from the fragments whispered through the coarse cloth, his already-frayed will dissolved before raw, primal need.
Almost without conscious thought, his fingers tightened. His thumb rubbed a sharp fragment's edge. No incantation. No focused intent. Like parched earth drinking the first drops of rain, the dormant Marks on his arms—and a deeper, older instinct—activated on their own.
A thin, discordant trickle of energy seeped from a few fragments, winding up his fingers, into his skin.
"Ungh…"
The sensation was overwhelming. A violent, near-paralyzing relief. The aching void in his channels and Marks was brutally, blissfully filled. A drowning man gulping air. The body's pain and exhaustion receded momentarily beneath a wave of dizzying fullness.
The Marks on his arms, like dried sponges hitting water, flared to life.
One pulse—a weak but steady glow.
Two pulses—brighter now, throbbing erratically. The golden light of the Sanctum was unmistakable in the dimness.
Then, the light died.
There was no shout. No warning.
The man simply vanished from his spot and materialized directly in front of Erika. A grease-stained hand clamped around Erika's wrist.
It wasn't just physical strength. It was an absolute, suffocating weight that slammed into Erika's very core. The nascent Sanctum energy in his channels was brutally, effortlessly crushed. The golden glow of his Marks was snuffed out instantly, like a frail candle plunged into an ocean trench.
The pouch was ripped from his paralyzed fingers.
Erika's breath caught in his throat. He couldn't move. He couldn't even tremble. He was pinned beneath the sheer, terrifying pressure radiating from the man.
The man's face held no anger, no panic. His eyes were empty, dark voids staring down at the boy. He leaned in slightly, his voice a flat, freezing whisper that seemed to scrape against Erika's bones.
"You are already dead."
The words hung in the air, heavier than the physical grip on his wrist.
The man held his gaze for a second longer, ensuring the reality had sunk in, then released his grip.
Erika collapsed onto his hands and knees, gasping for air that suddenly felt too thin, his wrist throbbing with a dull, terrifying ache. Loren stood frozen a few paces away, his face ashen, having witnessed the instant, insurmountable gap in power.
The man turned his back to them, shoving the pouch into his coat. He didn't look back. He simply raised a hand toward the towering bookshelves lining the platform.
No incantation. No sound.
The massive shelves obeyed. They began to rearrange themselves with a silent, intricate, gear-like precision, parting to reveal a dark, narrow passage.
"Bathe. Eat," the man threw the flat command over his shoulder, his tone returning to that weary, indifferent drone.
He stepped into the passage, his figure melting into the shadows, leaving Erika and Loren alone on the silent platform.
Erika knelt on the floor, staring at his dormant arms, the phantom chill of the man's grip still wrapped around his wrist.
What in the world had they fallen into?