Yohan was seeking the essence of his core through conventional means in a world where the flow of time and reality was ambiguous.
Having exhausted every other option he could think of in this bizarre realm, he had been left with no choice but to fall back on the fundamental method of awakening the core — the same way he would have had to do it in the real world, simply and without shortcut.
Strangely, focusing and seeking here felt easier and less resistant than it ever had in the real world, and with time his mind began growing calmer and more weightless, almost as though the sea stretching out before him had taken the shape of his thoughts.
But there was a problem. Unlike in the real world, all he could do here was shape his core — nothing else. That sounded manageable in theory, but the human mind was not built to sustain a single task indefinitely with nothing else to do, think about, or eat. Left like this long enough, starvation alone would finish him before anything else could.
Especially for someone like me with ADHD, adapting to this kind of singular stillness is no small thing. And there's no telling how long it will take, what the result will be, or what effect it will have in the real world. What happens if I die from emaciation before I finish nurturing? What if I accidentally shatter my core — will it shatter this anomalous world too and send me back to reality?
I dunno, I dunno any of it. But I'll keep doing it because... Yohan opened his eyes slightly, stealing a brief glance at the moon. Something sure is changing.
He held the thought for a moment, then sharpened his focus back onto seeking and seeking alone.
No matter how much time passed, no matter the existential exasperation and mental fatigue that accumulated, he had no choice but to keep going. And it wasn't only his stomach that had begun to feel hollow — even his head had too, subtly.
When he could no longer endure the starvation, pushed to its absolute limit, he... killed himself — slicing the side of his neck. It had become his preferred method. The quickest, the least excruciating, and over before he had to stare too long at the blood seeping out.
After an uncertain interval that felt simultaneously like a brevity and an eternity, he was standing at the shore again. But this time there was a faint, complacent smile on his face and a trace of tired hope in his eyes as he gazed at the indifferent moon.
"It's... changing. Something is happening."
Although...Nothing visible had changed about the Moon's visage, nor its luminance. Even its enormity remained unperturbed.
And yet.
He submerged himself back into the monotonous drudgery and repeated the same ordeal again and again, dying each time he reached the physical limit of what he could endure.
Before beginning his Seeking, Yohan had already died thirteen times. Having now repeated the Seeking and resurrection cycle a near-psychotic number of times, he opened his eyes to the familiar picturesque vista of the moon and sea with an expression caught somewhere between jubilation and nightmare — but almost immediately his face shifted into a deep frown.
H-have I f*cked up again?
The moon was the same as ever in one sense, yet something was different. It was whole now — a complete moon, no longer half-submerged below the horizon but hanging high in the sky, well above the horizon line.
But that wasn't what had unsettled him. He had already anticipated and observed the moon rising gradually. The first time he had practiced Seeking here, it had seemed to climb ever so slightly, almost imperceptibly, but enough to make him suspect. To confirm it beyond doubt he had thrown himself into Seeking with renewed persistence, and the result had been a conspicuous shift in the moon's position.
That shift — which he had attributed to his own efforts rather than the enigmatic nature of this world — had given him an ambiguous but sustaining hope. So he had continued, driven by a soul-tearing willpower he had forged through sheer repetition and the optimism that grew each time the moon moved.
But right now...
What is the meaning of this Black Sun appearing here?
Yohan stared at a point slightly above the moon, nearly directly overhead in the tenebrous sky, his eyes tightening with apprehension.
The Black Sun. The same one he had seen on the other side of this world upon his first arrival, now hanging directly above the moon as though approaching it with quiet, furtive intent.
Are they going to coincide if I keep nurturing my core? Where did this Sun come from?
Yohan lingered for a while, then began shaping his core again with a firm, anxious expression.
The next time he opened his eyes to check his surroundings, he gulped and felt cold sweat trace a line down his spine.
The Black Sun and the White Moon had nearly touched at their edges and would soon coincide and for reasons he couldn't articulate, Yohan couldn't help but find it ominously, hauntingly scenic.
His unblinking eyes reflected the two spherical figures as they drew together, almost equal in size, the sky around them quietly bleeding into gray. Then, abruptly, they coincided.
No — what?! They aren't...
For a moment it appeared they were simply overlapping, one passing over the other, but in the next instant something wholly unexpected happened.
They coalesced.
The sky became incoherent, inexplicably surreal. It was still empty yet a blinding, gloomy luminance erupted from it and engulfed the entire world in a single blink. The sky at its centre — where the two celestial bodies were merging — began contorting and convulsing, as though the heavens themselves were on the verge of tearing apart and cascading down upon him. The violent tremors that accompanied it could be felt through the soles of his feet despite the ground seeming solid beneath him.
Wait? Crap!
Yohan had been slow to notice, but the landscape beneath his feet was shuddering, growing more unstable with each fraction of a second. Before he could process any more of it his feet were frozen in place, transfixed into the sand by some invisible force, refusing to move.
Not that there was anywhere to run in this calamitous expanse.
It lasted only seconds. When his dread proved justified, Yohan instinctively shut his eyes and raised his arms to shield his face and body from the collapsing fragments of the white sky raining down. Even through closed eyelids he could feel a blinding luminance pricking at them — followed by something inconceivably bizarre, a darkness that somehow emanated its own black light. Or an incredulous concoction of both.
For an eternity of second, Yohan felt nothing substantial. Then—
"Aghh...!!" He shrieked, the sound growing more inhuman with each passing second until it couldn't escape his throat at all, swallowed back into him, leaving only a sanity-eroding agony that had nowhere to go.
Every part of his body convulsed violently — a countless barrage of micro-bursting pain erupting from every corner he could control and every corner he couldn't. Every gut, muscle, bone, flesh and vein, everything that constituted his human body groaned with a silent, suffocating agony. He could almost feel every fibre and cell of his existence being simultaneously tortured and obliterated and rearranged, a palpable sensation of his own soul being scraped raw. And slowly, one by one, he lost all sense of time, then emotion, then intelligence, and finally consciousness itself.
***
A dishevelled, seemingly frail figure lay still on a smooth, comfortable greyish-white terrain.
Then his eyes opened, blinking slowly a couple of times as his disoriented, hazy vision gradually cleared.
With a perplexed expression he stared up at the mundane grey, humid sky for a moment.
Then with a low growl he sat upright, eyes widening as he glanced around his surroundings with a muffled pant, noticing a calm, exquisite grey-blue sea stretching out before him — it gave off a strange sense of relief and peace.
So...I am still alive? Or...
His thoughts were slow and scattered when something familiar brushed against his hand on the terrain and he reflexively threw himself aside.
Almost immediately after pulling back, with the mild light filtering down from somewhere above the grey sky now giving him a clearer view, he caught sight of the eerie liquid and felt a repugnant wooziness wash over him.
What in the...?! He swallowed, planting both hands on the terrain, which was blanketed in fine greyish-white dust.
The eerie warm liquid streamed all the way to the grey-blue sea, seeping into it — yet miraculously it didn't appear to mix, or perhaps something far more surreal was occurring, as Yohan observed the phenomenon from the side of the stream.
The liquid was crimson red — the deep, ominous suggestion of a stream of blood.
Isn't...it the same liquid I bathed in several times?! He steadied himself against the wooziness and straightened upright. I'm sure it's, but... He looked in the direction it was flowing from.
Is it blood? Of whom? Nah, what the... Why blood? What's happening? What am I thinking?
The question should be where it's coming from?
With a deep shudder he began walking in the direction the blood river was flowing from, which happened to be swallowed by a heavy grey mist that obscured everything beyond a hundred metres from where he stood. The river itself radiated a cold dread just by being looked at.
As he approached the source, the grey fog thickened, caressing his skin with a strange dreamy quality, until barely anything was visible beyond three metres in any direction.
However, as he pressed further through it the fog seemed to lighten, almost dissipating, or more accurately, being absorbed by something ahead, however faintly.
Further in the distance, visible past the line of his shoulders on both sides, stood gargantuan, surreal obsidian-like trees. In shape they closely resembled those that had enclosed the throat-like passage, though seemingly hundreds of kilometres away, their silhouettes discernible at the very edges of the world, as though encaging it entirely. For a fleeting moment Yohan sensed something embossed on their trunks — then it was gone, and he couldn't recover the impression. Not that he had much curiosity to spare for anything beyond the singular, consuming desire to return to the real world.
For some reason unlike any of his previous resurrections, he felt unusually lethargic and drained, his body pale and sore, numbed through and aching faintly with a burning sensation threading through his veins. But...what he could do except walking and enduring?
STEP!
Can I really fight something that doesn't exist?
STEP!
Can I really blame something that doesn't exist?
STEP!
Can I really expect anything from something that doesn't exist?
SIGH...
Here, there's only I... and I alone.
I can't fight anyone for anything but myself.
I can't blame anyone for the consequences but myself.
I... can't expect and hope from anything or anyone but myself.
Isn't it the same for people like me in the real world?
We claim to fight through life, casualities, fate and the world, yet honestly, most of the time we are struggling and fighting through our own selves.
When faced with failure, I often try to blame the system, the foolishness of others, the cruelty of time, or circumstances themselves, as if shifting the weight elsewhere could silence the emptiness slowly eating through me. But if I am honest, truly honest, then somehow, in one way or another, I would still be responsible for most of it.
I place trust in people. I expect things from them. Yet deep down, I always know that even when I fail to trust myself, there is still no one more trustworthy than myself. Even if I understand myself poorly, nobody understands me better. Even if I expect little from myself, there is no safer place to put hope than within my own hands. At the very least, I would no longer have to suffer the disappointment that comes from waiting for others to do something I should have done myself.
Wish I could always remain this honest with myself.
Like many others... I can't be perfect.
But—
I sure can be better.
Soon after, Yohan crossed through the dense gray fog and arrived at a vast, picturesque field stretching endlessly on both sides of the path ahead.
A flicker of astonishment passed through his tired eyes.
On either side of the narrow road bloomed contrasting fields of roses extending as far as he could see—boundless black roses to his left and endless white roses to his right. Between them, cutting through the center of the path, flowed a narrow stream of eerie red liquid resembling blood, though far thinner now than before.
The sight alone ignited a faint spark of hope within him.
Releasing a tired breath, Yohan continued forward while carefully keeping to the narrow edge of the path, trying not to let the crimson stream touch his feet and avoiding looking at it for too long whenever possible.
As he walked further, he noticed something else.
Gravestones.
They stood scattered among both rose fields at irregular yet considerable distances from one another, partially buried beneath flowers.
Passing by them, Yohan noticed strange inscriptions carved into the stones—symbols, runes, and unfamiliar writings that looked inconsistent with one another, as if each gravestone belonged to a completely different script or civilization. They remained too far away for him to properly examine, and he had little desire to step into either field.
Indifferently, he increased his pace and casually began counting the gravestones as he passed, keeping himself between the flowing crimson stream and the unnaturally perfect rows of roses.
Eventually, while traversing deeper into the strange landscape, he noticed the gray fog ahead growing denser once more.
Several meters away—
the path seemed to end.
Or perhaps, something new simply waited beyond it.
By this point, Yohan had counted every gravestone he passed before finally approaching the dense gray fog ahead.
There were sixteen in total.
Eight within the field of black roses.
Eight within the field of white.
Something about it felt simultaneously ordinary and deeply wrong, though Yohan couldn't understand why.
Before he could dwell on it further, his heart dropped and colour drained from his face instantly.
I'm cooked...
Two enigmatic, human-shaped apparitions stood at the far edges of both opposite fields, right where the fog thickened.
Staring directly at Yohan with unmoving sternness.
A cold quiver ran through his throat all the way down to his feet and halted.
For a few moments, his mind simply refused to process what he was seeing.
Then, tightening his fists and forcing a shallow breath into his lungs, he continued moving.
He was still trembling faintly, eyes locked on them with extreme caution
As the distance closed and their forms grew clearer through the haze, his steps slowed unconsciously.
They were indeed staring at him. Or rather— they should have been. Because neither of them possessed eyes. No, they were faceless.
One figure was wholly white, the other wholly black. Their bodies seemed coated in a faint, muted glow, not bright enough to illuminate anything around them but just sufficient to define their outlines against the fog. Smooth and featureless from head to toe, they looked less like living beings and more like silhouettes cut cleanly from light and darkness themselves.
There were subtle differences between the two apparitions, however — the black figure appeared slightly taller, its frame broader and more imposing, exuding a formidable, malevolent presence.
The white figure stood in complete contrast, yet somehow equally unsettling.
Although neither possessed a face, Yohan couldn't shake away the irrational feeling that the white figure was smiling at him.
Both of them were pointing at something behind them, further into the grey mist and higher.
It was only then that Yohan noticed two colossal pillars rising behind them, swallowed almost entirely by the grey fog, only their faint outlined silhouettes visible as they climbed all the way to the grey skies above. He couldn't determine their full height, but they were gargantuan and cyclopean, each at least fifty metres broad.
Yohan stopped paying attention to the apparitions and steadied his thoughts, pressing deeper into the fog. Soon a two-metre wall emerged ahead of him, crimson liquid trickling down from its edge — narrower now than ever.
He climbed over it, only to find another wall immediately above. Then another. And another... It didn't take long to realise these were the steps of some megalithic staircase.
On either side, colossal dark grey pillars rose in close rows through the mist, climbing upward and vanishing somewhere into the grey sky above.
I swear if it's some tormenting loop of stairs...but what can I do even if it is, except keep hoping to return...home.
A dull screaming numbness spreading through his limbs and burning from the relentless climbing.
In the beginning he had tried to count the steps, but after the thirty-first something he simply lost count — the numbers grew cryptically faint and then cleared from his head.
Yohan took one final climb fueled entirely through conviction and a slow poisoning hope, and collapsed onto his knees, breathing heavily, holding eyes open with great efforts.
As Yohan struggled to keep his eyes open, His eyes caught a glimpse of an ancient, exquisite archway towering directly above him — nearly white, archaic, abnormally large relative to his own size, its surface engraved with mysterious runes.
And that wasn't all. The platform on which he was resting stretched out into a circular expanse of dark material that resembled neither stone nor metal, its surface streaked with slow-moving crimson veins crawling beneath it. Surrounding the platform like an amphitheatre were ethereal monolithic white chairs bearing engravings similar to those on the archway, though Yohan felt even more dizzy and disoriented trying to look at them, and had not even a shred of curiosity left to decipher any of it. The entire platform bore a striking resemblance to a sacrificial altar of some heavenly court.
Each chair rose high into the haze, formed from pale mineral-like structures that curved upward like ribs or antlers, thin white vapour drifting constantly around them.
He indifferently estimated there were perhaps thirty to forty chairs or even more. And behind them, heaven-piercing pillars disappeared into the fog above, standing in absolute stillness like silent guardians, each bearing similar yet distinctly unique runes.
Among them, four chairs had been visibly dilapidated.
At the centre of the platform stood an excruciatingly incongruous hovel. It resembled an old countryside house — weathered but intact,
A dark red stream flowed slowly from its open doorway, creeping across the platform in branching trails before gathering into a single current that passed beneath the archway and continued down the endless stairs below.
Behind the hovel, hidden beneath layers of white mist, stood something incomprehensible. Its oppressive presence alone sent a thundering chill through the body — the kind that made any sentient being feel an involuntary compulsion to submit. Yohan couldn't bring himself to look at it for more than a fraction of a second without a splitting pressure building behind his eyes, followed by nausea, disorientation, and a gradual inability to organise thought coherently and in that brief instant, the dreadful sensation of losing his sanity entirely.
Yohan didn't realise when he almost leaned to bow towards it, holding back his composure by smacking his temple several times.
He scurried cautiously to the hovel, which was lit by a ghostly light. Three things caught his attention immediately.
On the right end of the hovel sat an empty crude wooden cradle with a murky white tunic draped over it. At the complete opposite end, a makeshift bed had been formed from layered animal hide and wool into a thin mattress, a single greyish pillow at one end beneath a coarse wool-and-leather blanket. And directly in front of him, in the centre, rested a mundane grey tomb — no markings, no symbols, no runes of any kind — with sixteen or seventeen petalless flowers laid across its surface.
Everything looked old and worn with time, yet inexplicably clean. Almost immediately he noticed the red stream was flowing from somewhere nearby — though not from the tomb itself. As he straightened his gaze he spotted a small, peculiar mirror on the front wall, unremarkable in size yet odd in every other sense, and from behind it the crimson liquid was seeping out, washing across the tomb's base as it crept out of the hovel.
The odd thing was that the mirror reflected everything in front of it.
Everything except him.
Yohan felt nothing. Under any other circumstance this alone would have unsettled him to the core of his soul — yet he approached the tomb with a blank face, removed the slab, and bent to look inside.
Flick—!
"Throne of the Fallen."