NOVGO.NET Chapter 318: Void
Chapter 318: Void
He collapsed onto the stone, limbs slack, chest rising in harsh, ragged bursts. His fingers trembled, scraped raw from the climb, and every joint in his body screamed with dull fire. The strain he’d forced himself through—the speed, the power, the jump—it came crashing back now like a tidal wave.
His muscles burned. Not sore. Not fatigued.
Burned.
Twitched.
He felt his body failing under its own weight, not from injury, but from sheer overuse. He’d pushed beyond limits. Then pushed past those. And now he was feeling the price.
“Haaaah… haaah…” he gasped, breath uneven. His ribs ached with each inhale.
And then it came.
Something new.
A sensation crawling under the surface of it all. Not pain. Not even exhaustion.
Something emptier.
A hollowness, not in his stomach—though that ached too—but deeper. Further in.
He was thirsty. His throat was a wasteland. Every swallow was like scraping sand through dry bark. His stomach clawed at itself, demanding food.
But alongside those very human cravings… came something else.
A mirrored feeling. Familiar. But not.
His fingers curled, twitching without thought. He felt his skin prickle, as if his body were trying to breathe mana again—but there was nothing left to pull.
And suddenly, he understood.
’Mana…’
The word surfaced in his mind, uninvited. Unstoppable.
He was depleted.
Utterly.
Not just physically—but energetically. Spiritually. Whatever thread he’d managed to grasp during that sprint, whatever tenuous connection he’d made to circulate mana, had burned through him like dry wood in a storm.
And now that it was gone?
Now that his body had tasted it?
It needed it.
Craved it.
Hungered for it the same way his throat begged for water.
His eyes fluttered.
His body spasmed—just a jerk of his shoulder, uncontrolled. A muscle seizing.
And still, that void stayed with him.
Not fatigue.
Not injury.
The sensation gnawed at him.
That void.
That absence.
His hand twitched, fingers clawing weakly at the stone beneath him. Not for support. For connection. For something—anything—that would let him feel the thread again. That would let him pull.
He sucked in a breath. Shallow. Forced. And with it, he tried.
He reached.
For the mana.
It didn’t flood in like before.
It resisted.
His body—a moment ago surging with power—now trembled under its own weight. The flow came in drops, like pulling from a dried well. And each drop hurt. Not stinging, not sharp. Deep. Internal. Like veins pulling too tight. Like organs rejecting the strain.
He hissed. Grit his teeth.
The mana entered his body in wisps, but it didn’t nestle in like before. It scraped. Rubbed against the inside of his chest like sandpaper dragged over raw nerves.
Then he felt it.
A wet heat behind his ribs. Not mana.
Blood.
Inside.
Something ruptured.
’Shit…’
The thought came hazy, swallowed under the rising wave of pain.
And then, in that moment—he remembered.
The hospital bed.
The fluorescent lights.
The sterile chill of the air on his back. Machines beeping softly. A nurse whispering that he needed to stop pushing himself. That whatever strength he had left needed to go toward recovery. Toward survival.
That moment. That first one.
When he’d woken up and realized it wasn’t just fatigue.
It was something worse.
The same sensation now.
The same fragility threading through his chest, coiling around his lungs, twisting through his spine. The ache of something beneath the surface being wrong. Deeply wrong.
’Not again.’
He clenched his jaw, eyes fluttering open to the fractured sky above.
He wouldn’t let that feeling take him again.
He wouldn’t become that body in a bed.
Not here.
Not now.
Damien’s body lay rigid against the stone, twitching from overexertion, but it wasn’t just the physical fatigue that crippled him now—it was the creeping dread of emptiness within. He could feel it like a pulse, like a gnawing echo that wouldn’t stop. The pain, the burn, the thirst—yes, they were real. But this? This was something else.
He tried to breathe, pulling the mana again, but it resisted—slow, thick, like syrup through torn veins. It scraped as it entered, and every trickle of energy felt like it was clawing through old wounds. His body rejected and absorbed in the same breath. His fingers curled tight. Spasms rocked his chest.
’This… this feels familiar,’ he thought grimly.
It was. The helplessness, the panic tucked behind endurance.
It was like then—back when he first realized something was wrong with his body. When movement turned to pain. When fatigue turned to weeks in a hospital. That raw, voiceless fear of knowing your own shell was giving up. Of lying under fluorescent lights with no one who could explain why.
And then came the voices.
First a murmur. Low. Incoherent. As if spoken through water or glass.
“…nael se… soratek…”
His brow twitched.
Then again, louder. Twisting.
“…denar vosh… sil…”
He flinched as the words grew clearer—not because he recognized the language, but because he felt himself understanding it.
“I remember how weak you were.”
The voice slid under his skin, too close to be external.
“You think this strength makes you special? You’re still that boy. Still dying.”
He gritted his teeth.
More voices joined it—mocking tones, distorted fragments of memory. A teacher’s disappointed sigh. His mother’s desperate reassurance. Victoria’s anger. Laughter, twisted and wrong.
“Even now, you run. From the truth. From yourself.”
His fingers dug into the stone.
’Shut up.’
The voice slithered back, threading through the cracks in his thoughts, silk-wrapped and serrated.
“Your pride…” it murmured. “That towering ego. What did it give you, in the end?”
Another breath shook from him. Damien pressed his palm harder to the stone, trying to anchor himself. But the edges of the world felt fluid. Unstable. The wind whispered—not from the plateau, but from somewhere behind his ears.
“You were always so certain,” the voice said. “So loud. So sharp. Thinking you could tear through fate with just words and attitude.”
More voices joined it. A teacher’s voice, blurred by time: “He’s clever, but unstable.”
A doctor’s echo: “He doesn’t know when to stop. That’s dangerous.”
His mother, quiet and broken: “He was so full of life… before all this.”
“Illness brought you low,” the first voice hissed again, now splitting into a dozen whispers. “You—who sneered at limits—were chained to a bed by your own failing shell. Tell us, Damien… where was your cleverness then?”
He shook his head. Gritted his teeth. Tried to breathe through it. The mana crawled in—painful, sluggish—but it was still there. Still real.
’Focus. Come on—’
“Still pretending?” the voice sneered, half in another tongue, warped and ghostlike. “Zaranth… veli’soth.”
Reality shifted again.
He blinked, and for a second the plateau was gone—replaced by a sterile room. White walls. Fluorescent lights overhead. A slow drip of saline. The beeping of machines like a countdown he couldn’t escape.
He gasped and slammed his fist against the ground.
Stone.
Real.
But then—
“Vash kell’eta. Deneri’an vosh.”
—his vision twisted, and the sky split into cracked mirrors. Faces he’d buried. Doctors, friends, the hollow look in his mother’s eyes the day she stopped telling him it would be fine.
“You can’t even handle your own mana,” the voice laughed now, old and infinite. “You think that makes you strong? You’ve tasted something greater—but you are still meat. Still bound.”
Damien clenched his jaw so hard it felt like it might shatter. His other hand clawed at his chest, not from pain—but from the suffocating weight pressing in. Like something was coiled inside him, waiting to break.
’No. No—’
He forced himself to breathe.
One second of clarity—air in, mana crawling with it.
The plateau again. Real. The world, fractured but grounded.
Then the whispers surged back, dragging him under—
And so it began. A tug of war. Between what was real and what had been. Between the raw earth beneath his hands and the dying world of memory. Between now and then. Pride and collapse.
Each time he fought, he surfaced.
And each time he faltered—
The voice returned.
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