Chapter 320: Empty

"My little boy... don’t wander into the darkness all by yourself."

The soft feminine voice seemed to pierce directly through his Soul itself. Atlas’s entire consciousness suddenly stopped thinking as his translucent eyes widened in shock, and his head immediately snapped toward the direction from which the voice had come. However, there was nothing there.

Only the endless darkness surrounded him, stretching in every direction without a visible beginning or end. Atlas remained completely silent for several moments as he tried to understand why the voice felt so familiar when he couldn’t remember ever hearing it before.

’Little boy...? Who would call me a little boy?’ He questioned internally before another thought immediately followed. ’O-Only a parent calls their child like that, right?’

Atlas slowly turned his head again and searched the surrounding darkness, but there was still no one present. His expression became slightly more serious as he considered the possibility that he might have somehow imagined the voice.

’Am I hallucinating?’ The thought appeared naturally, but Atlas quickly began dismissing it. This was the deepest part of his own being, a place connected directly to his Soul, and there was no reason for an ordinary hallucination to suddenly manifest as a voice capable of reaching his consciousness from within this place.

More importantly, Atlas knew that the space around him was completely isolated. He had already altered the logic of space around his physical body before entering this state, and he was now inside a completely separate spatial dimension that nobody should have been able to detect, let alone interfere with.

Before Atlas could reach a conclusion, the same feminine voice suddenly came from another direction, although this time the words were completely different. "Do not worry, my child, the hurdles coming your way will vanish eventually when the seed of ◼◼◼◼ sprouts within you."

Atlas frowned even more deeply after hearing that. He couldn’t understand what the voice was talking about, and the mention of the seed of ◼◼◼◼ only made the entire situation more confusing.

He slowly looked around the darkness again before lowering his gaze toward his own translucent hands. ’This is the deepest part of my being. If I don’t allow anyone to enter here, they should never be able to enter it. That means...’

Atlas remained silent as he carefully considered the possibilities. He could instinctively tell that even if the voice belonged to someone he had never met and that existence was somehow residing within the deepest part of his Soul, it should have required his permission to enter this place.

Even the Codex had needed his allowance before it could enter this part of his existence, and Atlas couldn’t imagine someone simply forcing their way inside without him noticing. That left him with only a few possibilities.

Either he was hallucinating and he had somehow been trapped inside an illusion created by someone else, or there was something within his own existence that he had completely forgotten.

The first possibility was highly unlikely, and Atlas immediately knew why. He had already altered the logic of space around himself and was currently inside a completely isolated spatial dimension where nobody could detect his location.

If someone couldn’t even determine where he was, then they shouldn’t have been capable of casting an illusion on him in the first place. As for hallucination, Atlas was equally certain that wasn’t the case.

That left only one possibility that Atlas found genuinely disturbing, ’I don’t have parents at all... So who could call me little boy? And what does the seed of ◼◼◼◼ mean? Is this the Codex’s doing?’ Atlas turned toward the codex for a brief moment before shaking his head as he knew it wasn’t the codex, it never spoke anything nor would it play Hide and seek voice with him.

Atlas immediately focused on his memories. He clearly remembered that when his sense of self had developed, he had been completely alone in this world, surrounded by commoners in that village.

He remembered the people around him, the environment, and the life he had experienced afterward, but the moment he tried to look further into his past, he noticed something strange. ’Huh? All the memories I have start from when I was around nine or ten years old. What about before that?’

Atlas narrowed his eyes and began searching through his memories more carefully. Even a single forgotten memory could have become the spark that connected him to countless others, allowing him to gradually reconstruct what had happened before that point, but there was nothing.

Atlas tried again. He searched through every fragment he could find, carefully examining the earliest memories he possessed, yet the result remained exactly the same.

There was no childhood memory before that age, no image of a parent, no place he could identify as his birthplace, and no moment that could explain how he had ended up alone among the commoners of that village. More importantly, it didn’t feel as though something was blocking his memories.

There was no seal, no barrier, and no mysterious force preventing him from reaching them. The entire portion of his memory before that age was simply empty, as though those memories had never existed in the first place.

Atlas frowned and tried searching once more, refusing to accept the result. He focused harder, digging deeper into his consciousness, but once again there was nothing.

This time, however, a strange feeling of nervousness began spreading through his consciousness, and he suddenly felt as though he was having difficulty breathing despite being in a purely spiritual state.

It was as if he had discovered that something extremely important had been removed from him, something that should have been carved so deeply into his existence that he could never forget it. Atlas opened his translucent eyes and remained completely silent for a long time as he tried to understand the strange emptiness he was feeling.

’Why? Why don’t I remember anything?’

Atlas knew that a person’s sense of self developed long before the age he remembered reaching. More importantly, memories didn’t require someone to possess a complete understanding of themselves before they could exist.

A child could remember places, voices, people, and experiences from an age even when they barely understood the world around them.

Yet...Atlas had nothing.

There was nothing there.

After spending a long time searching without finding anything, Atlas finally released a quiet sigh. ’I’ll think about it later. That voice isn’t coming anymore either.’ He didn’t like leaving such an important mystery unresolved, but there was no point in endlessly searching through memories that simply weren’t there.

For now, Atlas shifted his attention back toward the reason he had entered this state in the first place.

His own Soul.