NOVGO.NET Chapter 320: Void and voices (2)
Chapter 320: Void and voices (2)
The piss-stained hallucination kept grinning.
But Damien no longer heard it.
Because something shifted—snapped—inside him.
That bile-thick voice, that pathetic display, that smugness reeking of surrender dressed up as survival… it all blurred. Faded. Became background noise to something else.
Something louder.
Hotter.
Sharper.
A memory—no, a thousand memories—flashed like teeth behind his eyes.
White sheets. Bleach-stained ceilings. Machines blinking without purpose. His body, raw and thin, reduced to a husk stretched over bones. Living in piss and IV bags while his mind screamed for a fight that never came.
Of course he was bitter. Who the fuck wouldn’t be?
He was a teenager. Barely on the edge of becoming something. And instead, the world shoved him into a bed and said stay there. Said rot quietly. Said accept this.
So yeah. He’d raged.
He’d hated everything. The doctors. The nurses. The goddamn color of the curtains.
But more than that?
He hated the way no one expected him to make it out.
They smiled. Whispered. Gave him pamphlets and pity like that was all a mind like his deserved.
And now, this… thing—this swamp of failure made flesh—had the audacity to look down on him?
’Fuck. This guy is talking to me now?’
Damien’s lip twitched.
A breath hissed through his teeth.
’Not like this.’
His chest rose—shaking, not from pain, but from the fury beneath it. A deep, molten core finally cracking open.
’Who the fuck am I?’
His fingers curled into the stone, the skin tearing, bleeding.
’I’m Damien.’
He blinked.
The world focused. Tight. Clear.
’Do I care about voices?’
His eyes cut toward the hallucination—pale and bloated and already fading.
’I fucking don’t.’
’Do I care about pain?’
His muscles screamed. His veins still ached like glass dragging mana across raw flesh.
’I fucking don’t.’
Those memories—those slow, poisonous years in a bed—they weren’t chains anymore.
They were markers.
He’d survived that.
And now?
Now he was something else.
Something more.
“Those memories…” he muttered, voice low, steady, venomous with clarity, “…they’re here for me to face.”
Not to break him.
To remind him.
He stood—not fast, not clean—but with weight. With choice. With defiance.
The hallucination trembled now. The smile was slipping.
Damien exhaled once.
“Yeah,” he said, voice like gravel. “I buried that shit beneath the bitterness. Because I had to. Because the world handed me an unbeatable challenge, and I spat in its face.”
His feet planted, spine straightening. The plateau flickered fully into view—cracked, broken, but real.
“Now?”
He grinned.
Eyes cold.
Sharp.
Unbreakable.
“It’s time to overcome.”
And in his chest, the mana moved.
Not fast. Not easy. But willing.
He had remembered.
He was not the boy in the bed.
He was the man that clawed out of it.
“I am Damien,” he said again—calm, clear.
The hallucination cracked—first at the edges. Then all at once.
It didn’t explode. Didn’t scream.
It just… slumped.
Like a puppet whose strings had been cut. A bloated, wheezing mockery of defeat evaporating into dust as Damien stepped through the memory of it. No rage. No triumph. Just dismissal.
The real fight wasn’t with that.
It was what came after.
His body still screamed.
The void in his chest still pulsed like an old wound pried open. That aching need for mana—raw, desperate—hadn’t vanished. His limbs still twitched. His head still spun. Every breath scraped down his throat like glass on rusted bone.
But now?
He wasn’t drowning in it.
He was moving through it.
His vision flickered—cleared—then blurred again. The world came in pieces: the split sky overhead, the shattered stone beneath him, the heat still radiating from the collapsed plateau behind.
Pain whispered.
“Just rest.”
Voices murmured.
“You’ve done enough.”
But Damien grit his teeth.
No.
He took a step forward—only one.
The tremor in his leg was violent. His knee nearly gave.
But he didn’t stop.
Another step.
The wind returned, thin and cold against his skin.
Another.
And with each one, he could feel it—
The weight of everything still pressing down. Still there. But not winning.
Not anymore.
His mind clawed at the edges of consciousness, tried to pull him down again into that warm fog. Into that soft, suffocating place where sleep meant surrender and rest meant relapse.
No.
He kept walking.
Every inch forward was a war. Not against monsters. Not against mana. Not even against fate.
But against himself.
The self that had learned to lay down when pain hit.
The self that had trained to curl inward.
He was burning that now.
Step by ragged step.
And when he couldn’t walk anymore—when his legs shook too hard to carry even another inch—
He dropped to his knees.
Breath ragged. Mind splitting.
But he didn’t collapse.
He just sat there. Letting the echoes pass. Letting the panic ride its course. Letting the pain bite and fade and return again.
Until finally—
Nothing.
No visions.
No voices.
No past or pain or even self.
Just… quiet.
Empty.
Like the inside of his skull had been scraped clean.
No hunger. No pressure.
No triumph.
Just a space.
Hollow.
Damien exhaled.
Long. Slow.
And in that breath, the last of the weight left his shoulders.
Not resolved. Not healed.
Just faced.
He stayed there.
Kneeling.
Not in submission. Not in failure.
Just… still.
His body screamed for rest. For sleep. For water. For food. For mana. For anything.
But he gave it nothing.
He simply remained.
The wind slid across his skin like silk now. Thin, fragile, unobtrusive. The stone beneath his knees had cooled. The sky above, fractured though it was, no longer seemed like it wanted to fall.
Everything was quiet.
Not dead.
Just—silent.
And in that silence, Damien found something unexpected.
Serenity.
No pride. No anger. No grief, even. Just the low, even echo of his own breath, the steady beat of a heart that had refused to stop.
His body throbbed. Every part of him called out. But he ignored it—not through force of will, not through pride.
Through understanding.
This state. This place between breaking and becoming. The weightless center of the storm. No momentum. No pressure.
Just being.
’Maybe this is it,’ he thought slowly. ’Maybe this is what he meant… by hollow.’
It wasn’t weakness.
It wasn’t power.
It was the space left behind when everything else was burned away.
The space where something new could begin.
And for now?
That was enough.
And so, he remained.
Kneeling in the hollow.
The last embers of thought guttered out one by one, like dying stars. His breath moved without urgency. His pulse a slow, patient thrum. Nothing clawed at him now. Not guilt. Not rage. Not fear.
The world no longer asked him to prove anything.
And Damien—just for that moment—didn’t offer anything in return.
Until something shifted.
Not loud.
Not sharp.
Just… a presence.
Like gravity remembering itself. Like heat entering a cold room that didn’t know it was freezing.
His eyes opened.
And there it was.
Not a man. Not a monster.
Not a dream.
A being.
It stood before him without form and yet more real than anything he’d faced. Its body seemed stitched from stone and breath, its edges blurred with movement that wasn’t motion—like existence obeyed it, not the other way around.
Primal.
That was the word.
Old, not in the sense of time, but in origin. Before spells, before systems, before even language. This was the kind of presence the world had been built around—not after. The kind of thing that mountains bowed to without knowing why.
And it looked at him.
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