The victory against the Abyss Lector had left a strange and unsettling peace in its wake. The immediate, existential threat was gone, but in its place was a profound and unnerving mystery. Two days after the raid, our small, secret council returned to the ritual site in the Whispering Woods. The air was no longer thick with the cloying taint of corruption; instead, it felt thin, quiet, and strangely hollow, like a room just after a grand orchestra has ceased playing.
Our team moved with a practiced, professional caution. Jean established a secure perimeter, her senses sharp for any lingering threats. Kaeya prowled the edges of the clearing, his eye scanning the trees for any sign of enemy scouts, his demeanor one of coiled, watchful tension. Lisa, carrying a bag filled with strange, humming instruments, walked beside me as we approached the main attraction: the ley line nexus.
It was no longer a pit of violent, violet energy. Where the corrupted heart had once pulsed, there was now a tranquil, mesmerizing pool of light. It was a deep, impossible sapphire blue, humming with a gentle, serene power that felt neither elemental nor abyssal. It was beautiful, but it was the beauty of something wholly alien.
"Extraordinary," Lisa breathed, her scholarly curiosity overriding any sense of fear. She began setting up her instruments, small devices with crystals and copper wiring that whirred to life as she placed them around the nexus. "The Harmonic Resonator didn't just purge the Abyssal hymn. It seems to have created a vacuum in the ley line's 'song'. This blue energy… it's the world's raw, untyped potential rushing in to fill that void. It's pure, but it's also completely unstable. It's the magical equivalent of a newborn god's first breath."
My role was to be her living sensor. With my attuned senses, I was the only one who could get close and describe the feeling of the energy. I knelt at the edge of the shallow crater, closing my eyes and extending my senses towards the blue light.
"It feels… quiet," I reported, trying to find the words. "It's not like Anemo, which feels free and active. This feels… expectant. Like a blank page waiting for a word to be written on it. There's immense power here, but it has no direction, no intent."
As I focused, I felt a subtle shift. A discordant note in the tranquil blue hum. My eyes snapped open. Deep within the sapphire light, a tiny, almost imperceptible flicker of violet appeared, like a drop of black ink spreading in clear water.
"Lisa!" I shouted, scrambling backwards. "Something's wrong! There was a remnant, a piece of the corruption left behind!"
It was the Lector's final curse. A seed of its power, left dormant, now reacting violently with the pure, untyped energy of the nexus. The tranquil blue pool began to churn. The gentle hum escalated into a shrieking, tearing sound. The beautiful light warped, twisting in on itself. It was no longer a pool; it was a vortex. A shimmering, chaotic, multi-hued tear in the very fabric of reality.
"It's a catastrophic resonance cascade!" Lisa yelled, her face pale with horror as she grabbed her instruments. "The two opposing forces are tearing the ley line apart at a conceptual level! It's creating an unstable planar rift!"
"Everyone back!" Kaeya commanded, his voice a sharp crack of authority. He and Jean immediately moved to shield Lisa, their Visions flaring to life.
But the rift had already found its target.
I felt it not as a physical pull, but as a fundamental law of physics being rewritten exclusively for me. The space around me seemed to warp and bend, gravity twisting into a spiral that centered on my very being. The portal, a chaotic maelstrom of raw magic and Abyssal void, had latched onto me. Why me? Perhaps it was the faint Abyssal taint I still carried from the reading. Perhaps it was the nature of my soul, a foreign entity from another world. Whatever the reason, I was an anomaly, and this tear in the world wanted me gone.
"Arthur!" Jean screamed, lunging forward, a wall of Anemo erupting from her sword to try and push me away from the pull.
Kaeya thrust his hand forward, a jagged wall of ice erupting from the ground between me and the portal, a desperate attempt to sever the connection.
It was useless. The force was not something that could be blocked or pushed. It was the universe itself folding in on me. I drove my sword into the earth, the blade groaning in protest as I was lifted from my feet, the ground itself seeming to fall away from me. I saw their faces—Kaeya's, a mask of grim desperation; Jean's, a portrait of pure, undiluted terror. It was the last thing I saw of my world.
With a final, silent, sickening lurch, I was pulled into the vortex. The world vanished in an implosion of light and color, and then… there was only the Abyss.
It was not a place. It was the absence of place. It was not darkness; it was the absence of light. My physical body was gone, and I was reduced to a singular point of consciousness adrift in an infinite, screaming void. There was no up or down, no beginning or end. Time stretched and compressed, a single second lasting an eternity and an eternity passing in a single second.
My mind was assaulted by a cacophony of non-sound. I heard the thoughts of forgotten gods, the echoes of dying stars, the silent, patient hatred of entropy itself. My memories began to fray. The image of Jean's face dissolved into meaningless pixels of light. The sound of my mother's voice became a distorted, alien frequency. My name, Arthur, began to feel like a word from a language I no longer understood.
I was being unmade. My very identity, my sense of self, was being erased by the overwhelming, absolute reality of the void.
Panic, raw and primal, was the only thing I had left. On the verge of complete dissolution, a single, defiant instinct screamed out from the deepest core of my being. It was the will to exist, the refusal to be erased. And it reached for the only power I had that was as absolute as the Abyss itself. The golden sun of my King's template.
I didn't just summon it. I poured everything I was—every memory of Earth, every moment in Mondstadt, every ounce of love for my friends, my desperate, terrified will to live—into that single point of internal light.
[EMERGENCY PROTOCOL: SOUL ANCHOR ACTIVATED]
[MANA BURST ... 100% OUTPUT]
A cataclysmic explosion of pure, golden energy erupted from my point of consciousness. It was not an attack. It was a declaration. I AM.
The golden light formed a perfect, shimmering sphere around my soul, a tiny, defiant pocket of reality in the un-reality of the Abyss. Inside my golden bubble, there was order. There was silence. I could think. I remembered my name. I remembered Jean's face. Outside, the silent chaos of the void raged against my shield, a pressure so immense it felt like I was at the bottom of a sea of crushed stars.
But the cost was staggering. Maintaining this "Soul Anchor" was draining my life force at an astronomical rate. My System, my only connection to a reality with rules, flashed with frantic, crimson warnings.
[WARNING: HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT DETECTED - CONCEPTUAL VOID]
[Internal energy reserves being expended at a catastrophic rate.]
[90%... 70%... 50%...]
[WARNING: SOUL INTEGRITY FALTERING]
I was in a race against my own annihilation. I didn't know how long I had been adrift. Minutes? Centuries? The void offered no answers. All I knew was the steady, terrifying depletion of my power. My golden shield began to flicker, the chaos outside pressing in.
[30%... 20%... 10%...]
[WARNING: IMMINENT SOUL DEGRADATION]
Just as the last of my energy was about to gutter out, just as my golden shield was about to collapse and deliver me to the all-consuming silence, I felt it. A different pull. A violent, tearing sensation. The unstable rift that had swallowed me was about to spit me out.
I saw a flash of a different reality—a sky of hazy gold, jagged brown rocks, the glint of strange crystals.
Then, a brutal, violent ejection.
I went from a state of non-being to being slammed back into a physical body with the force of a meteor strike. Pain erupted through every nerve as I crashed onto hard, dusty, unforgiving ground. The transition was so violent I blacked out for a moment, my senses completely overwhelmed.
When consciousness returned, it was to the symphony of my own agony. My body was a tapestry of bruises and fractures. My head pounded. My left arm, the one I had used to block the Lector's attack, felt like it was filled with ground glass.
The System was a cascade of red alerts.
[CATASTROPHIC ENVIRONMENTAL EXPOSURE DETECTED]
[Abyssal Taint Sustained: User's soul is now permanently marked by the Void. Long-term effects unknown.]
[Internal Energy Reserves at 1% - CRITICAL HIBERNATION IMMINENT]
[Anemo Vision Connection... OFFLINE. Requires ambient environmental recalibration.]
With a groan that felt torn from the depths of my soul, I pushed myself up. My vision swam. I was in a vast, deep, and utterly alien canyon. The towering rock walls were a deep, dusty brown, scarred with glowing purple cracks. Strange, luminescent crystals grew from the ground like twisted trees. The air was thick with dust and a strange, heavy pressure that made it hard to breathe. The sky above was not the clear, hopeful blue of Mondstadt, but a hazy, oppressive gold.
I was alone. I was broken. And as I looked around at the desolate, alien landscape, a single, horrifying certainty settled in my heart.
This was not Mondstadt.