The clang of the Voidstone door sliding shut was the last sound in the universe. And when it was gone, it took everything else with it.
The torchlight, the faint scent of damp stone, the feeling of Garrick's curious gaze on my back—all of it vanished. I was left in a silence so profound it felt like a physical pressure against my eardrums, a solid weight pressing in from all sides. The darkness was just as absolute, a perfect, seamless void that my new, enhanced eyes couldn't penetrate. There was no Aether here to see by, no ambient energy to perceive. The chamber's very purpose was to be a vacuum, a pocket of sterile nothingness in a world teeming with life.
For the first time since my second life began, I was truly, utterly alone. The immediate, instinctual reaction was a spike of pure, animal panic. My old, twenty-eight-year-old brain, conditioned by a lifetime of background noise and artificial light, screamed that this was wrong, that I had been buried alive, forgotten at the bottom of the world. It was a sensory deprivation so total it felt like a prelude to madness. I took a stumbling step forward, arms outstretched, and met only empty, indifferent air. My breath hitched, my heart—my human one, the ghost of it—fluttered with a phantom fear.
It was the steady, powerful thump-THUMP of the engine in my chest that anchored me. It was the only thing in this universe right now. A rhythm in the void. A clock ticking in a world without time. I focused on it, letting the primal, unshakable beat drown out the frantic scrambling of my mind.
I sank to the floor, crossing my legs, and forced my breathing to slow. My mother's warning echoed in my mind: Do not lose yourself in the dark. I wouldn't. The outside world was gone, so there was only one place left to go: inward. I had one month to solve an impossible equation. The first step was to understand the variables, not just as I saw them, but as the original Lancelot must have experienced them.
I started with the dragon. I let my consciousness sink into my own chest, past the cage of my ribs, and focused entirely on the source of my new power. To my internal senses, the Dragon Heart was a swirling, chaotic vortex of white-hot energy, a caged star raging against its confines. As I drew my focus closer, I could feel more than just power. I could feel an echo of the being it came from. There was a primal, ancient arrogance there, a sense of effortless superiority that had been earned over millennia. The mana it produced was incredible, dense and potent, but it was also imprinted with this wild, domineering instinct. It had no discipline, no finesse, because its entire philosophy, its very reason for being, could be summed up in a single word: Supremacy. It was a power designed to overwhelm, to dominate, to simply be stronger than anything else. It didn't need technique because its raw output was meant to render technique irrelevant. This was the Path of the Dragon, and it was a path of absolute, uncompromising might.
Then, with a deep, calming breath, I turned my attention to the rest of my body. The human part.
With the same internal sense, I traced the channels the mana was meant to flow through. My mana circuits. Compared to the raging star of the Dragon Heart, they were pathetic. Fragile, thin, and hopelessly complex, a delicate web of pathways designed for precision, not for raw throughput. They were like glass tubing designed by a master watchmaker, and I was trying to run a volcanic eruption through them.
I thought of the Paths I knew from the novel—the intricate spell formulas of a mage, the thousand-times-practiced forms of a martial artist. They were all systems of incredible discipline and control. They were philosophies built around a fundamental human limitation: the need for efficiency because of a lack of overwhelming power. They were Paths of Mastery through Limitation. That was the genius of humanity in this world—they had learned to do more with less.
And that's when the true nature of the problem slammed into me. This wasn't just a hardware and software mismatch. It was a clash of fundamental, diametrically opposed philosophies. You couldn't just apply a human philosophy to a draconic power source. It was like trying to run intricate classical music software on a primal, chaotic supercomputer. The two systems were fundamentally incompatible.
This was the wall the original Lancelot had slammed against for years. But I had one advantage he didn't. I had read the end of his story.
I remembered it clearly now, a passage from late in the novel. A moment of reflection before the final, doomed battle. The author described Lancelot's unique power, the Draconic Human Path, as a perfect synthesis. A state where the overwhelming supremacy of the dragon and the precise control of the human were no longer in conflict, but flowed together in a devastatingly efficient harmony. His power was described as a roaring ocean guided by the gentle, unyielding pull of the moon.
As a reader, I had just accepted it as a cool power-up. A "level-up" moment the hero had earned. The book never explained how. It never detailed the years of agonizing failure, the slow process of discovery, the moment of transcendent genius it must have taken to forge such a perfect union.
The original Lancelot wasn't a fool who stumbled into a solution. He was a genius. He had faced this impossible paradox and, through sheer will and desperation, had solved it. His Path was good; it was a work of art.
And I had to recreate it.
The arrogance of my earlier thoughts—that I would invent something new—evaporated, replaced by a profound sense of humility. I wasn't an inventor. I was a student, trying to solve a problem when I already knew the answer existed. I had the ghost of a blueprint in my head, a description of the final product, but none of the schematics, none of the math. I had to walk the same road he did, step into the footprints of his genius, and arrive at the same brilliant conclusion.
But I had to do it in thirty days.
I sat there in the perfect, silent dark for what felt like an entire day, letting this new, more realistic understanding of my task settle over me. My joy at having this month of silence was now tempered by the sheer, terrifying scale of the work ahead. This wasn't just about training. This was about discovery. It was about proving myself worthy of the power that the first Lancelot had paid for with his life.
In the silence of the chamber, surrounded by nothing, I found my starting point. The flawed blueprint was me. The successful outcome was a memory from a book. It was time to start building the bridge between the two.