The transition from the living forest to the dead mountains was not a line but a gradient of dying hope. The soil grew thin and rocky, the air sharp with the taste of ozone and dust. Through his Mana Perception, the world became a study in depletion. Where the glade had been a symphony of verdant green and silver flows, here the energies were grey, sluggish, and thin, like the last breaths of a dying thing. Patches of absolute void appeared in his sight—places where not even the faintest trace of mana lingered, just sterile emptiness.
Kaelen moved with a grim, silent determination beside him, her staff tapping a steady rhythm on the stone. Her own mana signature, a weave of analytic grey and white, was tightly controlled, minimizing its footprint in the desolate landscape. "Conservation is key here," she muttered, her voice barely above the keening wind. "There is little to draw on. Our own reserves must last."
Chen Mo found the Sovereign's Tusk reacting to the environment. The golden, heartwood-derived threads within its layered structure dimmed, as if depressed. The silver-void threads, however, grew more active, humming with a quiet resonance. It was as if the blade was drinking in the ambient emptiness, finding sustenance in the lack.
[Ambient Energy Source Shift Detected.]
[Primary Source (Life/Ley Energy): Negligible.]
[Secondary Source (Void/Cosmic Background Resonance): Elevated.]
[Artifact 'Sovereign's Tusk' is passively converting void-resonance to sustain baseline function. Efficiency: 12%.]
So the blade could feed on nothingness. A useful, if unsettling, trait.
They made camp that first night in the lee of a giant, wind-sculpted boulder. There was no wood for a fire. Chen Mo used a sliver of his will and a trickle of the Tusk's stored energy to spark a tiny, cold blue flame on a flat stone—a function of the void-energy conversion. It gave no warmth, only a faint, actinic light that pushed back the oppressive dark. Kaelen observed the process with rapt attention, her fingers twitching as if taking notes.
"The conversion is direct, with minimal entropy loss," she whispered. "Your Protocol's energy manipulation is brutally efficient. It treats magic like a mathematics problem."
"It gets results," Chen Mo said, chewing on a piece of elven waybread. It tasted of nuts and honey, a vivid reminder of the life they'd left behind.
"Results come with costs. What did it ask for, to forge that blade in the grotto? I felt the contract snap into place when you agreed to my terms. It's always bargaining, isn't it?"
Chen Mo didn't answer. He watched the cold flame. She was too perceptive.
On the second day, the landscape turned truly alien. The ground was covered in a fine, grey powder—not ash, but something denser, like pulverized bone. Strange, crystalline formations jutted from the earth, singing a faint, discordant tone in the wind. His mana sight showed these crystals were not inert; they were tiny, twisted knots of corrupted spatial energy, leaching what little vitality remained from the air.
And then there were the whispers.
At first, Chen Mo thought it was the wind. But as they descended into a deep, silent valley between two jagged peaks, the whispers resolved. They were not in any language. They were fragments of sensation, of emotion, bleeding directly into the mind. A surge of loss so profound it made his chest ache. A flash of rage as cold as the void between stars. A pang of hunger that had nothing to do with flesh.
"Psychometric echoes," Kaelen said, her face pale. She had her staff raised, its tip glowing with a soft, protective white light that seemed to dampen the mental intrusions. "The land is remembering its death. The trauma of whatever happened here was so vast it scarred reality itself. Don't listen to them. Focus on your core, on your breathing."
It was easier said than done. The whispers seeped in, threatening to unravel his focus. The Protocol offered a solution.
[External Psychic Intrusion Detected. Low-coherence emotional residue.]
[Countermeasure Available: Activate Cognitive Dampening Field. Cost: 5 PP/minute. Will filter non-critical emotional data.]
He activated it. The world didn't go silent, but the crushing despair and rage faded to a distant murmur, like a bad song playing in another room. The cost was acceptable.
The valley floor was a cracked, dusty plain. In the center stood the remains of what must have once been a forest. Not trees, but their ghosts: towering, smooth pillars of the same grey stone, shaped like petrified trunks, their branches broken stumps against the bleak sky. The Ashen Grove. The name was literal.
And at the far end of the valley, where the mountain walls closed in, was the source of the Blight.
It was not a creature, nor a plant. It was a wound. A vertical tear in the air itself, about twenty feet tall and rippling like a heat haze. From it seeped the familiar, sickly violet energy of the Blight, but here at its source, it was mixed with something else: strands of profound, lightless black that seemed to devour the very glow of the corruption. The tear pulsed slowly, like a heartbeat. Around its base, the ground was not just dead; it was inverted. A pool of swirling, anti-light, a liquid void.
[Target Identified: Spatial-Anomaly Type-3 ('Reality Tear').]
[Associated Emissions: Chaotic-Entropic Energy (Blight), Pure Void-Energy, High-frequency Psychic Resonance.]
[Hypothesis: Tear is a persistent wound from the 'fundamental fracture' referenced by Entity Kaelen. It is leaking energies from a corrupted or null-dimensional layer into the physical plane.]
[Primary Objective Update: Determine method of closure or stabilization. Direct destruction inadvisable.]
Before they could formulate any plan, the guardians of the wound made themselves known.
They rose from the pools of anti-light and detached from the shadows of the stone trees. They were creatures of the void and the Blight fused into a single, horrific form. Their bodies were shifting, semi-corporeal shapes of darkness, shot through with pulsing violet veins. They had too many limbs, which formed and dissolved like smoke, and their "heads" were featureless except for a single, weeping eye of Blight-light. They made no sound, but their approach screamed directly into the mind: a cacophony of hunger and hatred for all that is.
[Hostiles Identified: 'Blight-Void Amalgams' x6.]
[Threat Assessment: Tier 2. Capabilities: Phase-shifting (partial intangibility), Psychic shriek, Corrosive touch (Blight & Void).]
[Weakness: Concentrated life-energy, Ordered void-energy (Protocol-derived), Sustained spiritual pressure.]
"They're drawn to living presence!" Kaelen shouted, her staff flaring brighter. A beam of pure white energy lanced out, striking the lead amalgam. The creature shrieked silently, a portion of its smoky form dissipating, but the violet veins within it glowed brighter, knitting the void-flesh back together. "They heal from the Blight!"
Chen Mo didn't wait. He drew the Sovereign's Tusk. The blade, feeding on the valley's void-resonance, hummed with eager power. The gold threads within it were faint, but the silver-void core blazed.
He charged the nearest amalgam. It flowed around a clumsy spear thrust, its form becoming intangible. But as the Tusk passed through it, the blade's Spatial Anchor Weight property triggered. The localized reality around the edge of the blade solidified, forcing the creature to become corporeal for a fraction of a second to interact with it.
The Tusk's Life-Drinker Edge sheared through the manifested flesh. Where it cut, the violet Blight-energy didn't just bleed; it screamed and evaporated, and the black void-stuff recoiled as if burned. The wound did not heal.
It works, he thought with fierce joy.
But there were six of them. They learned. They began to attack in pairs, one becoming tangible to lash out with claws of corrosive darkness while the other remained phased, trying to flow past his guard to reach Kaelen. Her white energy beams kept them at bay, but each blast drained her visibly; her mana signature in Chen Mo's sight flickered.
He fought with a new blend of instinct and the Protocol's cold advice. Cognitive Acceleration triggered, slowing his perception. He saw the shift in an amalgam's density before it attacked. He ducked under a sweeping claw, pivoted, and drove the Tusk up through its core. It dissolved into a shower of dissipating shadows and fading violet sparks.
[Hostile Eliminated. Experience Gained.]
[Protocol Points Awarded: 80 PP.]
The points were higher. The threat was greater.
He took a glancing hit on his shoulder from another creature. It felt like ice and acid. His leathers sizzled, and a cold numbness spread. The system warned of minor Blight contamination and void-energy necrosis. He pushed it aside, focusing on the next target.
Kaelen, meanwhile, had stopped direct attacks. She was chanting, drawing complex geometric patterns in the air with her staff's light. The patterns settled on the ground, forming a shimmering, protective circle around her. The amalgams clawed at its edges but were repelled by the structured, orderly energy. "Buy me two minutes!" she yelled. "I can try to disrupt the tear's resonance! It might weaken them!"
Two minutes was an eternity. Three amalgams remained, now circling him with predatory intelligence. They stopped attacking randomly. They began to herd him, using phased movements to cut off his retreat, driving him towards the unstable ground near the void-pool.
He was tiring. The Cognitive Acceleration cooldown hadn't reset. The numbness in his arm was spreading. One of the creatures lunged, fully tangible. He parried, but a second one struck from his blind side, phased through his block. A claw of darkness raked his side. Agony, cold and deep. He stumbled.
[Significant Injury: Void/Blight Corruption. Biological degradation: 8%.]
He fell to one knee. The three amalgams converged, their single eyes blazing with malignant triumph.
No.
The thought was pure defiance. He wouldn't die in this godforsaken valley, food for shadows.
He slammed the pommel of the Sovereign's Tusk into the grey earth. He poured not just his will, but his concept into the blade. The Protocol's directive: Survive. Ascend. His own driving need: To cut a path through the darkness.
The blade's Resonant Core flared. It had been passively feeding on void-energy. Now, Chen Mo forced it to activate. He channeled all the converted energy, not into an edge, but into the blade's Conceptual Authority—the budding power to cut barriers and bindings.
"CUT!" he roared, not with his voice, but with his entire being.
A wave of visible force, shimmering silver and edged in desperate gold, erupted from the Tusk in a perfect, horizontal circle. It was not a physical shockwave. It was a conceptual severance.
The wave passed through the three amalgams.
For a moment, nothing. Then, the violent violet Blight-energy threading through their forms snapped, like severed cables. The cohesive link between the corrupting Blight and the devouring void within them was cut. The creatures didn't scream. They simply came apart. The void-stuff dissipated into the hungry air. The Blight-energy, untethered, flashed with a final, sickly brightness and then winked out.
[Hostiles Eliminated. Experience Gained.]
[Protocol Points Awarded: 240 PP.]
[Skill Developed: Conceptual Authority application. New Sub-Skill: 'Severing Strike' (Novice).]
[Artifact 'Sovereign's Tusk' – Energy reserves depleted. Void-resonance conversion rate reduced to 1% until recharge.]
The Tusk's light dimmed to a faint glow. Chen Mo gasped, the effort leaving him spiritually and physically drained. The wound in his side burned.
But the path to Kaelen was clear.
Her chant reached a crescendo. The patterns she'd woven shot from the ground like rails of light, spearing towards the pulsing Reality Tear. They didn't attack it. They latched onto its edges, a framework of pure, rigid order attempting to stitch the ragged wound closed.
The Tear shuddered. The flow of violet-black energy stuttered. The whispers in the valley rose to a deafening shriek of protest.
For a glorious second, it seemed to work. The Tear shrank by a foot.
Then, from within the depths of the lightless void at the Tear's base, something looked back.
An eye, vast and lidless, the color of forgotten graves, opened in the pool of anti-light. It held no intelligence Chen Mo could recognize, only an endless, yawning need. A tendril of pure void, thicker than an ancient tree and cold enough to freeze time, lashed out from the pool. It didn't move through the air; it unfolded across space, bypassing distance.
It struck Kaelen's lattice of light.
The structured energy didn't shatter. It unraveled, its mathematical perfection coming apart at a fundamental level. The backlash threw Kaelen through the air. She landed hard, her staff clattering away, its light extinguished. She didn't move.
The tendril retracted. The eye remained open, fixed on Chen Mo. The pressure of its gaze was a physical weight, crushing, annihilating hope.
[Entity Detected: 'Void-Leviathan' (Fragment/Manifestation).]
[Threat Assessment: TIER 4. CONCEPTUAL HAZARD.]
[Capabilities: Reality distortion, Conceptual erosion, Absolute nullification.]
[Host Survival Probability: 0.03%. Recommendation: Immediate evacuation impossible. Alternative: Appeasement or distraction.]
The Protocol's cold analysis was final. They couldn't fight this. They couldn't run.
The giant eye blinked slowly. The whispers in the valley coalesced into a single, silent command that echoed in the vault of his skull:
FEED THE VOID.
It didn't want to kill him. It wanted him to walk into the anti-light pool. To become part of the nothingness.
Chen Mo looked at the unconscious Kaelen. He looked at his dim, drained Tusk. He looked at the monstrous eye, the source of the Blight, the heart of the dead mountains.
The World Quest marker pulsed frantically.
He had no PP for a miracle. He had no strength for a heroic stand.
All he had was a Protocol that saw a Tier 4 entity as a "conceptual hazard." And a desperate, terrible idea.
The Protocol's primary directive was host survival. To survive, sometimes you had to gamble everything.
He took a step forward, not towards the pool, but towards the rippling edges of the Reality Tear itself. He raised the drained Sovereign's Tusk, pointing its tip not at the eye, but at the wound in the world.
"Protocol," he whispered, pouring every ounce of his intent into the mental command. "New contract. Maximum priority. Use the Tusk as a conduit. Not to attack the entity. To attack the Tear. Use every point we have. Use my vitality as a catalyst if you have to. Not to close it. To widen it. Just for a second. To let more in."
The system was silent for a heartbeat. Then, a prompt appeared, not in blue or yellow, but in bloody, urgent crimson.
[CRISIS CONTRACT PROPOSED: 'Controlled Overload'.]
Objective: Use bonded artifact to forcibly destabilize and briefly widen Spatial-Anomaly Type-3.
Risks: High probability of artifact destruction. High probability of host catastrophic mana burnout. High probability of attracting further void-entity attention. Potential for uncontrolled reality collapse (localized).
Potential Payoff: The Void-Leviathan fragment is tethered to and sustained by the Tear. A sudden influx of uncontrolled void-energy may disrupt its manifestation, forcing retreat or reabsorption.
Cost: All available Protocol Points (Currently: 720 PP). All stored energy in 'Sovereign's Tusk'. 30% of host's baseline life-force.
Accept? Y/N
It was a madman's bargain. To save themselves from the void, he would invite more void in, hoping it would confuse the monster.
He looked at the lidless eye. It watched, patient, infinite.
Chen Mo selected Y.
The Sovereign's Tusk exploded with light. Not its own light—it was a conduit, a sacrificial lens. The 720 PP vanished. The blade's layered structure screamed as the Protocol funneled raw, mathematical power through it, aiming at the delicate, frayed edges of the Reality Tear. Chen Mo felt a wrenching pull in his gut as his life-force was siphoned away.
A beam of pure, structured void-energy, shot through with the Protocol's signature blue latticework, struck the Tear.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic. The Tear didn't widen smoothly. It convulsed. It ripped open another five feet with a sound like reality tearing its own seams. A howling gale of raw, chaotic nothingness blasted forth—not the directed hunger of the Leviathan, but the mindless storm of the unformed void.
The giant eye flared with something akin to shock. The tethers connecting it to the Tear strained. The orderly hunger of the Leviathan was suddenly awash in a tsunami of chaotic, undirected void-stuff. It was like a refined predator thrown into a maelstrom of its own base elements.
The eye blinked, wavered. The crushing pressure lessened. With a final, silent ripple of frustration, the lidless eye sank back into the anti-light pool, which churned violently. The pool itself began to shrink, the Leviathan fragment withdrawing, sealing itself away from the sudden instability.
The uncontrolled void-storm raged for ten more seconds, scouring the valley floor, erasing two of the stone trees into motes of dust. Then, with the Protocol's energy spent, the Tear snapped back to its original size, its edges glowing with a dangerous, unstable energy.
Silence returned, deeper and more profound than before.
Chen Mo collapsed. The Sovereign's Tusk fell from his numb fingers, its light utterly gone, its surface covered in a web of fine, black cracks. It wasn't dead, but it was broken, again.
He was alive. Barely.
[Crisis Contract: RESOLVED.]
[Host Status: Critically Depleted (Life-force deficit, Mana burnout).]
[Artifact Status: 'Sovereign's Tusk' – Critically Damaged (Inert). Repairs will require Tier 3 materials and synthesis.]
[World Quest 'The Rot's Source' Updated: Void-Leviathan manifestation forced into dormancy. Reality Tear remains unstable. Source neutralized (temporarily).]
[Reward: 2000 PP, 'Void-Touched' trait acquired (minor resistance to void-energy, minor attraction to void-entities), Protocol Clearance Key Fragment (1/3) acquired.]
He lay in the dust, unable to move, staring at the bruised sky. They had survived. They hadn't won. They had traded one catastrophe for another, bought time with a broken blade and a piece of his soul.
Somewhere in the silence, he heard a groan. Kaelen was stirring.
The Ashen Grove was quiet. The immediate threat was gone. But the Tear remained, a ticking clock. And he had a feeling the Leviathan would remember the taste of his Protocol's ordered void. It had been… intrigued.
The journey back would be a nightmare. But they had to move. Before the whispers started again, or before something else came to investigate the burst of fascinating, alien energy that had just torn at the seams of the world.