I sat in the dark for maybe ten minutes without touching the floating screen.
Not out of fear. Well, not only. It was more that I knew the moment I reached out and confirmed, something would change permanently — and I'd already had enough permanent changes for one day. So I watched it. It watched me. The cursor blinked with a patience that was starting to feel like sarcasm.
Awaiting confirmation...
I reached out and pressed the text.
The screen exploded.
Not literally — but the single window multiplied into a dozen simultaneous panels that arranged themselves in the air in front of me like the pages of a book someone had unfolded mid-air. Blue, translucent, edged with a luminous filament so fine it looked like engraving. And in the upper right corner of each panel, something I had never seen in any screenshot of any official system — a symbol I didn't recognize, drawn as if by hand, pulsing faintly.
Like it was breathing.
I blinked. The panels stayed.
VOID SYSTEM // v.0.0.1-ALPHA
UNREGISTERED - UNDETECTABLE
HOST : RYN ASHVAEL [ACTIVE]
--------------------------------------------------
GENERAL PROFILE
Official Rank (Public System) : F [ERROR]
True Rank (Void System) : -- [UNDEFINED]
Class : VOID WALKER
Status : FIRST ACTIVE HOST IN 1,247 YEARS
--------------------------------------------------
BASE STATISTICS [LEVEL 1]
HP 12 / 12 [F]
STRENGTH 4 [F]
AGILITY 5 [F]
ENDURANCE 4 [F]
PERCEPTION 6 [F]
MANA 3 [F]
POTENTIAL ??? [OFF THE CHARTS]
SYSTEM NOTE : Statistics displayed reflect the host's current state, not their ceiling. The Void does not start at the top. It starts below zero.
--------------------------------------------------
ACTIVE SKILLS
No active skills unlocked.
--------------------------------------------------
PASSIVE SKILLS
[ABSORPTION] [UNIQUE - HIDDEN RANK] Passive copying of skills and abilities from individuals in prolonged proximity. Automatic improvement of copies over time and through continued exposure. Copies are undetectable by external analysis systems.
Absorption ceiling : UNKNOWN
Available slots : UNLIMITED
WARNING : This skill is permanently active. It is already working. It has been working your entire life.
--------------------------------------------------
TITLE
[PRIMORDIAL VOID]
Passive effect : Undetectable by all analysis systems from Rank F to Rank S.
Passive effect : Complete concealment of true potential.
[??? - LOCKED]
Unlock condition : UNKNOWN
Hint : "It waits for you to understand what you have lost."
--------------------------------------------------
PROGRESSION
Level 1 -> 2 [0% / 100%]
Void points 0
NEW SYSTEM MESSAGE // PRIORITY : HIGH
I read through everything once.
Then I put my hands flat on my knees and stared at the wall in front of me for a long time without doing anything.
Void Walker.
I didn't know that term. Not from official manuals, not from public classifications, not from the three years of awakening enthusiast forums I'd scrolled through at night with the slightly pathetic hope of knowing in advance what I'd become. It didn't exist. Or rather — it had existed, apparently, and for one thousand two hundred and forty-seven years nobody had seen it since.
I reread the line POTENTIAL : ??? [OFF THE CHARTS] and something strange happened in my chest — not quite joy, not quite relief. Something more unstable than that. Something that looked dangerously like hope, which I tried to crush immediately because hope had cost me a lot this morning.
Then I reread ABSORPTION — It has been working your entire life.
And I stood up.
I took three steps toward the window, stopped, came back, sat down. Stood up again. I didn't know what to do with my body suddenly. I thought about prep school where I'd jumped two levels in physics in two weeks after being assigned a seat next to the best student in class. I thought about running training where my times improved regularly and inexplicably. I thought about dozens of small moments scattered across eighteen years that I'd chalked up to hard work, luck, natural observation.
It wasn't hard work.
It wasn't luck.
It was this. It had always been this — silent, invisible, running in the background since the beginning without me knowing, without anyone knowing, without the public System itself being able to read it.
— What even is this, I said out loud to the silence of my bedroom.
The panels didn't answer. The cursor on the waiting message kept blinking.
I sat back down, breathed out slowly, and opened it.
SYSTEM MESSAGE // PRIORITY : HIGH
--------------------------------------------------
Host Ryn Ashvael,
You do not have "no class". You have absorbed the potential of every class in existence without activating a single one.
Every ability that exists in this world carries a frequency. The Void contains all of them. This is why the Slab could not read you — it was looking for a single frequency. You had fifty-three simultaneously.
This is not a flaw on your part. It is a limitation of the system — not yours.
Recommendation : Reveal nothing. Not the System. Not the Class. Not Absorption. Not to your family. Not to future allies. Not to those who are already watching you.
The world categorizes what it understands. What it does not understand, it destroys.
Final note : The Void was erased from official history. That was not an accident. Find out why.
Current progression : 0%
What comes next is yours to decide.
I stared at that last line for a long time.
The Void was erased from official history. That was not an accident.
There was something about the way the System wrote — not cold, not neutral. Almost careful. Like someone choosing their words because they know certain things said too early do more harm than good. That should have been reassuring. It wasn't entirely.
The decision formed without me needing to think it through. Nobody would know. Not the Void System, not Void Walker, not Absorption, not the stats, not any of it. In the world's eyes I was Rank F, Classless, the twelfth documented pathological case in thirty years. That would be my armor. Let people watch a man on the ground — they don't watch what he does with his hands.
I dismissed the panels. Watched them dissolve one by one.
Then I sat in the dark and tried to sleep.
I didn't really sleep.
I lay on my back with my eyes on the ceiling and thoughts moving too fast to settle — fifty-three frequencies, first host in 1,247 years, erased from history, that was not an accident — and every time I started drifting toward something that resembled sleep a new question would form and pull me back up. Sometime around three in the morning I got up, drank a glass of water in the dark kitchen, looked at the lights of Valdris through the window.
The city kept going. Indifferent. Clean.
I thought about Lirien. Not with pain — it was too early for pain, there was still that natural layer of anaesthesia that comes before real wounds. Just with a cold, pragmatic question: would she have reacted differently if she'd known. Whether a Void Walker is worth more than a Rank F to a noble family. Probably not. Probably worse — something unclassifiable, inexplicable, erased from official history for a reason I didn't know yet.
I went back to bed.
I didn't sleep.
The next morning, someone knocked on my door.
Not loudly. Three light knocks, evenly spaced, like someone who isn't sure they have the right place or would prefer you didn't answer. I checked the time — nine twenty. I didn't remember ordering anything. My mother always called ahead. Nobody else had any reason to be standing at my door on a Wednesday morning.
I got up anyway.
She was there.
Black hair cut straight at the jaw, light jacket, a cloth bag held in both hands by the handles in front of her. She looked at me with a perfectly calm expression — neither embarrassed to be there nor particularly assertive about it either. Just present. Natural. Like showing up at a stranger's door the morning after the most humiliating day of his life was something people did normally.
It took me two seconds to recognize her.
Block C. Middle row.
— You live here, she said. It wasn't a question.
— Yeah, I said, because it was true and I didn't have another answer available.
She held out the bag.
— I brought food. You looked lonely.
I looked at the bag. I looked at her. I looked at the hallway behind her — empty, the light at the far end flickering like always, smell of cheap detergent. I ran through the possible explanations. Wrong address. Charity outreach. A mutual friend's contact I'd forgotten about. None of them held.
— We don't know each other, I said.
— No, she said.
Just that. No defensiveness, no awkwardness — like my observation was accurate and didn't change anything about what she was doing. I took the bag because holding it out between us without taking it was starting to feel stranger than taking it. Inside there were two boxes of warm rice wrapped in kraft paper, soup in a thermos, and chopsticks.
— How do you know my address? I asked.
She tilted her head slightly — not to dodge the question, more like she found it less urgent than I did.
— Are you okay? she said instead.
I looked at her. She looked at me. Her expression hadn't shifted by a single millimeter — that quiet, settled attention that gave me the same feeling as the day before in the stadium. Not of being watched. Of being read. Like my answer wasn't really the answer she was waiting for, like what she wanted to know she was finding somewhere else, in something my words didn't cover.
— I'm fine, I said.
— Good, she said.
And she smiled — a real smile this time, small, brief, gone almost as soon as it appeared. Then she turned and walked back down the hallway without adding anything. No explanation. No number. No see you around or hope you like it. Just her footsteps in the corridor and the corner at the end swallowing her up.
I stood in the doorway with the warm bag in my hands and the silence coming back.
The soup smelled exactly like what I would have ordered if someone had asked me what I wanted to eat. Clear broth, ginger, a little pepper. My thing since childhood, the kind of specific preference you never mention to anyone because it's too particular to be worth bringing up.
I went back inside. Put the bag on the table. Sat down.
It wasn't exactly unease.
It was something harder to name — something that felt like being in a room and slowly realizing the walls are closer than they were before. Nothing alarming yet. Just that slight peripheral pressure you notice and decide not to notice.
I ate the soup slowly, watching the brick wall through the window.
It was exactly the right temperature.
That afternoon, the System panels reappeared on their own above my desk — a silent, unrequested update that added a single new entry under the Absorption skill :
UPDATE - ABSORPTION [PASSIVE]
--------------------------------------------------
New entry detected in registry.
TARGET : [UNKNOWN]
Estimated proximity : 0 to 50 metres
Detected ability : [LOCKED]
Ability level : [LOCKED]
Ability nature : [LOCKED]
System note : This has never happened before. Resistance mechanism : UNKNOWN. This entry will remain under observation.
I stared at This has never happened before for a long time.
The System that had described me as a theoretically impossible entity, first host in twelve centuries, bearer of an off-the-charts potential — that System had nothing to say about a girl who brought soup.
Just under observation.
I closed the panels.
Looked at my front door.
Thought about the small smile that had disappeared too fast.
And about the fact that she had known exactly what I wanted to eat without me ever having told anyone.