Published at 25th of July 2024 6:49 am

Chapter 1790 Land of Nothingness [6]

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Damien's first step was to "understand" once again.

It was the most important thing in this realm, but he was doing it a little differently this time.

He wanted to know what this place was purely out of curiosity. Sure, he wanted to exploit it, but that was meaningless to his current efforts. He was being sincere and honest with the world in hopes that it wanted to see that from him.

In most cases, those with pure intentions would always flourish. Human emotion polluted the connection between people and the world. That wasn't necessarily always a bad thing, but when trying to reach the world to this degree, it was better to empty the mind of such thoughts.

In essence, entering a state of nothingness. It was a little bit of a coincidence for Damien to choose this direction. However, it was indeed what he needed to do.

The deep blackness he saw changed and morphed into the figure of a woman in a white dress. She had incredibly pale, almost translucent skin and a pair of eyes hazed over by clouds of grey. She glowed just slightly like an entity with no physical form. Perhaps it was because she didn't exist in the first place.

Damien immediately understood that the woman was just the physical manifestation of a concept. The changes taking place in her were meant to be interpreted by those who witnessed them. The woman walked, her bare feet causing ripples in the ankle-deep black water. She didn't seem to have a direction, but the further she went, the more the environment changed.

Trees of the same color as the water rose from the blackness. They were only a shade lighter than the void of nothingness, so they were difficult to perceive if one wasn't paying attention.

Before Damien's eyes, the pure white woman moved through the pure black forest. As she continued, the water crept up her legs and hid them from the world. For a moment, they continued to shine subtly, though they were eventually consumed by the blackness.

The water turned material and climbed up the woman's body, wrapping around her left half like vines. The vines sunk into her skin, tainting the purity of her appearance. In only a few seconds, she had become a picture of yin and yang, harboring a deep blackness along with her original self.

The two halves of the woman's body fought. The whiteness tried to keep its form as much as possible. The blackness tried to take as much as it could, greedy for more regardless of how much it had.

It seemed like the woman would be consumed by darkness at any moment.

However, it never happened.

The blackness and the whiteness fought for a very long time, but eventually, they settled in their own halves of her body.

Unfortunately, by the time it happened, the woman was already dead.

The two sides panicked as they lost their host. They understood their power and understood that they wouldn't have any purpose without a host.

The woman's corpse shined with two opposing lights. They stayed together, unable to break apart, and found themselves unable to exert power unless they did so in tandem.

The matter of the woman's body was broken down and reconstructed. A new being rose from the ashes, half black and half white. It no longer had a gender or a pure form, but it had a different kind of beauty that had to be acknowledged.

It walked. As it walked, the black forest changed. Half of it turned pure white, and the other half turned an even darker shade of black.

The world gained a sort of equilibrium, but only at the expense of that innocent woman.

However, her corpse no longer existed. Her mark on the world was erased, replaced with only those two forms. The illusion faded away from Damien's mind. Once it returned to the familiar darkness that represented his lack of thoughts, he opened his eyes.

'So that was…something.'

Damien took a breath.

In a picture like that, it was easy to see the darkness as the villain.

The whiteness had existed in that woman from the start. It was easy to see it as an innocent entity in the entire story.

Even when the woman died, it was stuck with the blackness and led along into a new form. If one was biased towards the whiteness from the beginning, then the story could be interpreted entirely differently.

Perhaps Damien would've possessed a similar outlook if it was a different situation. However, if the story was like that, how could it possibly relate to Death's Hold?

Damien tried to view it through a different lens.

Say that woman was once ordinary. Say she was just a vessel. Say the whiteness possessed her a very long time ago. Say it was the very thing that led her into the blackness in the first place.

Say the blackness and the whiteness were always meant to be one.

What if the woman was merely used as a conduit for that union?

The way Damien interpreted it, the scene seemed to depict something like order and chaos. Two opposing forces of the universe without defined forms that realized they needed a host to continue functioning.

It was a story about the beginning of everything, when "Existence" decided to manifest itself as a world that could be viewed, while Nonexistence remained a black forest that melded into the background and went unseen despite being the other half of the picture.

It was curious. The formation of everything definitely didn't happen like that. Existence never found Nonexistence through a medium. They were born together as two halves of the same entity when the Void decided to define itself. Who created this storyline?

What was its purpose?

'The black forest has to be the same as this one. The form is different, but the nothingness I saw when I first connected to the environment is the exact same as that one.'

Hell, the scene itself manifested inside of that nothingness. It was hard to realize or distinguish it from any other blackness as it had no aura, but since Damien recognized its particularity, he never forgot.

So, then, if this was a forest created through the events of the story, if it was the mirror of a forest that called Existence its home…

'...what does it even mean?'

Right, there was no way that was enough information for Damien to garner anything, but it was a good start nonetheless.

Damien stood up from there. He looked around, meeting eyes with the beasts that watched him.

They growled menacingly. Their voices were deep and guttural, striking fear in the hearts of the fearless.

This was the exact point when others who tried the same thing died.

They interpreted the story in a specific way and decided to act upon it. When they made the wrong decision, the black forest rebelled.

'I'll die too.'

Damien was once again mortal in more ways than one. Here, even he could die.

'Well, that's if the Void doesn't want to save me again. Considering that it was for the sake of the physique's awakening, I doubt it's willing to do it a second time.'

He joked to himself, but he was known to stay jovial.

He had to make his next move very carefully.

He had to act with absolute certainty that his interpretation of the story was the right one.

Otherwise, he would be no different than any of the rest.

He, in all forms, would be wiped from all Existence.

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