Alaric blankly stared at the endless void. He didn't care anymore.
He was already dead. His body simply hadn't realized it yet a dead body that still breathed.
The Voice echoed again. "Alaric... What do you desire?"
Alaric, whose mind was still a blank slate, answered, "Death."
The Voice chuckled. "Death... I didn't expect to hear that as an answer."
"Who are you?" Alaric asked blankly, unsurprised that his voice had even returned.
"My bad... I forgot to introduce myself. People... no, Arcanists call me Void. Since I don't have my own voice, I use the voices of others."
Alaric turned his neck, straining to look around. "What do you want?"
"I am not the one who wants something... it's you." The Voice chuckled again, the sound rippling across the dark expanse.
The silence of the void didn't last.
The moment the entity labeled itself as Void, a catastrophic dam broke inside Alaric's mind.
The numbness shattered, and a chaotic cyclone of human emotion everything he had suppressed while crawling through the dirt flooded back all at once.
First came the denial, sharp and frantic.
No, this isn't real. Arcanists? The Void? I am a merchant. I belong in the Western Sector, surrounded by stone houses and ledgers.
His mind violently rejected the impossible emptiness around him, desperately trying to reconstruct the walls of his study, to feel the solid weight of the obsidian lamp under his palm.
It was a refusal to accept that his neat, structured world had been completely obliterated.
But right behind the denial crept a dark, desperate greed.
The realization that he was speaking to something otherworldly sparked a primitive urge.
If this entity was real, if it controlled this space, then it could give it all back. Images of his vast wealth, his gold coins, his silver circles, and the absolute authority he held over his financial empire flashed across his consciousness.
He wanted his status back. He wanted to be the titan of the Western Sector again, standing above everyone else.
And with greed came a cruel, intoxicating flicker of hope. If this thing could speak, it could act. It could stitch his severed arm back to his shoulder.
It could restore his vanished fingers. He didn't have to be a dead body that breathes. He could be whole. He could live.
Then, the hope twisted, turning black and poisonous as it morphed into an all-consuming anger.
Volt.
The name alone felt like a brand scorching his thoughts.
The image of the noble's calm, composed face framed by the windowpane burned in his mind.
The man who casually dismissed child slaves as "inefficient" had broken him like a toy. A white-hot fury, violent and suffocating, eclipsed everything else. Alaric didn't just want to survive anymore he wanted to tear the aristocracy down.
He wanted to see Volt bleed onto the dirt, stripped of his haughty composure, begging for the very paradise he had weaponized against Alaric.
Finally, the rage burned itself out, leaving behind a cold, hollow acceptance. He looked at the endless nothingness. The anger didn't change the fact that his car had gone over the cliff. The hope didn't grow his arm back. He was broken. He was here, at the mercy of a voice that stole his own words to speak.
The emotional tempest gradually receded, leaving Alaric's mind completely bare, raw, and waiting.
The chuckle of the Void rippled through the weightless expanse, vibrating through Alaric's non-existent chest as the stolen voice spoke once more.
"So..." the voice echoed, its tone dripping with a terrifying, rhythmic curiosity. "What do you desire, Alaric? And to achieve that... what are you willing to sacrifice?"
Alaric finally regained some of his wits. "Anything."
The Voice chuckled again. "Anything?"
"Anything reasonable," Alaric corrected him.
"We'll see about that, won't we?"
The Voice grew louder, sounding as if it were drawing near.
At a certain distance, Alaric could feel the entity standing directly in front of him, yet he couldn't see it.
He knew the voice was not human, not a god, not a demon it was just Void.
"What is this place?" Alaric asked, observing his surroundings.
"A place where Arcanists come after their mind realm."
The moment Alaric heard the phrase "mind realm," a memory sparked.
He remembered Tylor mentioning something about it a passing comment that he might not have to enter his own mind realm.
The exact words eluded him, but the core of the memory lingered.
The Voice continued, "If you want to become an Arcanist, just like the person you are currently thinking of, you have to complete my three tasks."
This time, the one who chuckled was Alaric. He didn't care that the Voice could read his thoughts about a conduit user his reflection was vague enough that anyone could have guessed it.
"What? Do I have to find some magical stones for you?"
"No." The voice remained calm, a chilling mirror to Volt's composure. "Your first task is that you have to clap physically."
The words hung in the endless nothingness, sharp and mocking.
Clap physically.
For a fraction of a second, Alaric's mind simply refused to process the absurdity of the command.
Then, the realization of what he was being asked to do slammed into him, triggering a violent, white-hot explosion of rage that eclipsed everything he had felt before.
"Are you damn mocking me?!" Alaric roared, the sound tearing through the vacuum of the void. His non-existent chest heaved with a phantom fury that made his vision blur into a chaotic haze.
The image of his severed arm lying alone in the dirt of the Vath Hills flashed before his eyes.
The memory of his vanished fingers, dissolved into nothingness before he even fell, burned in his thoughts like acid. He didn't even have a physical body he could see or feel in this hellscape, let alone two hands to strike together.
"I don't have an arm! I don't even have fingers on the other!" Alaric spat, his stolen voice trembling with a mixture of sheer disbelief and unadulterated hatred.
He wanted to reach out and strangle the unseen entity, to rip the calm, mocking tone right out of its throat. "It's physically impossible! You know damn well I can't do it!"
The weightless expanse offered no comfort, no echo to his screams. The fury surged through his broken mind a desperate, raging protest against the sheer, unfair cruelty of the universe.
He had survived a cliff drop, an arcane blast, and the loss of a limb, only to be toyed with by a cosmic entity playing a sick joke.
The Voice didn't waver. It didn't grow angry or defensive. Instead, it remained utterly calm.
"Is it?" the Voice whispered from the darkness right in front of Alaric's nose, its tone dripping with absolute indifference.
"That's not my problem."
The indifferent words hung in the darkness, leaving Alaric alone with the cold weight of the impossible task.
The blinding rage in his mind gradually receded, forced into a corner by the sharp, calculating instincts of a businessman who had spent his life solving problems when backed into a corner.
He forced himself to think. The silence of the void stretched for a full minute, undisturbed.
If this entity called itself the Void, and this was a realm beyond the physical world, then the rules of the Western Sector didn't apply here.
He couldn't clap without his limbs, but he was still a dead body that breathed. If he was meant to fail, the entity wouldn't have bothered giving him tasks.
"If I must clap physically," Alaric spoke aloud, his voice steadying as he locked his unseen gaze toward the position of the entity,
"then you need to give me back my physical reality. Send me back to the bottom of the cliff where I was dropped so I can do it. Or bring my reality here."
The Void did not answer with words. Instead, a sudden ripple tore through the weightless expanse.
With a series of dull, heavy thuds, objects began to materialize out of the emptiness, floating within arm's reach of Alaric.
First came the blood-slicked pebble he had stared at in the dirt.
Then, the crumpled, skeletal wreckage of the teal car appeared no longer burning, its blue coal power spent and extinguished, smelling of cold metal and ash. And finally, drifting listlessly in the dark, was his severed left arm.
Alaric stared at the pale, detached limb. He was not done.
"I need a needle," Alaric demanded into the dark, his jaw tightening. "And a strong thread. And five wooden, strong finger-like sticks."
A faint glint of silver caught the non-existent light as a thick, heavy steel needle and a length of coarse, industrial thread materialized. Beside them, five splintered, rigid wooden sticks carved to the rough length of human fingers hovered before him.
Alaric didn't hesitate. He looked at his right hand the blunt, fleshy stump where his fingers used to be.
Gritting his teeth, he grabbed the first wooden stick. Without a second thought, he drove the blunt wood forcefully into the raw, ruined skin of his palm, anchoring it deep into the flesh and muscle. He repeated the motion four more times, his breath catching as he forcefully inserted the remaining sticks into his hand until he had a makeshift, rigid claw.
The pain was a distant, white-hot roar, but his mind was focused entirely on the threshold of survival.
He leaned forward in the weightless void, opening his jaws, and bit down hard on the cold, stiff fabric of his severed sleeve, anchoring the weight of his left arm in his mouth. Using his newly engineered wooden fingers, he clumsily pinned the thick needle against the floating wreckage of the car, forcing the coarse thread through the eye.
The process was an agonizing, mechanical nightmare. With his arm gripped tightly between his teeth, Alaric lined up the torn, ragged flesh of his left shoulder with the empty, raw socket on his torso. He used his mouth to manipulate the severed limb, holding it in place against his neck and jaw.
Then, using his blood-soaked wooden digits to clumsily push the heavy steel needle, he drove the metal straight through his own skin.
He didn't scream. He pulled the thread taut with his teeth, looping it back through the muscle and skin, binding the dead meat back to his living frame. Stitch by stitch, he crudely lashed the severed limb back to his shoulder, knotting the thread with a brutal, desperate jerk of his jaw.
When the final knot was secured, the left arm hung rigidly against his side unmoving and devoid of circulation, but attached.
Alaric swung his rigid, wooden-fingered right claw forward with everything he had left, slamming it directly against the palm of the sewn, lifeless left hand.
A single, dull, wet smack echoed through the endless void.
The physical clap was complete.