There was no fire anymore.
No pain.
No light.
Only darkness.
Not the kind that pressed in or threatened to swallow him whole, but something deeper, quieter. A stillness so complete that it felt endless. Luke did not feel his body. He did not feel the ground beneath him, or air around him. He was not floating, and yet he was not anchored either. He simply… was,
And even that felt uncertain.
His thoughts came slowly, as if they had to travel across a great distance just to reach him. They were faint. Incomplete. Pieces of something that no longer had a whole to belong to.
Who…
The question dissolved before it could finish.
There was no urgency in him. No fear. No desire to move or act. Just a hollow, quiet awareness that something had been taken. Something important. Something that had once defined him.
Now there was only absence.
Luke drifted in that emptiness for what could have been seconds, or years, it made no difference. Time had no meaning here.There was no before. No after. Just… silence. And then, a voice. Smooth, measured.
Unfamiliar.
Yet it brushed against him with a strange, distant recognition, like hearing a melody he had once known but could no longer place.
[You have slain an Ontological Glitch: The Dream Devourer.]
The words echoed through the void, not spoken aloud, but carved directly into his awareness. Luke did not react immediately.
The meaning did not settle. Did not fit. But something inside him stirred.
[You have eliminated an existential threat... congratulations on your feat host!]
[You have acquire a new attribute: Null Reverie.]
The last phrase lingered..Null… Reverie. It felt… important, heavy. Like a name that carried weight beyond understanding.
Luke's thoughts shifted slightly, drawn toward it.
What is… that…?
The moment the question formed—
Something broke open. Not outside, but inside. Memories surged forward. Violent, and unrelenting. A flood that tore through the hollow silence and filled it with fragments of something real. Cold wind against his skin.
The endless expanse of sky beneath him.
A floating island suspended in a vast, impossibly dark abyss.
Skysea Island.
The Sacred Sanctuary.
Luke gasped, or tried to. The sensation did not fully form, but the instinct was there.
"I…"
His voice did not exist, but the thought rang clear now. He remembered. Not everything,
not even close. But enough. He was a Commonality, Tier 5. One of the lowest among the awakened, forced to survive through grit, instinct, and will alone.
He had been abandoned.
Thrown into the Skysea Island, a graveyard disguised as a proving ground. A place where hundreds of thousands of Chaos Creatures roamed freely, each one more monstrous than the last.
And he had been alone, he always was. Or was he? The memories came sharper now.
Blood. He remembered being violently shoved into a blue portal. Hunger. The constant edge of death pressing against him from all sides.
Running.
Surviving.
Then—
Darkness again.
But not this one.
A different darkness.
A softer one.
A lie.
Luke stilled.
The dream.
Fragments of it lingered, but they were unstable, slipping through his grasp the harder he tried to hold onto them. A house.
Warmth. A voice calling his name. A feeling of belonging. It hurt..Not because he remembered it clearly, but because he did not.
"…It wasn't real," he thought, the words forming with quiet certainty. Something inside him understood that much.
The voice returned.
[Partial cognitive integrity restored...]
[...Memory degradation: 68% loss sustained....]
[...stability threshold: critical, recovering.]
Luke absorbed the information slowly..It did not shock him..Did not overwhelm him either. It simply… was. Like everything else.
'…So I'm still alive,' he thought.
'…Then where am I?'
There was a pause this time..Not long, but enough to feel intentional.
[Location: Skysea Island — Subterranean Cavern.]
The world shifted. Not physically, but perceptually. The darkness around him gained shape. Weight, depth..Luke felt it now, the faint pressure of the ground beneath him, the cold bite of damp air against his skin, the distant echo of something dripping far away.
His body returned to him in fragments. Heavy and unresponsive at first, but there. Real.
He inhaled sharply.
Air filled his lungs, rough and cold, dragging him fully back into existence. His chest rose and fell unevenly as sensation flooded him all at once, pain, stiffness, exhaustion. Alive.
He was alive.
Luke's fingers twitched against the stone beneath him..Slowly, painfully, he forced his eyes open. Darkness greeted him. Not the empty void from before, but real darkness. Thick, suffocating, absolute. The kind that existed in places untouched by light for centuries.
He lay still for a moment, breathing quietly, letting his body adjust.
"…Weave," he muttered weakly.
There was no response.
"…Null Reverie," Luke whispered. "What is it?"
There was a brief pause.
Then, familiar runes and new symbols weaved themselves into existence in front of him. They showed him precisely what he wanted to know.
Attributes:[Scarred], [Noiseless], [Null Reverie]
[Null Reverie] Attribute Description: [A lonely Commonality, discarded by the world, wondered around a desolate island in search of shelter. However, what he found was a sweet dream, the dream slowly taking away his humanity. He became overrun by alien emotions and memories he could not fathom, so he drenched himself in gasoline, and he burned...]
'Dream huh? More like a nightmare really. A sweet and enchanting nightmare.'
He did not really know how to feel about the description. First of all, it was incredibly vague, and not very well–written if he was honest. He had live that experience, up to the point where he burned... so the memories of pain were still embedded deep in his memory. Secondly, the Weave did not really tell him what the new Attribute was supposed to do, but he had received it after slaying a Glitch, so it had to be powerful.
Surely..
A small breath left him. Relief did not come, but something close to it did. A quiet, distant acknowledgment that he had survived something he did not fully remember. Luke pushed himself up slowly, his muscles protesting as he leaned against the cold stone wall behind him. His body felt weaker than it should have, but functional.
That was enough.
The cave stretched endlessly around him, swallowed in darkness.
Silent.
Too silent.
Luke stilled.
Something felt… off.
Not in the way the dream had felt.
Not soft.
Not deceptive.
This was different. Sharp, present and real.
His breath slowed as his senses sharpened instinctively, every fragment of awareness pulling inward. There was something else here. Not far, not close, but there. Watching.
Not with eyes, not in any way he could define. But he felt it. A presence.
Unmoving.
Unfamiliar.
Luke's grip tightened slightly against the stone.
"…Who's there?" he asked, his voice low but steady.
The darkness did not answer.
But it reacted..Subtly. Like something had acknowledged him. Luke's heart began to beat faster, not from panic, but from instinct.
Predator.
Or prey.
He could.not tell which.
"…Weave," he whispered, barely moving.
There was a pause, longer this time. Unusual.
Then, unfamiliar symbols appeared in front of him.
[Unknown entity detected...]
[...classification: unknown....]
[...threat level: error.]
Luke exhaled slowly.
"…That's not helpful."
No response came.
The presence remained.
Silent.
Waiting.
And Luke realized, with quiet certainty, that whatever had been watching him… had been there long before he woke up. And now—
It knew he was awake.