Terrible, all-encompassing pain. It began with a flash in his mind and spread through his body like a wildfire. The pain of burning, being pierced with a thousand needles, wracked with poison—everything at once as his brain imagined phantom sensations just to make sense of whatever was plaguing it.
The pain left no place for Zemin to think through. He could grit his teeth into nubs and scream until his voice broke—he probably did, though he couldn't feel it—but it changed nothing. The pain was like a storm, threatening to break the fragile vessel of his body at any moment, and Zemin with it.
He could die, or he could let go. The decision was barely conscious.
He fell—not his body, but his consciousness. A moment of vertigo, and the pain disappeared, together with anything else.
Zemin found himself in a familiar place—the Void Dimension. For a moment, he simply stayed there, gathering his wits and taking relief in the absence of pain.
Then he realized that besides pain, something else was lacking. He couldn't feel his body.
'What happened? I never went so far from my body, even in the deepest meditations!'
Zemin could feel the Void System here, as always. At least something didn't change. But a severed connection with his body—did that mean?..
Zemin forcefully shooed the thought away.
'Can this connection be restored, Void System?'
'An anchor for my soul… What would've happened if I didn't have you? Would've the Memory Injector still worked the way it did? Did it work at all, I wonder?' Zemin sure didn't feel like he had any extra memories.
If Zemin could rub his forehead, he'd do it. Instead, he could only imagine it.
'So both you and Master Makhos were right, in a way. Because of you, I'm stuck here, but thanks to you, I'm alive. I start seeing a pattern… Wait, my body! Do you know if it's still breathing?'
'Good. Still… Master Makhos must worry—and others! I better bring my soul back to my body as quickly as I can.'
Zemin looked around the Void Dimension with his mind's eye. Since there was no concept of space here, he could see everything at once and imagine it as something visual to make sense of it.
His soul was just him, but more ghostly. The Void System was a huge green web of ethereal strands, with the main storage of raw energy attached to it like a cocoon. Finding anything more specific within the web was a challenge.
'Can you show me the strands that lead to my body, System?'
'Right. I'm basically imagining the look of this entire space. Fine, I will have to do it myself, then.'
Zemin focused on the web, looking for the 'connections' the System mentioned. It came to his mind that they didn't necessarily have to be strands, but could be simply some other pieces of the web.
He didn't know how much time he spent exploring the vast Void System. From 'afar' it appeared simple, but the closer Zemin poked his ghostly nose, the more details there were. It had more layers than an onion, and each one Zemin lifted filled him with more and more awe for the System's creators.
While he searched, he found things he never noticed before: dozens of tiniest strings of energy coming to the main storage from the edges of the Void. Compared to the main storage, they were as small as a grain of sand compared to a mountain, but their existence was puzzling and alarming.
Zemin reached out to the origin of one and felt… something else. A hole, or a passageway.
So that's what it was. Zemin retreated.
The strings of energy must've come from stray molecules that came through walls around the portals.
He kept searching and sifting. Some other unknown amount of time later, Zemin found a node in the web that pulsed in a faintly familiar rhythm.
His heartbeat!
When Zemin focused closer, he found several strands which came from the node to his soul. But unlike others, they dove inside, disappearing somewhere under his skin.
He only noticed after trailing them with his mind. They reached outside of the Void, and through them, Zemin felt it—his body. The faintest impression of it.
Zemin's mental smile made the heartbeat node pulse slightly faster.
He reached out for his body with more intent now, using the Void System's strings as a guiding arrow. Zemin felt his body getting closer just from that effort.
Senses began to return to him. The darkness under his eyelids, the heaviness in his limbs, the splitting headache—a pale shadow of the pain from earlier, but still there.
And then a sudden memory stole Zemin's attention.
It came out of nowhere, like a bullet from a sniper, making Zemin lose all his concentration on his body.
Instead, he began remembering a fight he never fought and demons he never killed.