Seeing the Dementor shake its head, Hoffa felt a chill run down his spine. He had merely asked a probing question, never expecting the creature to understand him. He reached out, attempting to lift the Dementor's cloak.
But the Dementor evaded his touch, pointing to its hooded head with a pale, decayed finger.
Miraculously, Hoffa understood its meaning. Retracting his hand, he closed his eyes and activated his psychic field.
Instantly, the Dementor vanished. The tangible room disappeared, along with the intangible darkness.
The world before Hoffa's eyes transformed completely.
There were no landscapes, no vibrant life, no excess colors—only trembling white lines against a black backdrop. The lines were chaotic and without order, resembling a crude sketch of a comic strip.
In the Dementor's place sat a small figure made of tangled lines. It trembled, huddled in a corner, hugging its knees. It had no facial features or movements, just the motionless posture of someone clutching their knees.
Looking at the figure composed of chaotic lines, Hoffa felt an inexplicable surge of sympathy and an overwhelming sense of bottomless loneliness. The solitude seemed like a black hole, a force as inescapable as gravity, draining the surrounding world of hope.
Hoffa stood up and extended his hand. Miraculously, a stream of vivid colors flowed from his palm, stretching outward as he attempted to touch the small figure made of tangled lines.
Before he could make contact, the figure raised its head. No sound emerged, but a speech bubble appeared above its head, displaying the words: "Enough. The void will eventually consume everything."
Hoffa was struck like lightning. A profound sense of identification overwhelmed him.
He suddenly understood why this creature had allowed him to approach.
Could it see him as one of its own?
The thought made all the visions vanish. Hoffa exited the psychic field and returned to the real world.
There was no trembling figure, no crude, pale world of lines. Only a decayed, icy, black-robed form remained, floating in the air, devoid of hope and utterly disconnected from sensation.
The realization that the Dementor might see him as a kindred spirit terrified Hoffa. He looked at his hands, then at the creature before him.
Desperate to differentiate himself from the monster, he tried recalling his own pain—something as devastating as Harry's loss of his parents. Yet no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't summon any feelings of anguish. His life seemed like a blank sheet of paper.
He couldn't grasp his own pain, nor could he capture any joy. He felt like a floating duckweed in a vast ocean, unable to find footing, purpose, or meaning.
The pervasive sense of truth began to unnerve him.
The shadow of emptiness clung to him, impossible to shake.
Eager to escape this prison, he longed to reunite with his friends, to return to Hogwarts.
He dashed to the door of the confinement room, attempting to channel his power to force open the iron gate. But his magic failed him completely.
He pounded on the door, trying to make noise.
But his fists struck the walls without a sound.
After struggling madly for over twenty minutes, Hoffa realized that his battle was not against the confinement room but against the vast, inescapable machinery of the world's rules.
The Ministry of Magic, Azkaban, St. Mungo's Hospital, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Gringotts—all these institutions formed something immense, something called society.
And in the face of this colossal entity, he was as insignificant as an ant. The notion of bending the world to his will was nothing more than a fool's delusion.
Understanding this, he let out a bitter laugh.
"Too real," he muttered to himself.
He clutched his head, slid down against the wall, and sat.
In the pitch-black confinement room, Hoffa began a long period of solitude. His mind ticked away the seconds.
Tick.Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Tick.
Time flowed like a slow, endless river. He had never felt it pass so sluggishly, so devoid of meaning.
There was nothing for him to do. The dark room seemed enchanted, leaving him neither hungry nor in need of relief, unable to produce or store magic.
Falling into an abyss of nothingness, he entered a state of utter idleness, sitting cross-legged in the darkness, meditating endlessly.
When one meditation ended, he would start another, each cycle sharpening his mind. But the sharper his clarity, the more unbearable it became.
He was completely isolated from the world. His only companion was the silent Dementor, which, after its single utterance, fell into eternal silence.
Crushing loneliness tormented him, making him long for his friends with an uncontrollable yearning—for Miranda, for Aglaia.
He replayed past events repeatedly, trying to extract some essence from them to sustain himself.
But it was futile.
Three days later, he stopped meditating.
He chose sleep, curling up on the ground in an attempt to escape time.
Yet the cursed room seemed to block all means of evading solitude. No matter how hard he tried, Hoffa couldn't sleep.
He lost the ability to sleep, to eat, to relieve himself.
But he remained alive.
Alive in the purest sense—simply existing.
A week later, he began tracing patterns on the floor with his fingers to pass the time. But the surface was as hard as iron, and no matter how he tried, he couldn't leave a mark.
Two weeks later, he started singing to himself, even trying to amuse the Dementor. But the creature offered no response. It neither looked at Hoffa nor at anything else, as if utterly indifferent to his plight.
Half a month in, Hoffa's will began to waver. His biological clock collapsed, and he lost all sense of day and night.
A creeping madness invaded his thoughts, and the unspeakable loneliness started to consume his sanity bit by bit.
After a month, Hoffa began to despise reason itself. He couldn't understand why humans needed reason, why they calculated time, measured days and nights, created complex rules, or unleashed cruel beasts.
At this point, he no longer thought of Miranda or Aglaia. Instead, he felt only revulsion—disgust at the fate of others and an even deeper disgust for his own destiny.
Faint illusions began to arise in his mind. He started to see hazy figures flickering in the darkness. These figures were indistinct and ever-changing: sometimes sitting, sometimes standing, sometimes pacing slowly around the room.
But whenever he tried to take a closer look, he realized the shadow was himself. The one sitting was him, the one standing was him, and the one pacing was also him.
Realizing this, he sat back down in disappointment.
Three months passed.
Hoffa began to loathe everything. He despised this cursed system, this damnable pursuit of exploration. He detested everything in this world—money, sex, men, women, morality, and order.
He had been in confinement for an indeterminate number of days.
His senses grew sharper and sharper. On the silent nights, he could hear the distant sound of spiders spinning their webs. He could hear the slow condensation of water droplets on the ceiling, taking an hour to form before finally falling. He could even hear the heavy breathing of prisoners far away, lost in their own acts of madness.
This heightened perception brought only greater and more enduring torment.
His mind worked frantically, trying to extract some useful information from this torrent of meaningless stimuli, but it was futile. There was nothing to discern.
He began to lose control of his imagination, fantasizing about places he had never been, about things he had never done, and even about the existence of another version of himself. He started talking to himself.
"Why me?"
Hoffa asked the darkness, pacing back and forth.
"Why must I endure all of this?"
"Perhaps this is what you wanted all along?"
The other version of himself sat across from him, calmly analyzing the situation.
"Shut up!"
Hoffa whipped around, snarling furiously.
"Really? Then what do you want?"
What do I want?
What do I want?
What do I want?
Hoffa muttered manically, "I want to be great. I want to become the most extraordinary, the most unique existence in this world!"
"Then that uniqueness is loneliness."
The other version of himself spoke softly, "Eventually, you will abandon your school, your friends, your beliefs—everything."
"It doesn't matter. I don't care at all."
Hoffa shuddered violently, clutching his head and shaking it furiously.
"Impossible! Impossible! Stop talking."
He shook his head madly, trying to cast the voice out of his mind. "I won't abandon my school. I won't abandon my friends."
"You will. You definitely will. Because you were born destined for greatness."
"Shut up!!"
Hoffa roared.
He jolted awake.
There was no one before him. Everything that had just transpired was nothing more than a hallucination born of his extreme loneliness.
He buried his face in his hands, trying to suppress his chaotic thoughts, to stop his mind from spinning out of control.
But it was impossible. His mind, desperate to affirm its own existence and to reject the solitude and confinement he faced, charged ahead like an unbridled horse, unstoppable by any force of reason.
His subconscious, entwined with chaos and madness, dragged Hoffa into a strange and inexplicable mire of illusions.
In this hallucination, he saw countless faces floating in the void, each vibrant and vivid. All the faces were his own.
The face of a boy.
The face of a young man.
The face of a middle-aged man.
The face of an old man.
The face of a man on the brink of death.
They were all himself, from different times.
The past, the present, and the future.
"We are unprecedented and unrepeatable. We transcend time."
They spoke in unison, smiling at Hoffa, as if inviting him to join them, to become one of them. Hoffa even noticed an empty space among them, seemingly reserved for him.
Unconsciously, he stepped forward. The moment he merged with the crowd, it felt as though he was being utterly torn apart.
He writhed in agony, screaming, but his psychic field had already separated from his physical body, becoming a detached observer of his own suffering.
Everything was absurd and utterly mad.
(End of Chapter)
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