"Within every answer lies a greater question."
"—𝕯𝖊𝖒𝖔𝖓 𝖔𝖋 𝕶𝖓𝖔𝖜𝖑𝖊𝖉𝖌𝖊—"
Darkness.
It enveloped him entirely, a smothering, suffocating void. There was no light to discern shapes, no warmth to grasp sensations, and no sound to anchor his awareness. His consciousness floated untethered, suspended in the abyss.
...what is happening? Kiyotaka realized something off immediately.
He tried to observe and asses his condition.
Moments stretched into what felt like eternity, and he was quickly forced to conclude the inescapable truth:
He could see nothing, feel nothing, and do nothing but think.
A dream? No. Too structured for a dream, too lucid. But... what else could it be?
Awareness crept in like a whisper. Something is fundamentally wrong about this state.
Neurological paralysis? However, sensory deprivation on this scale is practically impossible, not without artificial constraints. Even my breathing—there's no awareness of airflow.
His thoughts were suddenly cut short as fire erupted within him, raw and unrelenting.
Pain.
The word failed to describe the searing agony that coursed through every fiber of his being. It didn't ebb or pulse; it consumed. A searing ache in his limbs, a dull pounding in his chest, and a sharper sting radiating through his skull—it was as if his body had been subjected to unthinkable forces while his mind remained elsewhere. Yet despite the torment, he could neither writhe nor react.
He unconsciously sifted through possibilities, dissecting each hypothesis in order to get out of this condition. But no answers came to him. Each theory unraveling under its own contradictions. The logic he so heavily relied upon to master the situations around him now offered no salvation.
No input aligns with reality as I know it. Am I unconscious? Trapped in some chemically-induced hallucination...?
His inner analysis stuttered as an alien presence intruded upon his mind. A voice. He could hear it. But it wasn't just a voice. Something far greater, vast and oppressive intruded upon his thoughts. It felt like the slow shifting of an immeasurable weight pressing against his mind—like the slow shifting of ancient tectonic plates.
At first, it was incomprehensible—a blur of soundless whispers and indecipherable intent. Then it poured in all at once, breaching his defenses as though they were mere illusions.
Fragments of knowledge, disjointed and chaotic, flooded his consciousness in a deluge. Symbols—complex, interwoven, and seemingly arcane—etched themselves into his awareness without his consent. His thoughts, once sharply ordered, were scrambled and scattered, a storm of insights he neither wanted nor needed. Every concept carried an impossibility that defied the laws he knew:
A serpentine figure spiraling infinitely.
An ancient tome whose ink shifted and reformed.
A majestic throne above the gray fog.
A dark river flowing eternally.
Stars winking into existence, only to collapse moments later.
The imagery clawed at his psyche, each revelation embedding itself in his mind as though inscribed by a chisel on stone. He couldn't look away—not that he could close nonexistent eyes in this nothingness—but neither could he avert the endless cascade.
This... is a problem... Am I going... to die here?
If he could have laughed at the absurd understatement of his inner voice, he would have.
But at the crescendo of the torment, the presence culminated in a singular moment. A figure stood amidst the storm of knowledge—a silhouette cloaked in robes of shifting glyphs, with countless eyes radiating an intelligence that saw him, stripped him bare, and found him wanting. One of its appendages, amorphous and shadowed, extended toward him.
There was no opportunity to fight, no means to resist. But when it touched him—his mind, or whatever fragment of self he still possessed—the void shattered.
"—𝕯𝖊𝖒𝖔𝖓 𝖔𝖋 𝕶𝖓𝖔𝖜𝖑𝖊𝖉𝖌𝖊—"
The pain didn't vanish so much as recede, leaving a ghost of itself embedded deep within him. Awareness returned in gradual waves as if unthawing from a frozen eternity. And finally—after what seemed like hours suspended in an abyss—Kiyotaka managed the simplest action, one that felt monumental in the aftermath:
He opened his eyes.
The remnants of an oppressive darkness retreating to the edges of his awareness like smoke dissipating into the night. For a brief moment, he didn't move or breathing.
Where am I? The surroundings offered no answers.
Instead of the cold sterility of a dormitory or the mundanity of a classroom, he found himself in a decrepit room. Its dim lighting came from an oil lamp perched precariously on a weathered wooden desk. The shadows it cast seemed alive, shifting with an unsteady rhythm.
He blinked, attempting to bring order to the chaos in his vision. The peeling wallpaper, curling like dried parchment, gave the room an aged and decayed air. A musty scent, thick with mildew and tinged with the acrid bite of burnt wax, invaded his nostrils. The furniture seemed to protest its existence—every piece scarred by neglect and the merciless passage of time.
His gaze landed on a cracked mirror leaning against the wall. Fragments of a face stared back, unfamiliar yet familiar as well. Dark hair fell unevenly around sharp, angular features. The hollowness of the eyes belonged to someone he didn't recognize immediately.
He frowned. Who is this guy?
He raised his hands, inspecting them with a deliberate slowness that bordered on detachment. Pale and thin, scarred along the knuckles and marked by the wear of years. These were not his hands. This body was not his.
His lips twitching of their own accord. A transmigration?
The transfer of consciousness or soul to a foreign vessel. It was a concept he had come across before—not in terms of possibility, but as an intellectual exercise. But now it was his reality.
—how?
Pain pulled him out quickly. They originated from his limbs—a dull, omnipresent ache that underscored every thought.
A quick glance confirmed the source. Red, angry welts marred his arms, winding from his wrists to his elbows like burning brands. The skin had split in places, exposing raw flesh underneath that wept faintly in the cold air. On his legs, deep, purplish bruises stretched across his thighs and calves, their borders tinged with sickly yellow.
They quickly regenerated themselves at visible speed. It was definitely a strange sight to see. Also, such wounds would normally led to death for someone of this house's caliber. Where did the man get that power?
Memories began to filter through the haze, disjointed and half-formed, like puzzle pieces drenched in water—one fragment stood out.
"Lucien Eberhardt."
The name tasted foreign on his tongue, but it stirred something—a connection forged without consent.
Images came unbidden: crowded streets drenched in fog, candlelit rooms cluttered with dusty tomes, and fleeting impressions of secretive things—arcane, forbidden, tantalizing. It seemed that this body's previous owner had been a tinkerer in mysticism—authentic mysticism.
From what he could piece together, Lucien Eberhardt—this body's previous owner—had been more than just a dabbler in esoterica. He wasn't chasing charlatan theatrics or sleight of hand.
However, mysticism violated everything he understood, everything logical. Such constructs fell apart under scrutiny, revealing the wires and pulleys that produced the illusion. To the cold machinery of reason, mysticism had no place—no foundation, no logical end. Yet here he was, grappling with a mountain of incongruities.
One simple fact loomed large, however— this world was not his own.
At first glance, it mirrored his. The cycles of day and night, the rising constellations, even the rough measures of time carried the same system. Yet the signs that this wasn't Earth began to stack in subtle, then overwhelming ways.
The moon, its cratered surface a deeper red than any he'd seen before, loomed far larger in the sky, casting the night in an unnatural hue. Familiar constellations were gone, replaced by star patterns that was alien—pinpoints of light in configurations that seemed like glyphs inscribed across the heavens.
It's just close parallel world. But no evidence supports a method of dimensional travel—natural or otherwise. My existence here disrupts causality itself. The only plausible explanation is external interference.
But what? Or who? His thoughts wandered to Lucien's mystic pursuits.
Lucien's memories converging on a singular event.
His gaze fell to the nightstand. There, an empty glass caught the dim glow of the oil lamp, its surface stained with an iridescent residue of purples, greens, and blacks. Looking at it, he recalled something.
It was a memory of Lucien crafting a potion meant to grant power beyond human capabilities. To become a Mystery Pryer.
He obtained the formula from some organization called Moses Ascetic Order— a shady organization.
The ingredients to concoct it is quite easy to obtain.
The simplicity belied the danger, which often lay not in the components themselves but the ritual to bind them. These weren't tools of mystics—they were the makings of someone who knew the right back alleys and had the nerves to scavenge, bargain, and steal.
The foundation of the potion lay in duskshade fungus, harvested from decaying timber hidden in ruins. This blackish-purple growth fed on the remnants of rotted structures. Lucien had scraped barely enough of it—three palm-sized clusters—from the damp beams of a crumbling library.
To this, he added a concentrated extract of nightglass leaf, a waxy green plant that flourished only in perpetual shade. Its essence was said to heighten perception by creating resonance with unseen forces. Lucien had gathered just a handful of the delicate leaves under the guise of helping a gardener in a noble estate, boiling them down to produce a thick, syrupy liquid the color of tarnished silver.
The grounding agent was bone ash, blackened remnants of incinerated human bones. A teaspoon's worth was sufficient to stabilize the volatile components while acting as a bridge between the material and spiritual realms. This macabre addition was not purchased but bartered—silver coins discreetly slipped to a sullen undertaker at the morgue.
He then dissolved the ash into gravedust mercury, a fluid that shimmered with a faint phosphorescent glow. Extracted from metal veins below Backlund's old graveyards, it carried residual energies absorbed from the thousands interred there over centuries. A vial of the mercury, weighing no more than a few ounces, was enough to give the mixture its dangerous allure, allowing it to tap into arcane resonance buried deep within the city.
Supplementing the base ingredients were subtler additions: a thin strand of crimson sycamore resin, gathered at dawn from a solitary tree on the edge of an abandoned factory. Its crimson sap resonated with lunar cycles and was said to enhance the potion's ability to anchor higher-dimensional connections. Lucien had waited through the night, chiseling droplets that hardened into an amber sheen as he worked.
A small squeeze of Silver Thornberry Juice followed—a liquid that seemed to faintly hum under moonlight. This additive, sourced from glowing fruits cultivated by impoverished farmers on Backlund's outskirts, bridged the gaps between consciousness and intuition, softening the drinker's mind to perceive more than what was immediately visible.
The final touch came in the form of Wraith Oil Residue, a viscous black ooze extracted from decaying organic materials and filtered into semi-purified liquid. While inherently unstable, its chaotic properties ensured that the brew would rupture natural barriers—pushing the imbiber beyond mortal limitations into uncharted realms.
Together, these ingredients became something far greater than the sum of their parts. The fungal spores and grave-tainted mercury introduced a latent connection to the spiritual plane. The sycamore resin amplified lunar resonance, while the thornberry juice heightened Lucien's ability to glimpse unseen truths. The wraith oil bound the whole into an unstable matrix that fused mortal senses with glimpses of higher-dimensional insights.
Lucien believed the potion's power lay not just in its individual components but in the careful layering of symbolic associations: decay and memory from the fungus, clarity from the mercury, heightened awareness from the thornberries, and spiritual corruption from the residue—yet that ensured his end and Kiyotaka's new beginning.
It was probably incomplete or something, because his life was sucked away because of it, seemingly paving the way for Kiyotaka's arrival.
As more fragments of knowledge surfaced, details of the Mystery Pryer's powers became clearer:
First is the Eyes of Mystery Prying— a spontaneous and instinctive ability. His eyes could pierce illusions, see hidden truths, and unravel the bindings of deceptive constructs. However, this constant revelation could also expose him to corruption, so he should show some restraint while using it. I'll have to be particularly careful considering it can't be deactivated.
And then there's Spirituality.
Lucien's—or rather Kiyotaka's—spirituality was heightened. This gave access to Spirit Vision, enabling the discernment of emotional states, magical auras, and irregularities in beings or items.
Lastly, Ritualistic Magic and Divination.
To be more precise, rudimentary understanding of ancient arts that granted access to conjure helpers from the Spirit World, provided their contracts were secured properly. Using pendulums, charts, and ritual circles, the Mystery Pryer had several paths open to acquire assistance and knowledge, thus the divination.
Kiyotaka exhaled, his breath steady but his thoughts otherwise. This wasn't just a new body. It was a prison of flawed aspirations, all because its previous occupant's actions.
This body is fragile. Its power unstable. But power exists nonetheless.
He traced a finger along the rim of the glass, feeling the faint slickness of the residue left behind. The iridescent stain shimmered under the lamp's flickering light, its appearance hypnotic and faintly repulsive. Slowly, he released it, leaning back against the rickety bedframe. His expression was blank, but the gears in his mind churned relentlessly.
The faint flicker of the oil lamp burned on, its light weak and struggling—yet persistent.
Could the potion have served as some crude gateway? But if so, why him? Why now?
His fingers brushed the edge of the nightstand, absently tracing its splintered surface, as a distant memory stirred—it was from his life on Earth.
It had been a particularly slow evening, one of those nights when the oppressive monotony of a controlled life left even Kiyotaka searching for diversion.
He'd stumbled upon an obscure tome—more novelty than substance—filled with arcane symbols and cryptic verses in a Antique & Mysticism store. Most of it was nonsense, esoteric babble designed to sell the illusion of depth. But one passage caught his attention.
A ritual.
Nothing too elaborate, just a sequence of actions and a chant. Its bold title had amused him enough to try it.
He'd gathered candles, paper, and ink, following the instructions out of little more than idle curiosity.
The ritual required the inscription of a circle—a crude design of intertwined shapes that supposedly symbolised "the root of knowledge" and "the void from which all thought emerges." In truth, it resembled an overcomplicated doodle from a bored artist.
Once the circle was drawn and the candles lit, the instructions directed him to speak a chant:
"Demon of Knowledge,
First among the Learned,
Architect of Understanding,
They who reigns over Knowledge Moor,
Bearer of Eternal Insight."
He'd spoken the words aloud. At no point had he expected anything.
For a moment, silence had answered. Then, somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind, he thought he felt somethint. A presence, faint but exist—a subtle tightening around the edges of his consciousness, as though unseen eyes had settled upon him.
But nothing overtly extraordinary occurred. No apparitions. No whispers from beyond the veil. If anything, he chalked it up to the placebo effect, an overactive imagination responding to his surroundings.
He'd moved on, the ritual joining the many inconsequential oddities scattered throughout his curated memories.
But now…
The chant returned to him with its dreadful clarity. Could it somehow connect to the impossibility of his current situation?
He considered the implications. If the ritual had carried any latent connection to this world—or to Lucien's ill-advised venture into mysticism—it was worth investigating. Recreating it here might yield something. Whether insight or danger, he couldn't yet determine.
But that chant.
"Demon of Knowledge,
First among the Learned…"
It lingered inside his mind. The pieces of his circumstances remained disjointed, but this fragment might be a thread worth pulling.
For now, he placed the idea in reserve, cataloguing it among the many uncertainties he intended to dissect.
Kiyotaka's eyes flicked to the empty glass again.
To move without understanding would be suicidal, but stagnation is equally fatal.
—however, if mysticism governed this world, then it would fall to logic to dismantle it.