Chapter 166: Void’s Trial 1: The Essence of Life

Date: 6/23/2001 – 4:10 AM

Location: The White Room – Assessment Floor

Perspective: Kaiser Everhart

The stylus felt like an extension of my bone. I didn’t see the paper anymore; I saw the architecture of the universe as a series of flawed formulas..

Everyone in this world, from the high elves of Sylaris to the dwarf physicists of the Iron Peaks, viewed space and time as a static stage—a flat, unchangeable floor upon which the mortals performed.

They believed Myriacron was unbeatable because he owned the stage.

They were wrong.

The stage is not flat. It is a fabric.

And like any fabric, it can be stretched, folded, and torn.

I began to sketch the tensors. I ignored the “Three Laws of Momentum” established by the Dwarf physicist, Throrin Stone-Scribe. Throrin’s work was the foundation of this world’s physics, claiming that force is linear and gravity is a constant pull. It was a beautiful, simple lie.

Throrin’s laws are for mortals playing in the dirt.

I am looking at the sun.

I wrote the equation for Relative Causality.

Space-Time Curvature (κ) = Mass Influence (M) ÷ Energy Propagation (EΩ).

If mass bends reality, then energy traveling through it—light and vibration—does not merely pass; it warps the warp. I proved it first with starlight: directing a beam of concentrated luminous mana past a dense mana core and measuring the angular drift, watching light curve, proving space could be dragged.

Then I shattered the lie completely by channeling compressed Wind Mana into oscillating pulses around the same core; the curvature destabilized, rippling, distorting measurements, showing that vibration doesn’t bow to gravity—it disturbs it. Gravity is not a tyrant force; it is a negotiable geometry.

And if geometry can be shaken… then even a god standing on it can be made to fall.

I proved that gravity is not a force, but the curvature of space-time itself. Myriacron isn’t a god because he controls time; he is a god because his mass is so immense that time bends around him.

To defeat him, you don’t use more mass. You use the two constants that even a god of space cannot outrun: Light and Sound.

Location: Foundation Command Center – Observation Deck

The room was in a state of quiet, hysterical chaos.

“This is impossible,” a woman in a lab coat stammered, her eyes darting between the monitors.

“He just… he just invalidated the Stone-Scribe Equations. He’s claiming that time isn’t a river, but a variable dependent on velocity. He’s calling it ’Relativity’.”

“It’s baseless!” an older instructor shouted, slamming his hand on the console.

“It’s the rambling of a child who has lost his mind to the Void-Constant. You can’t just say light has a speed limit that dictates the flow of time!”

“Then explain the math,” another whispered, pointing to the scrolling feed.

“Look at the synchronization. The equations are balancing. He’s using elemental mana-frequencies to simulate a gravitational collapse. He’s proving it as he writes.”

The lead researcher turned to Vance, his face pale.

“Director… just weeks ago, this subject couldn’t formulate a basic mana-viscosity chart. He was average. Below average. How has he surpassed a thousand years of dwarven physics in 20 minutes? Does he have a secret Talent we missed?”

“A ’God’s Soul’?”

Vance stood perfectly still. His eyes were reflected in the glass, two silver points of light.

“He has no talents,” Vance said, his voice a low, chilling rasp. “The scans are absolute. He is empty.”

“He is a void.”

“Then how?”

Vance didn’t answer. He was watching Kaiser’s hand move. The boy wasn’t even looking at the paper anymore. He was staring through it.

Perspective: Kaiser Everhart

Light and Sound.

Sound is a vibration of the medium. Light is the speed of information.

Myriacron exists in a state of “Perfect Presence”—he is everywhere in his domain at once. But if you use high-frequency Acoustic Mana-Resonance, you can create a “Spatial Ripple.” You shake the fabric of the stage. You force the “God” to vibrate at a frequency he cannot control.

Then, you strike with Coherent Light-Mana.

At the speed of light, time for the observer stops. If I can accelerate a mana-particle to the threshold of C, I am striking a target that is frozen in a moment of my choosing. I am not hitting a god; I am hitting a statue.

To kill Myriacron—

The “God-Killer” formula was complete. It was a simple, elegant sequence of vibrations and light-pulses that would turn the universe’s own weight into a guillotine.

Vance is watching.

The instructors are terrified.

Good.

I looked at the final sentence.

To kill Myriacron, one must realize that a God is only a God until someone measures his limits.

I reached for the stylus to sign the paper, but my hand never touched the page.

The White Room didn’t just fade; it vanished. The desks, the parchment, the 97 other students, and even the air itself were swallowed by a sudden, absolute darkness.

I wasn’t in the simulation. I wasn’t in the nursery.

I was standing in the center of a cold, infinite Void.

Vance’s voice echoed in my mind, not as a director, but as a warning.

“Child of Death.”

I waited in the dark.

Time Unknown

Location: The Great Void – Trial Grounds

Perspective: Kaiser Everhart

I opened my eyes to an absolute, suffocating blackness. There was no floor, no ceiling, and no horizon. It was a vacuum that didn’t just lack light—it devoured the very concept of it.

I felt a sharp tug on my arm.

“Kaiser?”

Amelia’s voice was small, stripped of its clinical confidence. I could feel her trembling. Her grip was tight.

“What happened?” she whispered. “The synchronization was at 100%. The simulation shouldn’t have collapsed. Where are the others?”

I looked around. Gradually, my eyes adjusted—or perhaps the darkness allowed us to see. All 98 students were here, floating or standing in the nothingness. They looked like small, pale sparks in an infinite ocean of ink.

“I don’t know,” I said. My voice didn’t echo. It was just swallowed.

This isn’t Vance.This isn’t the Foundation.

The scale is too large.

Suddenly, the darkness itself seemed to breathe. A voice vibrated through the void. It wasn’t a sound heard with ears; it was a realization that formed directly in the center of the brain. It felt ancient, heavy, and indifferent to the laws of reality.

“Oh, children of heirs…” The voice was a tectonic shift.

“Which among you is destined to bear the Heart of the Void? Who among you will watch over the threads of fiction and the weight of reality? This is not an assessment of your mind.”

“This is your trial.”

In the center of the obsidian field, a pillar of light erupted. It was blinding, a sharp needle of brilliance that forced us to shield our eyes. As the glare softened, a lone, radiant tree stood in the center of the nothingness.

Its leaves were made of silver mist. Its branches bore crystal “fruits” that pulsed with a rhythmic, golden light. They hummed. It was a sound like a thousand newborn hearts beating in unison.

A single command etched itself into our minds.

“Eat, or cease existing.”

I looked at the tree. My mind immediately went into a state of rapid analysis.

Survival is the only objective.The cost is unknown.

The humming… it isn’t mana. It’s life.

One student, a boy near the front, moved first. He was brave. He reached out, plucked a fruit, and bit into it. He let out a sigh of relief.

He didn’t die.

Then, his face changed.

He dropped the fruit. He began to claw at his throat, his eyes bulging. He wasn’t choking. He was screaming, but no sound came out. He collapsed, clutching his head as if his brain were being split internally.

I walked toward the tree. Amelia stayed close, her breath hitching. I reached out and took a fruit. It felt warm.

I bit into it.

The taste was a sickening contradiction.

It was as sweet as sugar, but it smelled like old grief.

Then the “memory” hit me.

It wasn’t a dream. It was a theft. I saw a man in a small village I had never visited. He was laughing, holding a small wooden carving he had made for his daughter. He was happy.

He was loved.

Then, he stopped breathing.

I felt his soul being torn away from the world. I felt the exact moment his daughter’s laughter turned to a confused silence. I felt the cold terror of his final breath as I consumed his existence to fuel my own.

I didn’t flinch.

I swallowed.

One life for one life.

A zero-sum game.

To stay in the race, I must become a consumer of worlds.

Around me, the horror began to unfold. Some students refused to eat. They simply faded, their bodies turning to grey chalk before being washed away by the void like rain. Others ate too much, driven by a primal fear of death.

They were the ones who broke first. They began to wail, their voices a chorus of a thousand stolen lives screaming through their veins.

The orchard was no longer a sanctuary.

It was a slaughterhouse of souls.

I felt the man’s memories burning behind my eyes—the scent of his workshop, the sound of his wife’s voice. It was a parasite in my mind.

I looked at Amelia. She was staring at her own fruit, her face pale.

“If I eat it… someone dies, Kaiser,” she whispered. “I can see them. A woman… she’s reading a book. She’s… she’s just happy.”

“If you don’t eat it,” I said, my voice cold and flat, “you die. And she still dies eventually.”

“But you lose the chance to win.”

I took another bite. The sweetness was gone now. There was only the metallic tang of blood and the heavy weight of another erased future.

Kaiserism.

The winner writes history.

The victims are the ink.

I stared into the void, waiting for the next layer of the nightmare.

The rules are simple.My breath requires your end.

To exist is to be a thief.

I could hear the internal screams of the students around me—not vocalized, but vibrating through the void as they integrated the traumas of the people they had erased.

I saw a girl to my left witness the death of a mother through her own eyes. I saw a boy collapse as he felt the crushing weight of a grandfather’s final, lonely moments in a hospital bed.

This wasn’t just a test of hunger.

It was a filter for the heartless.

The Void wasn’t looking for the

strongest or the smartest. It was looking for the one who could swallow a soul without choking. It wanted the butcher who understood that the essence of one’s life is, by definition, the death of another.

To be “Me” is to ensure that someone else is “Not.”

I counted.

98 had entered.

23 remained.

The rest were gone—faded into the grey rain of non-existence because they had a conscience, or broken into screaming shells because they had too much of one.

“K-Kaiser…”

Amelia was shaking. Her emerald eyes were glazed, her pupils blown wide. She was seeing the lives she had eaten…

“Shh.”

I stepped forward and pulled her into a hug. I wrapped my arms around her small, trembling frame, pressing her head against my chest. I didn’t do it because I felt her pain. I did it because an unstable asset is a useless one.

“Don’t look at the memory,” I whispered into her hair. “Look at the result. You are breathing. She is not.”

“That is the only thing that matters now.”

“I… I can s-still hear her… closing the…” she stammered, her breath hitching against my neck. She clung to me, her fingers locking behind my back with a desperate, crushing strength.

I looked over her shoulder.

Designation 000001 was standing a few yards away. He was unfazed. His golden hair seemed to catch a light that shouldn’t exist in this darkness. He wasn’t looking at the dead. He wasn’t looking at the tree.

He was looking at me.

He walked over, his footsteps silent on the obsidian. His face was a mask of marble—perfect, cold, and utterly detached.

“A waste of energy,” 01 said. His voice was like a scalpel. “The girl is compromised. Her empathy is a structural flaw.”

“Empathy is a variable, not a flaw,” I replied, not letting go of Amelia. I felt her flinch at his words.

“It can be suppressed. But a partner who can record every detail of this void is worth the effort of stabilization.”

01 tilted his head. “Partner? You still think in terms of ’we.’ The trial brought us here to find the Heart of the Void. A heart is singular.”

“It does not beat for two.”

“The trials have just begun,” I said, my voice dropping into a low, strategic hum.

“You saw the mortality rate. 75 gone in one round. If the Void continues this pace, even a ’Peak Talent’ like you will eventually hit a wall you can’t climb alone. Being allied won’t hurt for now. As long as two remain, the trials continue.”

“We can decide who the ’One’ is when we reach the end.”

“A game of survival doesn’t reward cooperation, 981,” 01 countered.

“It rewards the one who removes the competition before they become a threat. You are an anomaly. Your logic is dangerous.”

“Why would I wait for you to find a way to kill me?”

“Because,” I said, meeting his cold gaze with my own, “if you try to remove me now, you’re betting that you’ve already solved the Void. And we both know you haven’t.”

01 went silent. The air between us crackled with a sudden, violent tension.

He was calculating the risk. He saw the “Void” in my eyes and realized that while he was a master of adaptation, I was the one who was currently rewriting it.

“Only for the next trial,” 01 finally said, his voice like cracking ice. “But if you hold me back, I will leave you to the shadows.”

“Fair enough.”

Suddenly, the obsidian field began to tilt. The radiant tree dissolved into a swarm of black moths that vanished into the ceiling-less sky. The humming of the hearts stopped, replaced by a sound that made my skin crawl—the sound of a thousand children laughing in a room that was too far away to see.

The Void’s voice returned, sounding more abstract, more distorted, as if the words were being dragged through a choir of the dead.

“The fruit has been tasted. The debt has been recorded.”

“But the heart is not yet hollow enough.”

The darkness around us began to twist, forming high, windowless walls of white stone that smelled of sulfur and old toys.

“Welcome… to the Hall of Youth.”

I felt a cold shiver run down my spine.

Youth?

The name is a lie.In this place, innocence is the first thing they slaughter.

“Kaiser,” Amelia whispered, her grip tightening until it hurt. “What is that smell?”

I looked at the long, narrow corridor stretching out before us. It was lined with doors that had no handles.

“It smells like a nursery,” I said, my voice flat. “But the kind where no one ever wakes up.”

The second trial has begun.

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