CHAPTER 17 — “The Emperor’s Eyes”
Not wrong like the other floors—dangerous, hostile, designed to kill anyone stupid enough to enter. Wrong in a deeper way. A fundamental way. The kind of wrong that makes your teeth itch and your shadow move when you’re not looking.
The Void Rift, the System calls it.
Reality breaks here.
I’m standing at the entrance, staring into darkness that isn’t darkness. It’s… absence. The opposite of light. The space between spaces where things go when they stop existing.
“Well,” I say to Johnson. “This is going to suck.”
He makes a sound that might be agreement.
╔═══════════════════════════════════════╗║ FLOOR 9 --- VOID RIFT ║║ ║║ Environment: Unstable Reality ║║ Physics: Suggestions, Not Rules ║║ Light: Sometimes ║║ Gravity: Depends on its mood ║║ ║║ Hazards: ║║ ? Spatial tears (unpredictable) ║║ ? Void echoes (psychological) ║║ ? Reality anchors (move them and ║║ the floor reconfigures) ║║ ? Something watching (unknown) ║║ ║║ Monster Level: 18-24 ║║ Your Level: 12 ║║ ║║ SYSTEM NOTE: We don't like this ║║ floor either.
Bad vibes. Very bad ║║ vibes. Please be careful.
║║ ║║ That's not sarcasm. Genuinely. ║║ Be careful.
║╚═══════════════════════════════════════╝
The System being sincere is somehow more terrifying than the void itself.
Cool. Great. Let’s do this.
The first thing you notice about the Void Rift is that distances lie.
Something that looks ten feet away might be a hundred. Something that looks far might be close enough to touch. Your brain keeps trying to make sense of the space and keeps failing, which creates this constant low-level nausea that never quite goes away.
Johnson handles it better than me. Probably because he doesn’t rely on visual processing the same way. Or maybe he’s just superior to me in every conceivable way. Hard to tell with him.
We move carefully. Every step tested before weight is committed. I learned that lesson early when what looked like solid ground turned out to be a thin membrane over nothing.
Nothing nothing. Not darkness, not a pit, just… absence. I looked into it for half a second and had to spend five minutes throwing up.
“I hate this place,” I announce to no one.
The void doesn’t respond. Rude.
The monsters here are called Void Wraiths, and they’re exactly as fun as they sound.
Imagine a shadow that got tired of being walked on and decided to fight back. Now imagine that shadow can phase through physical matter, ignore most magical defenses, and make this sound—this awful, teeth-grinding sound like reality tearing at the edges.
There are six of them. Circling.
“Okay,” I mutter. “Okay. Think. What kills a void creature?”
Not fire. Not ice. Not acid. Physical weapons pass right through. Standard combat alchemy is useless.
But I’m not a standard combat alchemist.
I’m an Archmage who remembers when the System was young. Who helped write some of the original framework rules. And I remember something about void creatures that the modern manuals have forgotten:
They’re not immune to everything. They’re immune to everything that exists.
The trick is using something that doesn’t.
“[Volatile Synthesis],” I whisper, pulling ingredients that have no business being combined. Nullstone dust—supposed to be inert, just a crafting stabilizer. Mana essence—raw, unaspected, the magical equivalent of stem cells. And a drop of my own blood.
The combination shouldn’t do anything. The System should reject it. Three null-state ingredients can’t create an active effect—that’s basic alchemical law.
Basic alchemical law is wrong.
What I create isn’t a potion. It’s a paradox. A thing that exists and doesn’t exist simultaneously. A philosophical contradiction given physical form.
I throw it.
The Void Wraiths scream.
Not the reality-tearing sound from before. An actual scream. Pain and confusion and something that might be fear if void creatures can feel fear. The paradox-bomb hits them like acid, eating at their non-existence, forcing them to be something when their whole nature is being nothing.
Two dissolve instantly. Three more flicker, wounded, trying to retreat into the void-between-spaces but finding it suddenly hostile. Johnson takes them while they’re disoriented—[Fang Rend] works fine on creatures that have been forced into partial existence.
The sixth one runs.
I let it go. Again. My mercy is really just laziness, but it sounds better the other way.
╔═══════════════════════════════════════╗║ COMBAT RESOLVED ║║ ║║ Void Wraith (Lv.
20) x5: DEFEATED ║║ Void Wraith (Lv.20) x1: FLED ║║ ║║ XP Gained: 2,847 ║║ LEVEL UP: 12 → 14 ║║ ║║ LOOT: ║║ ? Void Essence x3 (CAUTION) ║║ ? Reality Anchor Fragment x2 ║║ ? Wraith Core (Unstable) x1 ║║ ║║ NEW SYNTHESIS DISCOVERED: ║║ \[Paradox Bomb\] ║║ Tier: UNDEFINED ║║ Effect: Forces existential crisis ║║ on void-type entities ║║ SYSTEM NOTE: We're adding this to ║║ the official recipes but we're not ║║ happy about it.
This shouldn't ║║ work. You shouldn't exist. We're ║║ very confused.
║╚═══════════════════════════════════════╝
Confused is good. Confused means I’m ahead of the curve.
The deeper we go, the worse the void gets.
Not more dangerous, exactly. Just more… present. The absence presses against reality like water against a dam, looking for cracks. I can feel it trying to get into my head. Showing me things. Memories that might be mine or might be fabricated.
Persephone’s face.
Dario’s smile.
The moment the sword went in—
“No.” I stop walking. Force myself to breathe. “No. That’s not real. That’s—you’re not real. You’re just void-echo bullshit trying to destabilize me.”
The void doesn’t argue. But it also doesn’t stop.
I see the wedding. The cherry blossoms. The way she cried.
I see the party laughing around a campfire. Gorath’s terrible jokes. Sylva stealing food off everyone’s plates. Anton, quiet in the corner, watching everything and saying nothing.
I see the Demon Lord’s throne room. The victory we’d won. The betrayal we hadn’t.
“Stop,” I growl.
The void shows me Floor 10. The mana vault. The power waiting to be reclaimed.
And then it shows me something else.
Dario, sitting on a throne. Imperial Palace. Present day, judging by the architecture.
He looks tired.
Not dramatically tired. Not defeated or weakened or any of the satisfying things I’d want him to be. Just… tired. Lines around his eyes that weren’t there two hundred years ago. A slight tremor in his hands when he reaches for his wine glass.
“—don’t understand,” someone’s saying. A courtier, probably. Interchangeable noble face. “The eastern provinces are restless. Duke Aldric’s son is making noise about—”
“I don’t care about Aldric’s son.” Dario’s voice is the same. Golden. Confident. The voice that made everyone trust him even when they shouldn’t. “Handle it.”
“Your Majesty, with respect—”
“I said handle it.” He sets down his wine. The tremor’s more visible now. “I have other concerns.”
The courtier bows and leaves. Dario sits alone on his throne, in his palace, surrounded by everything he stole from me. And he looks…
Old.
Not ancient. Not dying. But older than he should be. The Mary Harvest kept him young for two hundred years, and now—
Now something’s changing.
His hand goes to his chest. Rubs at it absently. Like there’s an ache there he can’t identify.
My mana. Draining back to me. He can feel it, even if he doesn’t know what it is.
Good.
Suffer.
The void-vision fades. I’m back in the Rift, Johnson nudging my leg with concern.
“I’m fine,” I tell him. “Just got hit with some psychological warfare. The usual.”
He doesn’t look convinced.
“Really. I’m fine. Better than fine.” I start walking again. “He’s feeling it. Dario. The power returning to me—he’s feeling it leave him. That’s good. That’s very good.”
Johnson makes a sound that suggests he’s reserving judgment.
Smart rabbit.
The boss of Floor 9 is called the Void Arbiter.
It’s not a creature, exactly. More like a concept given form. A judge. A gatekeeper. Something that exists specifically to determine whether you deserve to pass.
It looks different for everyone, according to the lore fragments I’ve found. Shows you your worst fear, your deepest guilt, your greatest failure. Makes you face it before it lets you through.
Guess what it shows me.
Yeah.
“You could have stopped us.”
Persephone’s standing in front of me. Not the real one—the void-echo version, constructed from my memories and my pain and the darkness that lives in the spaces between thoughts.
But she looks real. Sounds real. That voice I used to love, that I used to think was the most beautiful sound in the world.
“You knew,” she says. “Deep down. You knew something was wrong. You chose not to see it.”
“That’s not—”
“You were so desperate to believe. So desperate to be loved. You let us manipulate you for years because the alternative was admitting you were alone.” She steps closer.
Her eyes are wrong—too dark, too empty—but her face is perfect.
Every freckle. Every line. “Your death isn’t our fault, Velthar. It’s yours.”
I want to argue.
I want to defend myself, explain that trust isn’t weakness, that love isn’t stupidity, that being betrayed doesn’t make you complicit in your own betrayal.
But part of me wonders if she’s right.
Part of me has always wondered.
“I see you,” the Void Arbiter says through Persephone’s mouth. “I see the guilt you carry. The shame. The part of you that believes you deserved what happened.”
“I didn’t—”
“Didn’t you? You were arrogant. Powerful. You thought you were so much smarter than everyone else. And when they proved you wrong, when they showed you that all your brilliance meant nothing against simple human treachery, you died with her name on your lips. Still loving her. Still believing.”
“Stop.”
“You’re going to do it again.” Persephone smiles, and it’s her smile, the real one, the one that used to make my heart stop. “You’re falling for the emperor’s sister. Opening yourself up. Trusting again. And when she betrays you—”
“She won’t.”