The Void

The edge of the white void is breathtaking. A literal edge of the world type scenario. The white just ends like a straight line with nothing beyond. To my soul, it registers as a blackness where nothing exists, however I KNEW, instinctively, that there was absolutely nothing there. To coprehend this, a little more detail is necessary.

To my soul, this registers as a 'blackness', however, I know instinctually that the 'blackness' doesn't exist. That shade, black, isn't there. There is no colour. No white, no black, no light, no dark. No space, no time. Just the Void. And it seems that I can't comprehend it, otherwise there would be no 'blackness'. I don't know what I would see, but the absence of light wouldn't be it.

Leaving the white void where I and the other sould appeared to venture into this absolute nothing terrifies me like nothing else. It's similar to the ocean. It's fine if you can see the bottom, but if you're swimming alone and can't see the bottom, that freaks me out. This is like that, only a million times worse.

Before leaving the (relative) comfort of my white void, I prepared as best as I could. I went through my own memories. My core memories are in the centre of my soul along with the useful memories of the other souls I consumed. Mostly languages really. A few skills I kept like the memories of a very dedicated gym owner and another of a martial artist's. Most others I left. Pushing all other memories from other people to the extreme edge of my own soul.

Another cycle of the power tearing apart souls came and everything I didn't want to keep was ripped from me, unmade and gone. By this time, I can bear with the pain of whatever power it was. Please note however that the pain didn't lessen, nor did I get 'used to it'. This was a pain that surpassed that. I had simply built up the willpower, the burning desire to LIVE so much that it was a raging inferno pushing me through. 

My preparations were complete now. As I stared into the void ahead, I pushed past my fear and leapt. Immediately, I could feel that the void was different from where I came from. I could move three directionally for a start. Up and down were no longer barred to me. I could still see the white void where I came from behind me as well.

Moving further and further into the nothingness, I found it to be a serene and calm place really. I had no doubt that there had to be some Eldritch Horrors who live in the deepest part of this void. I chose not to think about that.

Having moved further and further away from where I was, I looked back to see that the white void I arrived in was more of a circular 'plane of existence'. Kind of like how Asgard looked in the Marvel movies but with only white and a clear line that marked it's edge instead of a waterfall.

As I got further and further away from where I started, I soon lost sight of it, with only this nothingness around. As I moved, I kept observing this nothingness, and I soon started to be able to perceive more of the absolute lack of anything. The blackness faded to a dull grey colour as I kept observing whilst floating through. Until something changed.

Before I could react, I was smashed into by something! Taken completely by surprise, I reacted without thinking and did what I have been doing ever since I died, I consumed whatever hit me. 

For the first time ever since I died, things were different. The soul that hit me fought back! I was taken by surprise so much by this that it caught a solid hit in and bit off a chunk of me! The pain of that quickly snapped me back to reality and the situation I found myself in.

I didn't grow enraged, I simply kept calm and attacked back. It wasn't even a fight. I immediately consumed the soul that attacked me. It took a little longer than normal because I found that this soul was aware and thinking, which is a first for me. It still couldn't compare to my own soul however, like a cat trying to fight a tiger.

Nevertheless, the initial impact and the speed at which the soul was going had thrown us... somewhere. I couldn't tell directions in the void, but it felt like I was far away. Additionally, it might not have taken long, but maybe that's simply my perception of time. It was the strongest soul i've come across to date, but still only half again as big as a regular soul I consumed in the afterlife. And it fought back!

I have no idea where I am now. I mean, I didn't before but I was fairly certain that if I turned around and headed back to where I came from I would fine myself back in the afterlife again. Not anymore. Starting to feel paranoid now...

Before thinking further and to distract me from growing worries, I went through the soul's memories first. After going through this soul's memories I discovered two things.

One, this soul wasn't from earth, any earth. He was from a small village in a province somewhere. Two, that world had immortal cultivators! He had admired cultivators all his life as the son of the mayor, but was crippled from birth. He was bullied by his cousins and finally was pushed from a cliff. He crawled into a cave at the bottom with a broken body and came across something there. He died when the 'thing' he found absorbed into him.

This brings me to the second thing. He had an item with him! In his memories it was a block of multi-coloured, shining metal in a perfect cube. Now however, it was a mysterious scroll sitting in the very centre of my soul. There was a force coming from it that was trying to pull me in the direction where it was pulling the previous soul, but it was relatively weak. It was a strong pull for a normal soul but not for me, so I ignored that for now and stayed in place.

Hehehahahaha! I know what just happened! Clearly, that soul I just consumed was the main character of a cultivation story! It makes sense! Decent background, crippled from birth, bullied, fell from a cliff and had a mysterious fortuitous encounter. He was being pulled by this mysterious scroll through the void after he died. He was probably going to be reborn, use this scroll to right all his wrongs, climb to the top of the cultivation world etc etc.

Well, that has nothing to do with me. I stayed there, pondering in the void. This confirmed that the multiverse is real. Just thinking about that left me shuddering. There are some terrifying things in fiction. Marvel comics, DC comics, cultivation stories and most especially Lovecratian stories! These worlds have unspeakable entities that can snuff out universes on a whim. I stopped thinking about that and checked this scroll in my soul. It has got to be good stuff right?

Whilst resisting the pull from the scroll, I inspected it closely. There were no words written on it, it was more like geometric patterns, but that didn't seem to be it either. There were colours and shapes impossible to be seen when alive, but i've seen these colours before in other souls. The weird chromatic non-colours poured out of the scroll!

I spent a while trying to understand this thing. It was clearly the item that was going to pull the protagonist of his cultivation universe to the top, so obviously it was very abstruse and esoteric. The more I observed however, the more I understood. As I understood more and more of this scroll, I realised what it was.

A cultivation technique! And not just any, it was a Soul Cultivation Technique! Damn I was lucky! 

Time passed as I figured out the scroll. Soon, the pull from the scroll that was taking the previous soul stopped, however there were no changes to the scroll itself. I barely noticed as I was in a trance-like state of understanding this Soul Cultivation Technique.

Finally I snapped out of the trance once I understood everything. Damn is this technique amazing! No wonder all those cultivators fight to the death over higher ranked techniques in those novels. From the start, this scroll only has the technique, no information about anything else which was to be expected. And the previous soul was from a small villiage in a small province so he knew pretty much nothing about anything else like technique rankings, levels etc.

Well who cares about any of that! I got my hands on a treasure! This Soul Cultivation Technique pulls energy from the void, meaning where I am now, to slowly and systematically strengthen the soul with theoretically no limit whatsoever. I didn't even know there was any energy here to begin with! It's literally just nothing here. No light, no dark, no matter, no space, no time, no energy. So how can there be energy here?

It doesn't matter. I started to use this technique whilst floating there in the Void and I quickly came to understand. The technique doesn't pull 'energy' from the Void, it pulls the Void itself into the soul and uses it to refine, strengthen and upgrade the soul in a steady way. No 'bottlenecks', no 'stages', just a constant improvement without limit.

I couldn't help but become giddy with excitement. This is amazing! Looking 'inward', my soul was bigger and strongerthan any other I had seen. However, when I started to use the technique, the Void I absorbed flowed through my soul in a spiral from the core of the soul to the edges, then back to the core in a repeating cycle.

As this happened, my previously massive soul started to shrink. However it wasn't shrinking, it was condensing itself back into a smaller shape. As my soul condensed more and more, the quality of my soul improved too. I don't really know how to describe it whilst looking at it, but particles of my soul seemed to 'shine' brighter, the colours became more and more pronounced, the small amount of Dark and Light I identified as 'me' were more pronounced.

The Dark became endless Night, whilst the Light became like the burning of a Star. The endless colours became vivid and deep. The non-colour colours were shining with a light that was otherworldly and defied description.

I continued in a trance for a long, long while. I don't know how long it was before my soul was back to the size it was when I just died. When that happened, I felt like something had 'clicked' and I felt far, FAR more comfortable than I had before. It was like a weight I didn't even know existed had been lifted off my shoulders.

And how could I know? I died, then was immediately almost completely unmade. I consumed souls to keep myself 'alive'. I went on a journey through the void and haven't found anything yet. My soul was 5-10 times larger than a normal soul before, but it wasn't any better quality than when I died, just bigger and stronger.

Now however, I was back to normal size, the quality of my soul was incomparable to before and I felt so relaxed and comfortable it was hard to put into words. I decided to continue foward whilst I cultivated this soul skill. Speaking of this skill. I understood it completely after however long I spent in that trance and the cultivation skill, whilst a major part of it, wasn't the only part. There were 3 other parts of the skill. Offense, defense and detection.

These were much more straightforward. There were techiques to damage another's soul with your own Soul Energy including pressuring a soul, targeted strikes, blunt blows etc.

The defense of the soul included how to create shields around the soul, how to hide your soul from detection, how to organise your soul in layers like an onion to keep the core of it safe etc. Detection was taking the Soul Energy you had built up and spread it out like a field to detect anything within that field with precision. A bit like a domain.

All of these techniques however didn't really matter all that much. What these techniques were teaching was what mattered, and that was how to manipulate your own soul and your soul energy to do different things. The techniques were obviously very good, but they didn't feel like anything you couldn't figure out yourself if you knew the underlying principles of manipulating your own soul. 

So as I continued to move through the void, I continued practising the techniques whilst cultivating, making the manipulation of my own soul better and better. Before, I didn't know how to manipulate my own soul. All I knew how to do was move around and attack which was all driven by instinct. Now however, I could use my own soul much more effectively.

The first thing I focused on was defense. I organised my soul into layers with my core memories and personality in the centre, basically everything that made me 'me' including memories, skills, languages, etc. I condensed everything into the core instead of just my core memories which was all I could do before.

The next layer was made up of purely the soul with nothing else there, just pure soul with a neutral grey colour. The same with the layer after that and the one after that etc, etc. These layers were separated by the densest and strongest barriers of soul energy I could create at this time and I will continue to improve them as I cultivate this skill.

It was a very simple strategy for defending the soul but in my opinion the simpler the better. Getting too complicated will just make the defense weaker.

I moved through the void whilst practising the manipulation skills from the offense and perception sections after that. Moulding my soul and soul energy into spikes, hammers, swords etc, and striking, enveloping an area with soul energy and squeezing, doing the same with both my soul and soul energy to see if I could feel something through it. The only thing I could detect was the Void, which is actually new because before I got the cultivation skill and used the Void to cultivate the soul, I couldn't feel it before. Now I can.

The nature of the Void was still the same however. Just now had more depth to it than I could perceive before. It was matter but wasn't, was energy but wasn't. It was all very confusing but I had nothing else to do, plus if I could one day weild the Void, it would probably be among the very top forces in creation. That's not going to happen for a long, long time however.

I meandered through the void, finding absolutely nothing. I couldn't tell direction and all I had were my own thoughts. It was a different kind of torture than the white void of the afterlife. There, my soul was getting turned to dust but here is absolute silence, stillness, nothingness etc. It was maddening! The only things keeping me sane were the distraction of exploring the soul cultivation technique and the hope that I can somehow find a way to live again. 

After a while, I don't know how long, something changed yet again. I don't know how or why, but I was suddenly being pulled in a direction by a force I couldnt resist! No matter what I tried, I kept getting faster and faster! Until finally all movement stopped and I was still again.