The darkness didn't arrive like a storm. It arrived like an answer.
The void opened beneath him—not through concrete, not through earth, but through the lie that solid ground had ever been real, that the world had ever been anything but theater built over an abyss.
The hole bloomed with terrible grace, petals of absolute nothing unfurling from the point where his finger met gold.
Zane didn't fall.
The universe exhaled, and he was the breath.
***
No ground. No sky. Just dark in every direction, perfect and complete, and yet—his shirt was still visible. Pale fabric floating in nothing. The abyss granted sight without light, a terrible gift.
Air scraped into his lungs. His heart hammered against his ribs like something trying to break free. He was breathing but it felt like drowning. He flailed, desperate for momentum, for anything to push against.
Nothing. No anchor. Just a slow, helpless spin.
Then he saw it.
A blue orb. No larger than an egg. A cerulean galaxy captured in liquid glass, pristine stars suspended inside, pulsating, twinkling silent songs. It hovered. Perfect. Impossible. Just within reach.
And far away—the coin. The damned coin that had brought him here. Forever beyond his grasp now.
What was the blue thing? The question burned. He wanted to know. Needed to. But the coin had taught him something about touching unknown objects, hadn't it? The coin had led him here. What could the orb do? Lead him somewhere worse?
He kept his hands to himself. For now.
***
Silence pressed against his eardrums. Not the absence of sound but the presence of silence, a weight that made his own heartbeat seem obscenely loud.
The cerulean sphere pulsed. A visual heartbeat. It called to him—not with voice but with pull, gravitational, tempting. It promised answers. It hummed with potential that made the void feel less empty and more... waiting.
What are you? A key? A deeper prison? A soul trapped in glass like his?
The coin had been passive. Metallic deceit. This was different. This felt alive. Its presence seemed to carve out a small domain of is in the infinite is not.
To touch it might mean annihilation. Or transformation into something he couldn't comprehend.
His fingers curled into a fist. The desire to reach out ached in his arm, physical and demanding.
But he held fast. He wouldn't grab. Wouldn't grasp.
For now, he'd only witness.
***
How long? Seconds? Hours? Time didn't work here.
His thoughts started circling, desperate for something solid to grip. Razor's collections—he'd miss them. The nursing home bill. His father's face, slack and distant in that sterile room, tubes and monitors keeping him tethered to a world he barely inhabited anymore. All of it unreachable now, separated by this absolute nothing.
The orb pulsed again.
Maybe it was the way out. Had to be, right? What else would just float here, offering itself like salvation?
His hand drifted forward. Not a decision—instinct. Reflex. Because what the hell else was there? Die here in the dark or die touching something beautiful?
His father's face flashed behind his eyes. Tubes. Monitors. That steady beep that meant still alive, still waiting for you.
His hand stopped. Curled. Drew back.
But the math was simple. Stay here: slow death, maybe madness, definitely nothing. Touch the orb: unknown. And unknown beat nothing. Unknown was at least a chance.
What choice did he really have?
His fingers uncurled.
Reached.
The orb waited, patient as infinity, its stars twinkling their silent invitation.
Zane reached for the orb. The decision had already been made—not by thought, but by necessity. Wait and dissolve into madness, or act and face whatever came next. Escape or death. Not that he minded eternal peace, if it came to that. His hand moved forward, no longer under conscious command but driven by something deeper—survival instinct, or perhaps its opposite.
His fingers touched the cerulean surface.
The orb shattered.
It didn't break so much as unmake itself—fragmenting into white shards that pulsed with their own light, each piece a captured star rendered in crystalline glass. They hung suspended for a heartbeat, twinkling in the void like a galaxy caught mid-explosion. Beautiful. Impossibly, terrifyingly beautiful—the kind of sight that carved itself into memory, that would haunt the space behind closed eyes forever.
The shards didn't wait for him to admire them.
They erupted forward in a rush, a swarm of luminous fragments that converged on his chest with terrible purpose. The first impact drove the air from his lungs—a collision of light and matter that shouldn't have had weight but did. Then another. Another. They crashed into him frantically, desperately, each shard disappearing into his flesh as if his body were no more solid than water.
No pain. Just the overwhelming sensation of intrusion, of being filled with something that didn't belong.
When the last shard vanished beneath his skin, silence fell.
Not the oppressive silence of the void—this was different. Absolute. A silence so complete it swallowed even the sound of his own heartbeat, his own breath. Every sense sharpened to a razor's edge, every nerve firing in confused alarm, his entire being held in the grip of terrible anticipation.
Then—light.
It burst before his eyes without warning, a luminous blue that conquered the darkness with casual authority. A panel materialized in the space where the orb had floated, translucent and glowing, its edges sharp as cut glass. The air around it seemed to shimmer with heat that wasn't heat, presence that wasn't quite physical.
Silver runes crawled across its surface—symbols that weren't Cordian, weren't any language he'd ever seen, and yet somehow he understood. The meaning bypassed his eyes entirely, arriving directly in his mind like memory rather than sight. He didn't read them; their meaning simply began to seep into his awareness, unfamiliar yet somehow intimate, ancient yet speaking directly to something fundamental in his bones.
At first, it was just impressions—fleeting fragments his conscious mind couldn't quite grasp. Balance. Exchange. Fusion.
He focused, his mind latching onto the symbols, and the concepts wove themselves into a framework. A system. A mechanism for trade. The scope of it was dizzying, vast and undefined, promising everything and nothing in the same breath.
Then, as if a final lock had clicked open, the full message resolved in his mind with the clarity of a remembered dream. The unfamiliar became familiar. Suddenly, he could read the runes.
『The Equilibrium Shifts. A New Will Enters The Balance』
『The Grand Exchange Awaits Your Offer』
『Boon』
✧The Bazaar Of Equivalent Exchange
『Sacrifice』
✦Eternal Fusion
He blinked. Blinked again. The runes remained unchanged, patient and implacable, waiting for a response he didn't have.
The panel looked straight out of fiction. One of those interfaces from the web novels he'd devoured in stolen moments between jobs—the kind where protagonists stumbled into godlike powers, where ordinary people became extraordinary through systems that defied all logic and physics.
But those were fiction. Stories cobbled together by writers with too much imagination and too much time. They didn't manifest in reality. They didn't appear in voids beyond space, didn't shatter into light and crawl beneath skin.
He looked again.
『The Equilibrium Shifts. A New Will Enters The Balance』
What did that even mean? Was he the will? Then if he was... The entity—no, the interface. System. Web novels called it that. The system had to be the equilibrium.
But what sort of system was this? The ones in fiction just handed out godlike powers, quests and rewards like candy. This offered a transaction. Some Bazaar of Equivalent Exchange—a mechanism that would let him acquire anything, so long as he sacrificed something of equivalent value.
Wait. It was offering itself. That had to be it. It offered itself for the sacrifice of Eternal Fusion.
Eternal Fusion. He already knew the meaning behind those words he mysteriously, somehow understood. The knowledge was lodged so deep in his mind it terrified him, sent shivers cascading down his spine—terrified him more than the void embracing him.
Yet it was simple. Gain the system. Fuse with it forever.
The panel remained, steady and undeniable. The runes continued their patient shimmer, conveying meaning through pathways he couldn't explain.
He had to be dreaming. The thought arrived with desperate hope attached.
His fingers found his forearm, pinched hard. His nerves shrieked in immediate protest—sharp, bright pain that traveled up his arm and lodged itself in his awareness. Real pain. Unmistakable and entirely physical.
Not a dream, then.
Had he just... picked his way into fantasy? Reached through reality's skin and found something stranger underneath? The absurdity of it threatened hysterical laughter. But the void pressed close around him, patient and eternal, and laughter died before it could form.
What good was fantasy here? What use were godlike powers in oblivion's embrace? He'd trade every system, every supernatural gift, for a single doorway back to the mundane world—to debt collection and gym classes and his father's labored breathing.
Unless.
Unless it could help him leave.
The thought sparked like flint on steel. Yes. That had to be it. The system—whatever it was—had to be his escape route. Why else would it appear here, in this nowhere place? The universe, he suspected, was rarely so poetic as to hand out fantasy interfaces for mere decoration. They came with purpose. Function.
His eyes, heavy with a fear that was slowly crystallizing into resolve, returned to the shimmering panel, to the transaction that still waited for his answer.
What choice did he have, really? Stay here and slowly unravel, or step forward into the unknown and hope it led somewhere—anywhere—else?