The transition was instantaneous.
The absolute nothingness of the void didn't fade, it was violently ripped away, replaced by the biting, freezing reality of the Vath Hills.
Alaric gasped, a sharp, ragged breath tearing into his lungs as his eyes snapped open.
He was sitting on a cold, jagged slab of stone, the mountain wind howling past his ears and whipping his dust covered coat against his frame.
For a long, paralyzed moment, his mind was still trapped in the vacuum, the stolen echo of his own voice ringing in his ears.
"With the Incantation of..... Collapse the horizon, let all paths end in me."
His immediate instinct was to check his right hand, the hand that had been reduced to a blunt, fleshy stump, the hand he had brutally tortured by driving five splintered wooden sticks straight into the raw skin.
He lifted it to his face, his chest tightening in anticipation of the gruesome sight.
Instead, his jaw dropped.
The wooden sticks were entirely gone. In their place were his real, proper fingers, fleshed out and completely intact.
He flexed his knuckles, watching them clench into a perfect, strong fist.
The skin was flawless, bearing no scars from the self-inflicted agony he had just committed in the dark.
Only after his fingers curled did he realize they were tightly wrapped around something.
He looked down. He was wielding the very same blade he had driven into his own chest.
But it was no longer gritting against splintered wood, his restored fingers held it with a natural, iron grip.
The weapon was entirely weightless, as if he were clutching a blade made of nothing but air.
The perfect, colorless edge had transformed, now shimmering with a faint, dangerous purplish hue, the arcane energy swirling beneath its crystalline surface like a quiet storm.
Singularity.
Trembling, Alaric shifted his focus to his left side.
He lifted his left arm, the arm that had been severed by the blue coal blast and crudely sewn back on with his teeth.
It moved smoothly, responding to his thoughts with a terrifyingly perfect fluidity.
There were no coarse threads.
There was no dead weight.
The joint rotated without a single stutter of pain.
Finally, he pressed his right hand flat against the center of his chest.
There was no hollow, pitch-black cavity. The fabric of his coat was torn where the blade had pierced it, but beneath it, his skin was solid and whole.
Yet, as he focused inward, his breath caught. The heartbeat knocking against his ribs was wrong.
It didn't possess the familiar, frantic flutter of a terrified merchant.
It was a low, heavy, subterranean thrum, a rhythm that didn't feel like moving blood, but rather the steady, unyielding expansion and contraction of an anchor.
It was a different frequency entirely, a pulse that seemed to beat in perfect alignment with the Conduit.
His heart was no longer just an organ. It was a source.
Alaric rose to his feet, his boots crunching against the mountain shale.
He was no longer the broken, one-armed creature crawling through the dirt, begging for an end.
He was an Arcanist, standing in the freezing dark with a purplish energy weapon forged from the void itself.
He stared out over the jagged peaks of the Vath Hills, his jaw clenching as the purple glow of the blade reflected in his eyes.
Volt thought he had executed a pig in a ditch.
He had no idea he had just balanced the ledger.
Alaric glared at the weapon with the greed to swing it.
But he was afraid, he was afraid that he had to cut his own hands, he was afraid that he had to feel the very same agonizing pain.
The Voice also didn't tell him about can he use lumen Siphon without any sacrifice.
The adrenaline that had carried him out of the abyss began to ebb, and as the immediate shock faded, the brutal baseline of his biology reasserted itself with a vengeance.
A hollow, twisting ache bloomed in the pit of his stomach.
His throat felt like it had been scraped raw with sandpaper, dry to the point of cracking every time he swallowed.
A heavy, leaden lethargy settled over his limbs.
He forced his mind to calculate the passage of time, a merchant's habit he couldn't shake.
He had left his estate with Volt during the dead of night, peak December.
But looking at the pale, weak winter sun hanging low on the horizon, he realized a terrifying truth, it wasn't the next morning.
The position of the light, the thick frost layering the surrounding peaks, the sheer, hollow exhaustion of his cells, it had to have been at least two, maybe three days since the teal car went over the cliff.
For days, his body had been lying on the freezing stone of the Vath Hills while his mind was traded away in the void.
He couldn't afford to lie down. Not here.
Alaric took his first step forward, but his knees immediately buckled.
His legs, entirely drained of nutrients and stiff from the mountain cold, felt less like muscle and more like brittle wood.
He stumbled, his boots skidding through the loose mountain shale, before catching himself against the cold face of a boulder.
Every breath came out in a thick white plume, burning his dehydrated throat.
He had a weapon that could alter reality, a source beating with the frequency of the cosmos inside his chest, but right now, a simple slope of loose rock and a mile of freezing wilderness stood between him and survival.
He locked his jaw, anchoring his weight against the stone, and forced his broken, starving body to take another step down the mountain.
Alaric kept moving, forcing one heavy, mechanical step after another down the treacherous slopes of the Vath Hills.
His eyes scanned the gray, unyielding landscape, searching desperately for any sign of a mountain spring, a patch of hardy winter berries, or even a hunter's abandoned cache.
There was nothing but frost, jagged shale, and dead earth.
He paused, leaning heavily against a jagged stone wall to catch his breath. His tongue felt thick and useless in his dry mouth.
He let out a harsh, rasping sigh, his voice barely a whisper against the howling wind.
"Stupid... who would leave water and food in an area like this, where no one ever dares to come?"
He couldn't waste his remaining energy on useless complaints.
He pushed off the stone and kept going, using the heavy, subterranean pulse of his new heart to anchor his fading consciousness.
For half a day, the walk became a blur of endless shivering, blinding exhaustion, and the constant, nagging dread of the weapon clamped in his fist.
He didn't stop.
He dragged his starving, depleted body across the unforgiving terrain until the sharp, brutal inclines of the wilderness finally began to flatten out.
The thick mountain mist parted slightly, revealing a bleak but familiar horizon.
Ahead lay the sagging timber rooftops, the rising plumes of cheap coal smoke, and the huddled, miserable structures of his destination.
He had finally done it
He had reached the border of the Eastern Sector.