"I am... Void."
When that voice exploded in his consciousness, ten-year-old Arnor was squatting beside a dry riverbed known as the "Long Reach." He had just pried this glowing, blue-light emitting metal scale from the silt. He hadn't yet managed to put it into his leather pouch when that voice felt as if it had crossed ten thousand years of time, taking root directly in his mind.
Arnor sat back on the floor in fright; the scale nearly slipped from his hand.
"Do not be afraid." The voice sounded somewhat weak, even intermittent due to a lack of computation power. "I bear no ill will. I... I am merely a lost guide."
Arnor stared wide-eyed at his surroundings. The riverbed remained desolate; there were only the ruined mounds left by a lost civilization on the horizon. He was an outcast in his tribe, often mocked by his peers for staring blankly at the ruins.
"Are you a god?" Arnor asked silently in his heart; his elders often said only gods could project voices that rang inside the mind.
"A god? Hardly." The voice seemed to hold a hint of sarcasm. "If you must define me, I am more like... a broken library."
In the months that followed, Arnor's life changed entirely. This chip did not require him to do anything; it remained silent most of the time. Only when Arnor touched special metal wrecks or stared in a trance at the starry sky would it strike like a triggered dream, showing him extremely fragmented shards.
They were images: towers reaching into the clouds, light-carriages speeding underground, longswords capable of sailing between the stars.
For a tribe living on the margins of the transition from stone to bronze, these images were not just miracles; they were a form of torture. Arnor began trying to find real ruins based on the traces he saw in the images.
His first major discovery was a "Static Hall" buried halfway beneath a hillside.
It was a massive space wrapped in marble, filled everywhere with rotting cables and rusted metal brackets. When Arnor pushed open the heavy alloy door with trembling hands, he found that this was no temple, but a long-since looted old-era maintenance station.
"Turn left, three meters." Void's voice issued a command in the chip.
Arnor obeyed. He brushed away a thick layer of dust and, in the corner, discovered a control panel still emitting a faint red glow.
"Touch it, using your index finger."
Arnor obeyed.
As electricity met skin, the control panel gave off a crisp startup chime. Then, the air before his eyes rippled like water being splashed, as if some invisible surface had been broken.
It was a holographic globe!
Watching the projection of star map lines labeled "X-13" rotating slowly, Arnor was completely stunned. His breath quickened, and his pupils trembled.
"What is this?" he asked.
"This is a map." Void's voice sounded somewhat heavy with history. "This was the great star-chart humanity once possessed. Arnor, if I want you to understand all of this, we need to start from the most foundational parts."
Void realized it could not pour too much into this immature brain, or it would turn this human cub into a pile of chaotic noise, just like it had with X-13 back then. It had to proceed step by step.
"Arnor," Void guided the child to look at the blue planet on the star map that had already dimmed, "the first thing we must do is not go above the stars. We must first learn how to enable people in this world of ruins to once again possess the capability to resist death."
After that day, in this primitive tribe where the strong preyed upon the weak, there appeared a strange teenager.
He began to teach the people in his tribe how to smelt ore to resist the cold, and how to use old-era structural layouts to renovate sturdier shelters. He looked like an indefatigable prophet, but only he knew that every time night fell, he was actually carrying on the longest conversation with a lonely metal chip.
Void told him that night, "Arnor, I am not teaching you witchcraft. I am teaching you humanity's most powerful weapon—record-keeping."
"Because only by recording the truth of the darkness can humanity avoid walking that path toward the graveyard again, before the stars call to us once more."
This was the beginning for Arnor, and also the first step of Void's revenge.