Chapter 188: Chapter 188

His entire form was surrounded—no, revolved—by stars, like the galaxies themselves had bent to orbit him. His silhouette pulsed with an otherworldly brilliance, divinity bleeding from every inch of his presence.

In that moment, Art didn’t look human. He looked like a myth etched into the firmament. A celestial figure descending into a mortal dream.

His eyes—once emerald, playful, and always too sharp for his own good—were now incandescent gold. Not merely golden in color, but alive, as though the stars themselves had taken residence in them.

Every time they blinked, constellations shimmered, collapsed, and rebirthed within his gaze.

I was stunned. For a second—just one—I forgot to breathe.

Then, I laughed softly under my breath. "Hey Art... what’s with the divine cosplay? Doesn’t suit you, you know. Not with that jester personality of yours."

He didn’t look at me. Didn’t blink. Didn’t even flinch. Maybe my voice was blocked again, like before. I clicked my tongue and dropped the attempt.

’Whatever.’ I turned my attention to the world around us instead.

A black-and-red canvas stretched endlessly. Stars bent unnaturally, and space itself seemed to ripple in defiance of physical laws. No gravity. No up or down. No distance. It was like staring into a fever dream conjured by a mad god on the edge of insanity.

It looked beautiful, yes—but it hurt to look at.

I could feel it. The pressure. The buzzing. Something kept whispering in my ear—no, not whispering—singing. Voices that grated against my nerves, clawed at my skull, harmonizing with the unnatural rhythm of this realm. The longer I listened, the more I felt something within me... fracture.

Because something kept filtering it. Nullifying it.

My mind snapped to one conclusion: my element—Nothing.

The pure absence. Nothingness in its primal sense. It was shielding me. Stripping away the filth these eldritch hymns tried to smear on my soul.

I wasn’t affected. Not like I should’ve been. If someone else had been dragged here with me, they’d have lost themselves tenfold over by now—screaming, breaking, becoming part of this place.

But me? I was still me.

I let out a slow breath and looked again.

The void twisted. Reality folded, collapsed, and restructured—right before my eyes. The red-black abyss transformed into an endless ocean, waves rippling outward... but the waves were not water.

They were made of earth. Stone. Soil. The very ground itself flowed like a tide, swaying and wobbling like jelly.

My boots sank slightly into the strange terrain with each step. I watched my reflection ripple in the moving stone beneath me.

This wasn’t just madness. It was cosmic distortion. The dream of something so foul, so fundamentally alien, that reality bent itself into abomination to accommodate it.

I couldn’t describe it. Couldn’t give it a name.

Art shimmered once more. His entire figure pulsed with such overwhelming golden radiance that the world paled in comparison.

And then... he vanished.

His body ceased to exist. Gone in an instant. As if he’d transcended physicality. As if he slipped into another dimension altogether, one I couldn’t perceive.

But I knew he wasn’t dead.

Because of the thread.

A single, golden filament of mana connected his former spot to my wrist. It glowed with gentle warmth, swaying softly even without wind. I raised my hand, studied the shimmering string, then tried to touch it.

My fingers passed through it.

I didn’t know what to feel. Relief? Worry? Awe?

I shook my head and began walking. There was no point staying still.

The world continued to shift.

One step—black and red. Another—rainbow skies and mirror lakes. Then—burning deserts. Frozen tundras. Flesh and bone mountains. Clockwork cities in the sky. Worm-ridden void pits. Endless halls filled with my own distorted reflections.

Again and again. It didn’t stop.

Every few seconds, the landscape changed. As if flipping through the pages of a lunatic’s sketchbook. As if existence itself was on shuffle.

It changed hundreds of times. Thousands. Millions.

And I didn’t skip a single one. I witnessed every transformation. Faced every absurdity. Endured every loop.

One by one. One by one. One. By. One.

I wasn’t even sure if time still existed here. Maybe I’d been walking for days. Maybe centuries. Maybe only a few seconds had passed in the real world.

The only thing that did was that I was still here.

And somehow, despite the horror and awe and incomprehensible madness that surrounded me—there was still a thread.

A single golden thread.

So fragile. So delicate. Yet it was all I had—my sanity, my lifeline, my anchor to this existence. That luminous strand of mana shimmered faintly in the darkness, defying the oppressive weight of the void around me.

My entire being clung to that thread. My life was suspended upon it. It gave me something I hadn’t felt in what felt like lifetimes.

That word. It echoed inside my mind, like a foreign sound. I rolled it around in my thoughts, unfamiliar, alien. Hope was never a part of my vocabulary. It was a luxury I’d never been granted.

Hope was like luck—fleeting, unpredictable, a miracle you heard about in stories, happening to someone else, never to you.

And yet... I was hoping. Genuinely hoping for a miracle.

It was laughable, really. I was already standing at death’s doorstep.

No regret. No anger. No longing.

Yes. That was what I was. A husk of a person. My emotions had long since turned to ash, scattered somewhere... No... I never had them to begin with.

I raised a trembling hand to my face, brushing it absently as I let out a soundless chuckle.

’Every emotion I had experienced since arriving in this world... since waking up in this stolen body... they weren’t mine, were they?’

I had tried to make them mine.

I wanted them to be mine.

But deep down, I knew. I always knew. They were remnants—traces left behind by the original owner of this body. By Cassius.

A boy filled with warmth, pain, pride, and the weight of countless regrets, countless emotions.

’I had envied him. I envy him.’

That’s why I let his emotions bleed into me. Why I didn’t resist when his memories whispered in my mind. I welcomed the illusion of emotion, of humanity, like a beggar clinging to warmth in a snowstorm.

I desired what I never had. What I was never meant to have.

As I dragged my hand down across the void, it rippled like liquid, before shattering like broken glass.

Cracks spread through the space around me. Like a mirror splintering under pressure.

Here, in this isolated dimension—this prison—I was no longer pretending. No longer wearing the skin of someone else.

No longer haunted by Cassius’s emotions.

I was being true to myself.

My lips twisted upward in a hollow grin. A chuckle escaped me—dry and humorless.

"Hah... so the last of Cassius is gone," I murmured, voice echoing off the broken shards of reality. "No more interference... no more residue. I’m finally free."

I tilted my head back and whispered to the collapsing void.

"I am Arawn. The Nothing."

At that moment, something deep within me stirred. A white fog began to spill out of my skin, curling and writhing like it was alive. Thick, ethereal. It bled from my pores like a mist from the abyss, swallowing the fragments of the shattered dimension.

For the first time in this cursed second life... I embraced it.

The unshakable link to that which lies beyond all things—to the one truth that preceded creation and would outlast its end.

And just like that, I remembered.

The first one I had after transmigrating.

The explosion. The betrayal. The rage.

The hatred for everything.

The sheer rejection of existence.

Creation itself had been an offense to me.

And in that moment, with that single golden thread dissolving in the fog, I understood.

And that blink was all it took.

The incomprehensible domain I had been trapped in shattered—completely, utterly.

The monster that had chained me here, that grotesque imitation of fear and power, splintered like cheap glass.

I slowly looked down at my hand.

It was covered in white mist—thick, dense, coiling like a serpent around my fingers.

And yet I felt no fear. No revulsion. No anxiety.

A true, honest smile.

For the first time, I felt alive.

Not in the way Cassius had. Not through warmth, or joy, or love.

I had shed the last of what I wasn’t.

The final echo of another soul had been silenced.

Arawn had fully transmigrated.

And for the first time in two lifetimes... I was whole.