"When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade."
Lucien had experienced the death of his mother. If anything, she was the only human he truly held in deep gratitude within the depths of his heart. Gone, just like that.
The 4D construct still hovered above his head. Naturally, withstanding such an existence was not going to be easy. Blood ran down his eyes, ears, and nose. With every ragged breath, he coughed up crimson. The pressure of that bizarre entity was something Lucien's physical frame simply could not endure.
As he frantically searched for a way to endure and escape the crushing weight of that otherworldly pressure, faint sounds began to penetrate his ears—sounds that felt as if they belonged to a completely different plane of existence. The noises struck heavy, blurring his vision and draining the last of his strength in an instant.
Hovering at the absolute brink of collapse, a thought drifted through his mind. Will I die? Well, it's not like I care. If I die, then so be it. If I don't, then so be it. The universe itself seemed to marvel at his mindset. With a heavy exhale, he closed his eyes and slipped into the void.
When he opened his eyes, he was bewildered by the sight before him. Mountains hung suspended in the sky, their jagged peaks pointing downward to meet the crests of upright mountains below. Grotesque creatures tore through the very fabric of space to reach their destinations, yet as Lucien stood there, he felt his existence went completely unnoticed by these anomalies.
He felt truly alone.
An illusion, he realized. These things aren't real. If they had truly been real, there would have been a change in breath, movement, or a ripple of cautiousness amidst the anomalies as a result of noticing a new existence. But it wasn't so. Which means these things don't exist.
"Whoever you are, whatever you did, it didn't work," he uttered into the void.
At the utterance of that sentence, the entirety of space cracked. Reality fractured, and he was violently thrown to the foot of a mountain that seemed to extend into the infinite vastness of existence. To his right spread an endless, desolate plain; to his left, a sheer mountain face with no peak in sight. A wall of thick fog rolled directly in front of him, and at his back lay a darkness so absolute it felt as though it could pierce the soul.
When faced with the unknown, primal human reactions usually surface: fear, profound alienation, or desperate caution. But out of all these, the only thing Lucien felt was curiosity.
Curiosity drove Lucien's first steps. He walked toward the thick fog, but no matter how many paces he took, the distance between him and the gray wall never shortened. He turned to the right, his eyes scanning the endless plain, looking for a break in the terrain, a landmark, anything. Nothing. He walked to the sheer rock face of the mountain on his left and placed his hand flat against it. It was cold, unnaturally smooth, and entirely unyielding.
He stopped and listened. There was no wind howling across the plain. There was no shifting of rocks. There wasn't even the microscopic scratching of an insect in the dirt. It was a sterile, absolute vacuum of life.
With no external factors left to analyze, Lucien sat down at the foot of the peakless mountain. His mind, deprived of new information, naturally turned inward. In the dead silence of the void, the memory of his mother surfaced. Not the bloody, sudden reality of her death, but the quiet moments before it.
"You rely too much on yourself, Lucien," she had told him once, her voice a fleeting echo in his mind. "When I am gone, do not let that coldness swallow you. Find someone. Find a woman who can share your weight, someone to fill the gap I will leave behind."
He had dismissed it then. But sitting in a realm of infinite nothingness, those words anchored him. They ceased to be a mother's sentimental plea and transformed into a concrete objective. A logical directive. He would survive this place, he would break out, and he would fulfill that final wish.
He stood up, his resolve hardening. He closed his eyes and reached inward, calling upon his Essence—the very foundation of his power, the energy that allowed him to bend the rules of reality. He prepared to force his way out of this dimension.
A hollow, dead silence answered him.
His eyes snapped open. He tried again, forcing his will into his pathways. Nothing. It wasn't just that his Essence was suppressed; the space itself was completely devoid of it. It was a dead zone. Without external Essence to draw from, and with his internal reserves locked tight by the laws of this space, he was stripped of everything. He was, for all intents and purposes, just a mortal man in a cosmic cage.
He began to walk. He needed to find a physical exit.
Days lost their meaning. Without a sun to track the hours, without the basic human necessities of hunger or thirst to mark the passage of time, duration became a blur. His body did not age, nor did it weaken, preserved in a sickening stasis by the realm itself.
Years turned into decades. Decades bled into centuries.
A human mind is a machine built to process stimuli. When deprived of it, the machine begins to cannibalize itself.
At ten thousand years, the methodical, calculating Lucien began to pace the endless plain like a caged animal. He talked to himself constantly, repeating his mother's words out loud just to prove he still had a voice.
At one hundred thousand years, the memory of his mother's face began to rot. Try as he might, he couldn't picture her eyes or the sound of her laugh. The resolve to find a woman, to fulfill her wish, twisted from a logical goal into a deranged, obsessive mantra that he muttered endlessly into the soul-piercing darkness.
By the time a million years had passed, there was no logic left.
A million years of staring at the same fog. A million years of clawing at the unyielding mountain until his fingers bled, only to watch the wounds heal instantly, resetting his agony. The sheer, crushing weight of absolute isolation broke him. His stoicism shattered, leaving only raw, primal static.
Lucien collapsed against the foot of the mountain. He tore at his own hair and let out a laugh—a broken, jagged, wheezing sound that held no humor. It was the sound of a mind that had finally snapped under the weight of eternity. The void hadn't killed his body, but it had successfully slaughtered his mind.