Chapter 102: Chapter 102 - The Void
Seconds passed by as he sat on his bed, looking at the screen that had appeared right before him a few seconds ago.
It was a loading screen of some sort. Darius had tried to ask what its purpose was, but the voice in his mind hadn\'t answered.
[Loading…]
"Can\'t you tell me what this thing is?" Darius asked as it continued to load something. "Just a little hint."
[Just wait, impatient human. Everything will soon make sense.]
Darius frowned and decided to listen to the voice in his mind as she had been mostly right most of the time. Also, as much as Darius wanted to remember an instance where she lied, he couldn\'t.
The feminine voice in the back of his mind had not once lied.
It was strange, considering human nature. However, after the discussion with Fleur, it was clear that the person helping him through the system wasn\'t a human but a Goddess.
A literal Goddess.
Darius still couldn\'t believe it.
He knew that the person helping him by giving him all those powers had to be powerful, but for it to be a God. It was shocking, even for him.
"How much time do I have to wait?" Darius asked, as it had already been one long minute.
[…Ah, just keep quiet. It\'s almost ready.]
\'It?\' Darius thought with a frown.
Suddenly, the loading screen in front of him disappeared, and the empty space in front of Darius started to react strangely.
Blue particles started appearing out of thin air. But that was only the start, as Darius felt something pulling him toward those particles. In the process, Darius\' vision also became blurry.
The last thing he saw before his vision turned completely black was a huge blue portal.
Yes, a portal.
When Darius managed to regain his vision, he opened his eyes and was met with a vast sea of darkness.
Everywhere he looked around him, the only thing he could see was darkness.
Actually, that was a lie.
Through all this darkness, there was a bright star, and when Darius looked toward it, he felt warmth coursing throughout his body.
In fact, when he looked at the bright star that was most likely thousands of kilometers away from him, Darius started to realize that it wasn\'t the only star in this sea of darkness and that there were stars all around him.
Some of them shone less, some a little more, but the star that shone the most was still the first one that Darius had seen.
Unsure what any of this meant, Darius tried his best to stay calm and asked the voice in his mind for some explanations.
\'Hey… can you tell me what the hell is happening right now?\'
-Beep!
[Calm down. There was a slight problem with the portal. Instead of being thrown into my personal space, you were thrown into the Void. The Void is the place that separates everything from interacting with one another. Gods, worlds, everything you can potentially imagine.]
Darius felt his heartbeat increasing instantly.
\'A problem?! I\'m in the fucking void?! Get me out of there!\' Darius asked as he started panicking right away.
[Calm down. There is a solution to this little problem.]
"Little problem?!" Darius screamed as loudly as he could.
He was in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by strange stars that were shining weirdly.
There were no red exit signs anywhere around him.
Darius had literally no idea how to leave this place.
He was stuck in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing the Goddess said to him was, "Calm down."
"Just tell me how to get out of here!" Darius shouted.
[Look around yourself. You see the stars surrounding you, right?]
"I do! What about it? What are those stars?"
[Those stars either represent a world like your own or others. Either way, that doesn\'t matter. Within those stars, there is my personal space, where you will be able to meet me. That\'s your reward: meeting the Goddess who has been helping you for the past few weeks, aka me.]
Darius nodded as he heard what his reward would be. He knew that there was bound to be something else once he met her. Maybe he would finally be able to get answers to some of his questions regarding his skills and why he returned to the past.
"And how do I find your star out of all of those? And, more importantly, how am I supposed to move right now?" Darius asked.
Ever since he was thrown into that strange portal, he hadn\'t been able to move as he wished because of the strange gravity surrounding him. He tried to move around, but his entire body felt sluggish. He was lucky that his physical abilities had increased recently, or he might have been completely crushed by the atmosphere of the Void.
[There must be a star calling out to you. That\'s my personal space, and that\'s where you\'ll be able to meet me.]
Darius quickly determined that the star calling out to him was the one shining the most. But there was still the other part of the problem: How could Darius move in the Void?
After all, her personal space was well over thousands of kilometers. With his current speed, it would take years to reach it. There had to be something to help him, right?
[As for moving around in the Void… Well, that\'s complicated.]
"What do you mean? Is it possible?"
[Uh… well, not really. Even for me, it would be quite hard to reach my personal space.]
"Then, what the hell am I supposed to do?"
[Don\'t move. I\'ll try to ask some of my friends around you, and if there aren\'t any…then you might have to enter a random world, or if you prefer, a random star.]