THUMP.
The pulse came again.
Not in sound. Not in motion.
In presence.
Damien floated in a world stripped of reference—no ground, no sky, no air. Not even pain remained.
And yet…
He felt it.
The pulse.
Like the heartbeat of the void.
No—of the mana itself.
It wasn't auditory. It wasn't tactile. It was something deeper. A reverberation that touched the edges of his being not through nerves or breath or bone—but through existence.
He didn't hear the next thump.
But he felt it closer.
Like a tide brushing the edge of a soul he hadn't known he possessed.
This place… wasn't just absence.
It was mana.
Raw. Unformed. Infinite and yet contained.
He couldn't move here. Not physically. Not even in thought, the way dreams drift.
But his mana? It could.
It did.
He focused—not with eyes, but with whatever this new sense was. The thing that pulsed where his chest used to be.
The nest.
