"Yes… my dear disciple. You would need to assimilate yourself to nothingness. To increase your strength, you would need to become nothing."
Wannre delivered those words with calm certainty, as though she were simply stating an ordinary fact. But to me, they were far from ordinary. Her statement dug into me, lingering, echoing inside my chest.
Assimilate to nothingness?
What did that even mean?
Was I supposed to abandon everything—my body, my soul, my mind—and hollow myself out until there was nothing left? If I stripped all that away, what would remain of me? A husk? A shadow? A memory?
I wasn't a stranger to detachment. Most of my life had been lived behind a wall, watching emotions drift past like foreign objects. Joy, grief, even anger—I could mimic them, but I never truly grasped them.
