Joseph felt the slow, heavy weight of tiredness finally settle over him. It pressed down on his eyelids and made the bright computer screen seem far away. The room was hot and damp. The air smelled faintly of old ramen cups and unwashed clothes—the familiar, comforting smell of being alone. He shifted a little in his chair. The cheap plastic back made a low groaning sound. But he did not have the energy to move to his bed, even though it was only a few feet away.
In his lap was the physical copy of the newest fantasy harem novel. The pages were slightly sticky from touching them many times and from the damp night air. The story was about a young man, a genius with the sword, who suddenly crossed into the Demon Realm. Through tactical victories and forced alliances, he slowly built his own empire of beautiful, powerful demon women. Joseph was fascinated by the demon world—not the Christian hell, but a brutal, high-fantasy world ruled by dark power, blood contracts, and cold logic. He often dreamed of being reborn into such a world. Not as the helpless hero, but as one of the strong, cruel anti-heroes he enjoyed reading about.
The monitor still glowed with bright white light. It displayed the fan community forum where he had just finished arguing about his favorite antagonist's most recent crime. His eyes were heavy. But the intense, bright light from the screen kept his mind awake just long enough to read the current sentence in the novel: a description of a character's ritual sacrifice to gain Darkness Affinity. The words swam together. They blurred because of his exhaustion until they were meaningless symbols.
Joseph's head tipped back slightly. It rested against the worn fake leather of the chair. He felt the soft, running rush of sleep washing over his mind. A gentle, cool wave pulled him away from reality. The computer made a constant sound from its cooling fans—a soothing, steady mechanical noise. It was the last sound he heard. Everything was heavy, warm, and perfectly normal.
The moment of change was not gentle.
There was no fading. No drifting. No dream-like descent into sleep. Instead, there was a sudden, violent breaking apart of his entire awareness.
One instant, Joseph was drifting in the comfort of his chair. The next, he was falling.
This was not the gentle sinking feeling of a dream. This was a physical, impossible lurch of his entire being. It was the feeling of being dropped from an endless height without wind or gravity. There was no air rushing past his ears. Yet he knew, with a certainty that screamed through his nervous system, that he was moving. He was speeding up at an impossible rate through total darkness.
His mind tried to process the familiar panic response: yell, grab something, make it stop. But his body gave no response. He tried to draw a breath to scream, to release the huge, overpowering terror building up inside his chest. But his throat muscles just tightened and spasmed, pulling tight and useless. The pressure built. It ran through his chest and skull—the silent, high-pitched internal screaming without sound. His lips peeled back in a frozen expression of pain. His tongue flattened, useless against the roof of his mouth. The terror was pure, unfiltered, and ran through him like a high-voltage current.
He reached out his hands by instinct. He desperately tried to find a wall, a surface, anything to hold onto. But his hands met only the cold emptiness of the space around him. The darkness was not just an absence of light. It was an active, heavy presence that pressed against his eyeballs. It denied them any sensation, any comfort, any pattern to focus on.
The falling became the process of being taken apart.
As his mind tried to fight the sensory loss, the very memories that made him who he was began to violently scatter like broken glass.
He desperately held onto the last image of comfort: the tired, kind lines around his mother's face as she waved goodbye the last time he visited home. The image appeared in his mind, clear and comforting. Then it was instantly, brutally ripped away. It left a phantom ache behind. He tried to recall the specific, comforting smell of his childhood home's dusty, sun-warmed attic. But the memory was cut short. It left his brain firing a brief, desperate, and meaningless signal.
Joseph did not understand the word for this pain. It was the complete, violent breaking down of identity. It was not death, which was an ending. This was a painful process of being erased. He held on, with the strength of a drowning man, to a random, specific memory: the distinct texture of the peeling paint on his bedroom window sill. He fought to hold that single, tiny detail. He knew, instinctively, that if he lost the details, he would lose Joseph completely.
But the force was too strong.
The memory of the window sill snapped like a brittle thread. Then came the feeling of his father's rough, protective hand on his shoulder. Then the quiet, determined anger he felt during a small argument with a childhood friend. Each loss was a spike of mental pain, sharp and piercing, running throughout his mind. He was being emptied, piece by piece. Not gently fading, but being violently removed from himself.
The psychological impact of this breaking down was beyond anything he had ever read in a dark fantasy novel. The books described torture and gore. But never this intimate, horrifying violation of the very structure of the self. A fierce, new anger began to form. A burning core of resistance against the unseen, unknown thing that was doing this to him. *I am Joseph, and I will not be erased.* But even the thought was broken, thin, and rapidly losing its meaning.
He continued to fall. Though the sense of speeding up eventually dulled into a steady, endless drift. He was conscious, painfully so, yet entirely suspended. He landed nowhere because there was no ground, no air, and no boundary. His existence was reduced to a point of panic within a boundless, consuming void.
He tried to scream again.
This time, he forced the muscles in his chest and stomach to contract. To fight against the paralyzing influence of the void. He strained until the blood vessels in his eyes felt like they might burst. He forced a silent, muffled, choked noise that was entirely contained inside his own skull. The act of trying to scream brought a brief, fierce jolt of physical pain to his straining throat. For a terrifying moment, he thought he might pass out. But the fear was a constant, working presence that kept his mind agonizingly awake.
The sensory loss was the most profound and crippling source of terror beyond understanding.
He could not see. He could not hear. He could not smell or taste. The only thing he could feel was the terrifying boundary of his own skin. It defined the space where Joseph ended and the awful darkness began. He desperately tried to force his eyes open wider. He strained to catch any stray, tiny bit of light. But the darkness was absolute, heavy, and cold. After minutes of useless straining, his optical nerves began to rebel. They sent wild, phantom signals to his brain: streaks of non-existent purple, flashes of violent green. Only for the complete black to instantly swallow them. This constant, confusing visual breakdown was maddening.
He tried to orient himself.
Was he floating? Was he drifting? He tried to move his arm from what he thought was his side. He wanted to swing it slowly to understand his spatial position. He willed the muscles to contract. He received the faintest, delayed feeling of movement. But what was up? What was down? He could not tell if his arm was moving toward his head or his feet. Or if his entire body was spinning slowly and uncontrollably.
He then started talking to himself, slowly, internally, to try and keep the last remaining logical parts of his mind from breaking completely.
*"I am twenty years old. My name is Joseph. The capital of France is Paris. One hundred minus seven is ninety-three. Ninety-three minus seven is eighty-six…"*
He tried to perform these simple, everyday, logical acts—reciting facts, doing basic math—to provide a constant, internal anchor. But the void was corrosive. Halfway through reciting the alphabet, his mind suddenly failed to recall the letter that came after 'H'. He strained. Tried to force the memory. Felt the sharp, frustrating spike of disappointment and desperation. But the memory simply was not there. The gap felt enormous, terrifyingly vast. His mind was breaking, and the process was slow and agonizingly clear.
Time itself became a shapeless, hostile thing.
Had he been falling for a minute, an hour, or a thousand years? There was no way to measure it. The absence of sensation meant the absence of clocks, sunrises, or muscle tiredness. He could only measure time by the rate of his own psychological breaking down.
Slowly, over what felt like an eternity of continuous, silent falling, a profound hate began to replace the pure terror. It was not a childish anger. It was a cold, heavy rage born of total violation. He hated the force that had pulled him from his life. He hated the unknown demon world he had romanticized and now faced as a victim. He hated his own overwhelming, useless weakness—the weakness that had allowed him to be taken apart so easily.
This hate was the first thing that did not immediately dissolve in the void. It was a solid, working core of dark, powerful, and persistent emotion. It was a promise, unspoken and silent, that if he ever found the thing responsible, the person who had planned his rebirth, he would commit an act of cruelty worthy of the dark fantasy antagonists he once admired.
He realized his breathing was becoming shallow and ragged, yet entirely silent. He focused on the only true sensation he could manage: the constant, vibrant working of his own hammering heart, trying to pump blood that felt impossibly thin through veins that felt… wrong.
He focused on the feel of his hands.
He tried to clench his fists as hard as possible. A final, defiant action against the void. He felt the tension and the slight tremor of the muscles. But as he ran his mind's awareness over the shape of his clenched fist, a new, deeply unsettling sensation registered. The shape was subtle. A feeling of slight elongation. Of knuckles more prominent. Fingers ending… differently. It was the first, terrifying hint of the physical change that had occurred. A sense of vulnerability. The knowledge that his familiar, male body was no longer beneath his consciousness. He pulled away from the sensation. His mind recoiled in a final act of self-preservation. Refusing to acknowledge the full horror of his transformation.
The effort to resist the void, to fight the sensory loss, to keep the last pieces of his memory intact, and to process the frightening new strangeness of his body, finally overwhelmed the system.
The core of hate and anger remained, solid and burning. But the mind surrounding it could no longer stay conscious. The terror, the psychological pain, the frustration of his own useless struggle, had pushed his brain past its limits.
Joseph—or what remained of him—could no longer fight.
The last thought was a cold, sharp blade of logic: *I cannot win this fight. Survival requires shutdown.*
The pressure behind his eyes eased as the muscles finally relaxed. His internal screaming without sound stopped. It was replaced by a dull, low, heavy thudding, which rapidly faded. The pure, consuming darkness was no longer something to be feared. It became a heavy, soft blanket of oblivion. He did not lose consciousness to a dream. He lost it to a vast, necessary, and empty psychological shock. Fainting from psychological shock in the absolute, boundless nowhere. The fall continued, silent and unseen, carrying the fragile, broken point of consciousness into the next phase of his unwanted rebirth.
The last sensation was the faint, lingering metallic taste of blood in his phantom mouth. A promise of the dark affinity that now defined him.