Darkness. Thick, suffocating, endless.


    There was no ground beneath him, no sky above—just an eternal black, pressing in from every direction. He felt weightless, like drifting through a sea of tar. The silence was deafening, yet somehow... alive.


    A single whisper cut through the void.


    “You are cursed...”


    The voice came from nowhere. Cold. Hollow. It didn''t echo, it lingered, crawling through his skull like a parasite, embedding itself in the marrow of his mind.


    Then came pain.


    A flash. His heart lurched as images surged through him—faces he couldn’t name, voices he couldn’t recognize, blood on hands that might have been his. Flashes of light. Screams. A burning sun swallowed by shadow.


    Then, silence again.


    He tried to move. Nothing responded. His body felt like it belonged to someone else. Even the act of breathing—if he was breathing—felt foreign.


    “You are cursed...” The voice came again, closer now. More deliberate. Each word fell like a nail in his coffin.


    He wanted to deny it, to scream back, but there was no voice. No sound. Just that ever-present pressure in his skull. That presence watching him from beyond the veil.


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    Suddenly—impact.


    His body slammed against something solid. Cold. Hard. A floor, maybe? He gasped, his lungs finally taking in air—thick, dry, and reeking of ash. The sensation overwhelmed him, a violent return to awareness.


    He was no longer drifting.


    He lay still, staring into the endless dark above, his vision hazy. Faint shapes stirred at the edge of his sight—twisted, shifting things that had no form. The shadows moved with a will of their own, as if alive.


    His hand scraped against rough stone as he pushed himself upright. His muscles burned with strain, every movement heavy. He didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know who he was.


    But something inside him pulsed—low and faint, like a heartbeat that wasn’t his. A foreign rhythm, buried deep within his chest. A strange energy.


    He staggered to his feet, breathing hard. The darkness around him wasn’t empty—it was watching.


    Then it came. A flicker in the air. Like a crack in reality itself.


    [System initializing...]


    A soundless chime echoed in his mind. Words formed in the air before him, glowing faintly in pale, ghostly light. A message—no, a command.


    [Please enter your name.]


    He stared at it.


    Name...?


    His mind reached into the void, clawing at fragments. There was something there—broken pieces, names, faces, something important. But nothing stuck.


    But something inside him stirred—some broken instinct clawing its way to the surface. The name came to his tongue uninvited. A whisper from a time long buried.


    “...Mephisto.”


    The name slipped from his lips like a curse, swallowed instantly by the darkness.


    The system flickered.


    [Processing...]


    Silence. Stillness.


    The name echoed into the dark. And something deep within the Void… paused.


    No words. No voice. But a shift—subtle, suffocating—like the weight of a thousand eyes turning toward him.


    [Name registered.]


    The light dimmed. The presence faded.


    But something... remained.


    Watching.