As soon as Luna's soul was bound to his through [SoulBound], Evan felt a strange sensation settle around him.
He wasn't sure what it was at first and ignored it, but it lingered, and once he was done with Luna, he finally had a moment to pay it some attention. What he discovered surprised him.
Particles of void energy.
Yes, the same corruptive energy that would make anyone who knew its consequences shudder.
The fact that it existed in the environment was surprising enough on its own, but he noticed something specific almost immediately, the quantity was so minuscule that he could barely perceive it at all. Had it not been for the change that had heightened his affinity with it, he most likely would never have detected those particles in the first place.
He asked the system about it, and it simply explained that void energy had been released into the world when the Abyss opened. Although the Abyss had since been suppressed, traces of that energy still remained, just not in quantities large enough to cause any real damage.
Evan understood, but driven by curiosity, he decided to experiment with those particles of energy.
It took him a while to figure out how to do it, but he soon learned that he could manipulate the particles of void energy in much the same way as mana, or more precisely, by using mana to interact with them.
Once he had started manipulating them, he decided to take the next step and try absorbing them. Something he did purely out of curiosity, and something that quickly turned into a nightmare.
As it turned out, while he had an affinity with void energy, his body did not. The result was an experience not unlike having thin needles driven through every single nerve in his body simultaneously.
He ended up writhing on the floor in agony for what felt like several minutes, though it had probably been far less, before the sensation finally subsided.
That experience taught him to be considerably more careful with certain things, especially when those things were directly tied to something that had terrified entire generations in the past and continued to do so to this day, in its own way.
But it seemed his suffering hadn't been entirely for nothing, because shortly after, the rewards came.
[Ding! Your body is being corrupted by void energy.]
[Warning! Your vital parameters are decreasing.]
[Ding! The bloodline of the God of Death has activated.]
[Ding! The bloodline of the God of Death is counteracting the void energy.]
[Analyzing situation...]
[Ding! Your affinity with void energy has increased.]
[Ding! Your affinity with void energy has increased.]
[Ding! Your affinity with void energy has increased.]
...
[Ding! Your body has developed an affinity with void energy.]
[Ding! Your mana core has developed an affinity with void energy.]
[Congratulations, Host. You can now absorb and manipulate void energy.]
That was the last notification he received before losing consciousness, and he remained that way through the entire night, waking only the following morning to a knock at the door from a servant who had come to inform him he was running late.
Quite the night, all things considered. He had essentially subjected himself to a free session of physical torture, one he had gone looking for entirely on his own. He had no one to blame but himself.
Evan's plan going forward was to spend his days training with void energy and his nights hunting through his clone to keep growing stronger, all in preparation for the attack on Nicolas.
Evan was not the type to rush into things. So rather than striking immediately, he took his time to investigate first, and it was a good thing he did, because he quickly discovered that Nicolas, who normally made at least one or two trips outside the city to hunt, hadn't been seen outside his house at all.
Evan figured it had something to do with the massacre of those men that Luna had carried out, something that had most likely put Nicolas on high alert, the bodies, after all, were long gone, stored away in Evan's inventory, but the blood left behind told enough of a story.
It was clear the other party was now bracing for a possible attack and wouldn't be stepping outside anytime soon. That complicated things slightly, but only slightly.
A week was more than enough time to let the other party lower their guard while also giving him time to plan the attack properly.
And so he settled into a rigid routine, grinding ESS through the night and training with void energy whenever the day allowed. It was slow, painstaking work, but by the fifth day, something finally shifted. A small breakthrough, but a real one.
It was evening. Evan had just finished his daily duties, and nightfall was not far off, which meant it would soon be time to head out hunting through his clone.
His synchronization percentage had reached 16% by now, which had improved his control over the clone's body and abilities in several ways. But more importantly, he could now spend a little longer inside it, and finally speak without Luna looking at him like someone who had been pretending to be mute for the rest of their life.
He had just returned to his room, that luxurious closet of his, and settled onto the single bed that had probably destroyed more backs than it could count over the course of its long existence as an object.
He sat on it in a lotus position, ready to cultivate some void energy.
Progress had been slow, but every day he felt more and more that he was approaching some kind of turning point.
He didn't know what it was, but he was intrigued by it, so he continued accumulating void particles within himself and refining them until they were ready to be used.
There were many interesting things he had discovered while experimenting with void energy, but one in particular had caught him genuinely off guard, the possibility of nullifying the effects of other elements.
Void particles seemed to act as a kind of nemesis to the rest of the elements. They did not harmonize well within his dantian, and when he tried to use them, those elements tended not to respond to his commands, or worse, they would be erased by the void particles, only to be replaced by them.
The discovery unsettled him somewhat, especially because in a hypothetical scenario where a large enough and concentrated enough quantity of void energy were to be released into the world, it could theoretically absorb the energy of all other elements and convert them, something that, over time, would swallow everything.
It was only a hypothetical scenario, but it was more than enough to send chills down his spine.
It was clear he still knew far too little about this form of energy, and that he had to be more careful than ever. That was why today's turning point, while intriguing, also made him somewhat anxious.
Sitting cross-legged on the bed, he let out a slow, light sigh as he calmed both mind and body.
Good or bad, the only way to find out was to keep experimenting little by little. There was no point worrying about something he had no other way to confirm, especially when the system itself had decided to play deaf on the subject.
He began circulating mana through his body while slowly sensing the void particles in the environment.
Little by little, they began drifting toward him as if he were a magnet, entering his body and, after several passages, reaching his dantian, where the void energy condensed into a form he could use.
He continued slowly but steadily, and after nearly twenty minutes he began to feel something.
It was faint at first, barely there, like a thread too thin to grasp. But with each passing breath it grew clearer, more defined, as if something on the other end of that thread was becoming aware of him just as he was becoming aware of it.
A presence.
Vast. Ancient. And impossibly deep.
Evan's brow furrowed slightly as he focused, trying to trace the sensation to its source, and the more he did, the more it felt less like something he was reaching toward, and more like something that had always been there, waiting to be found.
Then the system spoke.
[Ding! You have established a connection with the Abyss.]
The words rang through his mind like a struck bell, and for a moment Evan simply sat there, perfectly still.
The Abyss.
A chill ran down his spine before he could stop it, not from fear exactly, but from the sheer weight of what that word meant.
'Well, shit…'
He didn't have time to process that, however, because in the next instant, something shifted.