(IC) Chapter 332 - Staring at the Void

Alonso stood, legs crossed, wearing a lighter leather shirt and pants, beneath a thick canopy of pine-like trees on the southern reaches of the Ajnal territory where it bordered the wilds, more than 50 miles from the nearest village.

The breeze was soft as it caressed him, and the temperature reminded him of Melbourne in early autumn, when summer had just begun to fade.

Yet as serene as the environment was, his mind was razor-focused.

The way to reset the States was straightforward in theory, but it was not something that could be done lightly. He couldn’t simply snuff out the nodes and subnodes like candles inside his body. There had to be order, balance—each flame dimmed while he maintained a counterfield, otherwise the collapse would shatter him.

But before that, there was one essential thing that had to be done.

“Houston?”

“Ready. I’ve set a backup just in case, but… it should work. It just may be… a bit painful.”

Alonso exhaled through his nose, a grim smile tugging at his lips. A bit, huh. He knew exactly what that bit meant. Not a sting. Not a burn. A full out crucifixion. But there was no way around it.

“Ok. Let’s get it done,” he muttered, clamping his jaw tight as he drew in the deepest breath his lungs could hold.

And then he synchronised with Houston. Together they reached into the latticework of internal microcapacitors he had painstakingly grown—the foundation of the Path of Shards—and began… to break them.

The first was targeted. It popped.

“FCK!!!” The scream ripped out of him before he could stop it. A lance of white-hot pain tore through his nerves, like fire threaded into his marrow as the other capacitors began to react.

The system collapsed inward. Each capacitor triggered the next in a violent cascade, unraveling the delicate balance. His body convulsed as though torn apart molecule by molecule, like his skeleton was being pulled through itself while his flesh was packed tighter than bone could hold. The agony didn’t come in waves—it came in full, folding into itself, multiplying.

And he had to stay conscious through it all.

He and Houston raced to shut them down before the instability killed him outright. Node after node, cluster after cluster—each shutdown came with another explosion of pain. He felt every one. His jaw ached from grinding his teeth; blood filled his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue. His vision blurred, then blackened, then sparked with colours that weren’t real.

It was endless. A thousand detonations crammed into the span of a heartbeat. Thousands of knives driven into every fibre of his body, tearing him apart from within.

He buckled, chest convulsing as smoke curled from his mouth and thin seams of blood split open across his skin. He forced himself not to scream again, though the sound quivered in his throat, desperate to break free.

And then… it was over.

He slumped forward, arms trembling, drenched in sweat. His chest heaved, every breath ragged.

“That…” His voice cracked, rough and broken. “Was more than a bit.”

“Well… good news, you lived,” Houston said, relief threading through his tone. Despite all the simulations he had run beforehand, he knew too well that something could always go wrong.

Alonso took a moment to collect himself, pulling the water container from his backpack. He poured some over his head, letting the coolness run down his face, then drank a little. He could feel Houston pushing to accelerate the healing process, and so he waited calmly for a couple of minutes until his body steadied again.

“Alright, that should be the worst of it today,” Alonso exhaled. “Let’s start by reverting the Body States, then.”

His focus settled on the subnodes—those tiny circuits of energy that quietly supercharged his frame, tightening muscle fibres, accelerating signals, sharpening reflex arcs, lending his bones a resilience beyond nature. He let his awareness slip across them like fingers brushing taut strings, then, one by one, he began to silence them.

The first release was subtle—a faint slackening in his calves and wrists, like weights had been added without warning. The second left his heartbeat pounding harder to compensate, blood pressure dropping with a wave of dizziness. By the time the last of the subnodes dimmed, his whole body felt dulled, slower, heavier, as if he’d stepped into a thicker gravity well.

He was now at the First Body State.

He exhaled and pressed on, eyes closed. The main nodes came next—the anchors that had carried him through every fight, amplifying strength, endurance, and speed. Touching them was harder, each tied into the rhythm of his breath, the spark of his nerves, the flow of his blood. He guided the current back, pushed it inward, and let the first node flicker out. The instant loss was brutal.

His shoulders sagged. His thighs burned. His back bowed under his own weight. Sweat pricked at his forehead though the air was cool.

The second node followed. His vision blurred, the world losing the sharpness he had grown accustomed to. The air felt heavier in his lungs, his chest rising and falling with more effort than it should have taken.

By the time the final node went dark, he was at zero.

The change was brutal. Going back from effectively a 125% boost to nothing, he felt like his body was petrified, its response so much weaker and dull. His senses—sight, smell, touch, sound—all felt so poor, muted, as if wrapped in gauze.

All in all, he felt weak as hell. And yet, in reality, his body was still superhuman at its current SP. But he knew, right now, if he did not use his Pillar, even a three-tail could kill him easily.

“Alright, that went much smoother than the capacitors,” he exhaled sharply, a thread of anxiety curling in his chest at the thought of some Warden stumbling upon him now. Still, he had made certain this area was as safe as it could be. “Now for the Pillar.”

He steadied his breathing and turned inward again, shifting focus from body to mind. The Pillar was a different concept entirely. Not muscle or bone, but thought. The core and lattice that made his brain faster, sharper, able to perceive electromagnetic waves and bend them into shape. It wasn’t just speed—it was clarity. With the Pillar active, the world unfolded in layers, each detail crisp and bright, each calculation flowing as smooth as water.

He touched the first subnode. It was like dimming a lamp in a room he hadn’t realised was flooded with light. His thoughts slowed, words in his head coming less cleanly. The crisp edge of every sound dulled.

The second followed. His perception narrowed. EM fields that once sang around him—patterns in the ground, faint pulses from distant life—faded into background noise. The world seemed flatter, stripped of its hidden depth.

He gritted his teeth and pushed on. The last subnode dimmed. His inner processing power—once cascading, recursive, almost computer-like—collapsed to the raw speed of a ‘normal’ mind. It was like trying to sprint through waist-deep water.

Then he reached the core nodes. These were worse. They weren’t just thought speed, but the lattice that sharpened and multiplied what was already there. He held the first steady, then cut it loose. The EM fields didn’t vanish, but their song dulled to a faint hum at the edge of hearing. His awareness shrank, still present, but stripped of the precision and layering he’d grown used to.

The second followed. His mind still reached outward, but it was clumsy, scattershot. Where before he could trace vectors, anticipate outcomes, and fold patterns into clarity, now everything came slower, hazier, like trying to sketch in the dark.

By the time the final Pillar node dimmed, Alonso was left with the bare bones of perception. EM waves brushed faintly at his awareness, enough to know they existed, but no longer sharp enough to bend or map with ease. His thoughts dragged, his world narrowed.

The silence was deafening.

It was seriously uncomfortable, the feeling of extreme weakness and—

“Yeah, come on, don’t delay, it’s getting pixelated in here,” came a voice in his head.

Alonso smiled, remembering that the ‘realism’ of Houston’s VR world depended on the Pillar, which now made it arguably…

“Yeah, like a video game from the 90s, no shit.”

Alonso chuckled but nodded, certain Houston was exaggerating—after all, even in its origin, his virtual world would’ve made a ‘normal human’ question reality. Anyway, he wanted to get out of this pit-hole of a state quickly too.

His mind, sluggish and moody, locked onto the method for the First Fusion State.

The diagrams were more template than manual. They didn’t outline step by step but instead marked out the key points, the direction one had to take. The freedom was intentional—each individual had to approach it in the way that suited them best. The only fixed condition was the destination: resonance, a perfectly balanced configuration.

Alonso stood and gripped his swords, immediately struck by how heavy they felt. As though he were carrying warhammers instead of blades. But it would have to do.

He drew in a deep breath and shut his eyes.

The world bled away.

In its place stretched the void. Yet it was not the same as before. The familiar field of stars and planets was gone, replaced by a vast emptiness—bare, hollow, a canvas of pure black, waiting to be redrawn.

He thought back to his studies of the pathways leading to the Third Standard State. He had tried to align them, bind them into one. Every attempt had failed. The Body and the Pillar refused to mix. He had treated the Third Pillar State as refinement, adding nuance to the system that made it whole. Not merely moons orbiting planets, but clusters bound into galaxies, galaxies woven into clusters. But none of it had carried him far. And the fact that the Body Path needed to advance in lockstep—just to prevent his overloaded microcapacitors from burning out—had only made it more complex.

Now, though, there was a path that began from scratch, one that embraced the very principle he had been circling without grasping. Perhaps that was the key all along. To step back twice in order to leap three strides forward. To start from zero.

Still… it was time to test it. To see if this method could truly carry him into the Fusion States.

He couldn’t deny the nerves coiling tight in his chest. But he drew a long, steady breath, holding it until calm washed through him.

He ran through a set of strikes—chops, thrusts—measured and deliberate, feeling out the weight of his swords and the rhythm of his weakened body. It only took a dozen before control settled in, clean and precise, as if the weapons were once again an extension of himself.

He inhaled once more and raised his blades.

The void stared back at him, waiting.

He moved. An upward slash, a cut across, a twist of the wrist into a thrust. Each motion dragged faint light from the darkness. Stars flared to life, pale pinpricks arranged in the rough scaffolding of a constellation. He flowed into the next sequence, sharp, crisp movements guided by instinct and calculation alike. More stars lit, joining the first, drawing faint threads between them.

For a heartbeat, hope surged. The constellation grew denser, brighter, ordered like the Pillar lattices he knew so well.

Then it faltered.

The stars trembled, lines collapsing inward. The flow was too rigid, too cerebral. He felt the weight of his muscles lag behind, his body little more than the scaffolding for a mind-built sky. The void shuddered and the lights blinked out one by one, leaving him in darkness again.

Alonso grit his teeth, lowering the blades. Not enough.

He had leaned too far into the Pillar again, into clarity and structure. But this was the Fusion Path. The body was not a passenger—it was half the engine. Calculation alone, or instinct alone, would always collapse.

He stilled, the void pressing in around him, silent and dark. For a moment he simply breathed, swords heavy in his grip, sweat dripping down his back. Then a sudden thought came—not a thought, but a certainty.

I am not inside the void.

I am the void.

His stance shifted, subtle but profound. The blades no longer an extension of his arms, but the brushes of a painter with flesh for canvas. He raised one sword high and cut down. Light did not bloom in front of him, but through him. A star ignited deep in his chest, burning at the point where heart and lungs met.

The second blade swept across, and another flared behind his eyes.

His body followed, twisting, the dual swords cutting arcs that left not trails in space but lingering embers inside him. A constellation unfolded across his ribs, another along his spine, each strike leaving light stitched into the framework of his being.

The stars did not scatter—they resonated, forming networks, nodes bound by breath, pulse, and thought.

He felt the lines pull taut. His muscles burned, but not with the dull ache of strain—with clarity. Reflex, calculation, perception, all bled into one current, each strike echoing both as motion and as equation.

He was no longer drawing on the void. The void was him.

Swords turned, wrists snapped, and the stars spread further. Down his arms, to the edge of his hands. Into his legs, his feet grounding the lattice with every shift in stance. Stars at each joint, each nerve cluster, each place where body and mind tethered to action.

Breath hitched. Sweat stung his eyes. He drove forward anyway, two blades flowing through a seamless chain of cuts, thrusts, parries. And with each movement, more light flared. His whole form shimmered in constellations, as if his flesh were glass and the galaxies burned inside.

He moved faster.

Stars cascaded down his spine, burst at his shoulders, flared at his heels. His body was no longer flesh, but an engine of light, each thrust the birth of suns, each turn of his wrist a spiral of galaxies. The void pressed close—but it did not loom, did not watch. It yielded.

The blades met in one last thrust, cutting straight through the silence.

And as the final star blazed into being, the constellations collapsed inward, the lattice closing—limitless, indivisible.

The stars aligned. The balance held. He exhaled.

Each sun seared the nodes into place.

The foundation… of his First Fusion State.