"No, no, no no.....this can’t be true."
Ash squeezed those words out of his mouth, his voice strained and uneven, as if each word had to force its way past the tightness in his throat.
His breathing was hard and labored, rising and falling in an irregular rhythm that he could no longer control, and every breath felt shallow, as though the air itself had grown too heavy for his lungs.
All sorts of memories seemed to pass in front of his eyes, not in a clear sequence but in overlapping flashes. It was as if he was reliving his whole life once more. Moments from his previous life intertwined with scenes from his current one, faces appearing and disappearing without order.
The memories with Nancy surfaced repeatedly, small interactions that once felt simple now carrying unbearable weight under doubt.
At that moment he felt how a dying person just before his death would be feeling, when the mind desperately tries to hold on to meaning while everything slips away.
After all, he had just experienced a flashback of all the memories of his previous life and the current one too, compressed into a single overwhelming surge that his mind struggled to process.
Unknown to Ash, his surroundings had already dissolved like mist fading into air. The mirror, the room, the presence of the psychiatrists, everything slowly disappeared without sound or resistance, as though none of it had ever truly existed. Gradually, everything around him turned white.
It was a place of Absolute White.
There were no boundaries, no shadows, no sense of direction. The whiteness stretched endlessly, swallowing every detail that once defined space, making distance and depth meaningless. It did not glow, it did not shimmer, it simply existed, vast and indifferent.
But Ash had no idea of any of it. He was suffering from an anxiety attack, kneeling, clutching his chest with blurry and tightly closed eyes, his fingers pressing hard against his shirt as if trying to stop his heart from tearing itself apart.
His body trembled slightly as if bracing against something unseen, and his shoulders rose and fell with each uneven breath.
His mind was jumbled and everything was in chaos. Thoughts collided before they could fully form, breaking apart into fragments that made no sense.
Questions surfaced but dissolved before reaching clarity, leaving behind only confusion. Doubt and fear tangled together until he could no longer distinguish one from the other, and the harder he tried to think, the more his thoughts slipped away.
Even his thoughts were not forming properly, and his situation seemed to have exceeded a normal anxiety attack. This was not just panic over fear. It felt as though his entire sense of self was being questioned at once, leaving him without stable ground to stand on, as if the idea of who he was had suddenly become uncertain.
While he was going through this, there seemed to be no way for him to come back to his senses. His breathing remained uneven, his chest painfully tight, and his body unresponsive to his attempts to calm it, no matter how much he tried to steady himself or slow his breath.
Then, within that endless white void, a voice filled with ancient wisdom that knew every Truth about existence echoed throughout the space. It was not loud, yet it resonated from every direction at once, as if the whiteness itself had spoken and the space had found a tongue.
The voice carried a calm authority that felt older than time, like an oracle of a God who had witnessed countless lives unfold and countless minds break under their own weight. There was no anger in it, no rush, only a steady certainty that made resistance feel meaningless.
{Pathetic!!}
The word did not strike his ears. It struck his mind.
A strange force moved through Ash, and the chaos inside him stilled as if someone had pressed a hand over a storming sea. The doubts that had been tearing at him moments ago faded without leaving a trace, as though they had never belonged to him in the first place.
"Huff....Huff...Huff..."
His chest rose and fell in a fast rhythm, breath scraping through his throat. Sweat clung to his skin, and his heart pounded as if he had just fought through countless mental battles and barely survived. His hands trembled slightly before he slowly loosened his grip on his shirt.
It was only after he steadied his breathing that he noticed the change in his surroundings. The absolute white stretching endlessly around him, with nothing else in sight, made him uneasy. There were no shadows, no sound, not even a sense of distance. It felt like standing inside a blank page before the first word was written.
He also vaguely remembered the voice that had pulled him out of that strange state, the same voice that had cut through the suffocating haze in his mind and dragged him back just before he could completely lose himself in it.
Where am I now...? And what was that voice..? Another illusion? Or was it something else...?
The questions did not rush through him. They surfaced slowly, heavy and cautious, as if he was afraid of what the answers might reveal.
{Illusion? Tsk.}
Ash’s eyes widened slightly. The response came instantly, almost overlapping with his thought, leaving no room to doubt that it had heard him clearly.
He turned his head from side to side, scanning the emptiness carefully, his movements slow and deliberate. His eyes searched for even the faintest distortion in the endless white around him, a shadow, a ripple, anything that could give form to the voice.
But there was nothing. No one. Just endless white, unchanged and silent, stretching in every direction without depth or boundary.
"W-What are you? Or rather, who are you? Are you the one who showed me all those memories that I did not want to see? Are you....what I think you are?"
His voice was a little hoarse from the earlier anxiety attack, the words rough as they left his throat, and he could still feel the dryness clinging to it.
He swallowed once before continuing, and as he spoke, his tone slowly steadied.
In this unknown place where nothing felt real, he did not let panic take hold again. He forced himself to think clearly, to question instead of crumble, because losing control once had already shaken him enough.
Even in this unknown situation, Ash was calm. It was not the calmness granted by the effect of runes. No. It was the calmness of a man who had faced death so many times that fear had slowly lost its sharpness.
His spine straightened almost on instinct, his shoulders settling as if preparing for a fight he could not yet see. His gaze sharpened, steady and alert, and he waited without lowering it.
{And the same man who collapsed under the weight of his past. Tsk!!! What a fearless man you are.}
"W-What..??"
Ash grew visibly confused and blurted the word out loud before he could stop himself, his brows knitting together as that statement pierced deeper than he wanted to admit. His jaw tightened slightly, not in anger, but in discomfort.
There was a silence for a brief moment before the voice echoed once more, and this time the stillness felt heavier, as if the white space itself was listening.
{Nothing, I just foresaw past the veil of existence and saw something past the 4th wall.}
Ash’s ears trembled faintly, a strange sensation running down his spine as if he had heard something forbidden. His mind buzzed as he blanked out for a second, thoughts scattering in all directions while trying to grasp words that felt too large for him. It was not pain, but it was not comfort either.
Then his eyes slowly regained their focus, the faint haze lifting, and he spoke again, more firmly this time as if grounding himself through repetition.
"W-What are you? Or rather, who are you? Are you the one who showed me all those memories that I did not want to see? Are you....what I think you are?"
There was silence in the white space once more.
A silence of quiet understanding of what had just happened.
{Tsk!! I forgot he is still not ready for that truth, his memories are rewritten to just few moments ago. Not even Rune of Knowledge can preserve those memories....Tsk, tsk, tsk, tsk.}
But after a brief moment of consideration, the voice spoke once more.
{Indeed, it is I who showed you all those memories that you were hesitating to face. And I am indeed the one you think I am.}
A quiet weight settled in the white void, pressing gently against his chest.
{I am the will of the Rune of Truth.}
The voice echoed like thunder across that white void, yet there was no actual sound in the air.
Instead, the words seemed to resonate inside him, vibrating through his bones and thoughts alike. For an instant, it felt as if Ash saw countless phenomena manifesting before him, stars igniting in silent bursts, worlds forming and crumbling into dust, truths rising and shattering in endless cycles, each vision appearing and vanishing within a single breath as though time itself had folded.
Ash was speechless. His lips parted slightly, but no words came. He had no language vast enough to describe what he wanted to say, but still something unknowingly surfaced on his tongue.
"You son of b%itch"