The silence in the outlet tunnel was heavier than the roar of the acid river. It was the silence of three people holding their breath, waiting to see if the fourth was still a man or had become a vessel for something else. Aryan's confession hung in the air, a chilling fog that no amount of regenerative salve could dispel.
He sat with his back against the pulsing wall, knees drawn to his chest, staring at nothing. The cold of the void was a permanent layer beneath his skin now, a glacial sheet that no external warmth could melt. He could still feel the seductive pull of that absolute zero, the promise of an end to the exhausting, painful struggle of feeling.
Jaya finally broke the stillness, her voice carefully neutral, a surgeon assessing a critical patient. "Can you walk?"
Aryan gave a single, shallow nod. He didn't trust his voice.
Rohan was in a worse state. Elian had managed to stabilize him, but the brutal "mending" and the agonizing trek across the ledge had pushed the big man to his absolute limit. He was conscious, but his eyes were glazed with pain, his breathing a wet, ragged thing. He couldn't walk. The sled was a necessity once more, a humbling anchor dragging at their progress.
They moved on, leaving the thunder of the Vitriolic Veins behind. The tunnel sloped upwards, the air cooling and clearing of its corrosive mist. The texture of the walls changed from the porous filter-flesh to something harder, more fibrous. Strange, root-like tendrils began to appear, snaking across the ceiling and floor, emitting a soft, phosphorescent glow.
Jaya consulted her slate. "The map is... shifting. But this should be the border of the Neural Jungles. The Primordial's equivalent of a peripheral nervous system."
"The 'Screaming Woods'," Elian murmured, the name escaping him like a dreaded rumor. "The Ossuary held memories of the dead. This place... they say it holds the thoughts of the living. The Primordial's, and... others."
The tunnel opened into a cavern so vast its ceiling was lost in a gloom pierced by the faint, tangled light of the neural roots. They formed a grotesque and beautiful forest, a canopy of glowing dendrites and axons. There was no wind, but the entire forest seemed to sway to a silent, rhythmic pulse. And there was sound—a low, constant susurrus, like a billion voices whispering at the edge of hearing.
It was the sound of a god thinking.
They had taken only a few steps into the Woods when the first thought-phantom hit them. It wasn't a memory from the past. It was raw, unfiltered sensation.
A wave of primal, gnawing Hunger.
It wasn't their own. It was vast, planetary, an emptiness that could swallow stars. It was the Primordial's driving imperative, the reason for the Devourment. For a terrifying second, Aryan felt his own stomach clench with a ravenous need, his mind clouding with the single, all-consuming desire to feed.
It passed as quickly as it came, leaving them shaken.
"The thoughts are contagious," Jaya warned, her knuckles white on the sled's harness. "Don't engage with them. Build a mental wall."
But building walls was a luxury Aryan could no longer afford. His consciousness was now a perforated dam, and the void within him was the sea on the other side. The raw concepts of the Neural Jungle didn't just brush against his mind; they seeped in through the cracks.
A new wave hit. This one was different. Sharper. More focused.
[Betrayal].
It was a shard of crystalline pain, the emotion so pure and potent it felt like a physical blow. It wasn't the Primordial's. It was alien, human. A fragment of some long-dead captain's final moment, a trusted lieutenant's mutiny preserved in the synaptic web. Aryan gasped, the feeling resonating with his own recent temptation in the void. The Doppelganger's voice echoed: They use you.
He fought to push it out, but the void within him reacted. It didn't reject the negative emotion; it absorbed it, metabolizing the [Betrayal] into cold, confirming data. The world around him seemed to grow a shade darker, the whispering woods a little more menacing.
"This way is no good," Rohan grunted from the sled, his voice thick with pain. "We're walking right through its mind. We need to go around."
"There is no 'around'," Jaya replied, her scanner flickering. "The neural pathways are the only stable routes. Going off-path means getting lost in unstructured thought... which is probably fatal."
They pressed deeper. The thoughts came faster, a torrent of alien consciousness.
[Joy] from a forgotten sunrise on a world of glass.
[Despair] from a species witnessing its sun go dark.
[Curiosity] from the Primordial itself, a flicker of interest in the tiny, thinking mites walking through its brain.
Each one was a siren's call to Aryan's fractured psyche. The positive emotions were a painful reminder of a warmth he was losing. The negative ones were fuel for the void. He felt himself becoming a filter, straining the world's emotions through the cold sieve of the Shard, leaving only sterile, logical residue behind.
Then, the Woods attacked.
A thought-phantom didn't just wash over them; it coalesced. From the swirling [Despair] and a lingering strand of [Predatory Instinct], a creature formed. It was a Neural phantom, a thing of pure psychic energy given temporary, terrifying form. It had no solid body, only a shifting, humanoid shape of tangled light and shadow, with claws of solidified sorrow and eyes that were pools of bottomless fear.
It didn't make a sound. It simply floated towards Elian, its very presence radiating a psychic chill that made the air crackle.
Jaya was the first to move. One of her mend-blades, now glowing with the sickly green of absorbed acid burns, flew from her hand. It passed through the phantom, the stored physical trauma useless against a being of pure thought and psychic energy. The phantom didn't even notice.
Elian backed away, his own calming energy seeming to have no effect, his face a mask of terror as the Wraith reached for him.
Aryan knew he had to act. But his usual tools were useless. He couldn't negate [Despair] or [Fear]; they were too fundamental, too vast. To try would be to drain himself into nothingness.
The void offered a solution. A cold, simple equation.
It is a thought. Unmake the thinker.
He could feel the Wraith's core, the fragile knot of psychic energy that gave it form. It would be so easy. A flick of his will, a tiny application of [Nothingness], and the Wraith would simply cease. It would be the most efficient solution.
But as he prepared to act, a stray thought-phantom—a child's memory of [Wonder] from a devoured world—brushed against his mind. It was a tiny, bright thing, so fragile it almost broke his heart.
And he hesitated.
In that split second of hesitation, the Wraith swiped its claw of sorrow at Elian. The healer cried out, not in physical pain, but in a soul-deep anguish, collapsing to his knees as waves of alien despair washed over him.
Rohan, with a roar of pure fury, tried to heave himself off the sled, but his leg gave way with a sickening crunch of re-broken bone.
The sound, the sight of his friends falling, shattered the cold logic the void had imposed on Aryan. A different kind of heat flared in his chest—not the warmth of connection, but the white-hot fire of rage.
He didn't target the Wraith's core. He targeted the concept that allowed it to interact with the physical world: [Manifestation].
He didn't unmake it. He unraveled it.
With a mental scream that tore at the fabric of his own soul, he seized the conceptual threads that bound the Wraith's emotions into a physical form and pulled them apart. The creature didn't vanish. It dissipated, its form exploding outwards in a silent shockwave of raw, unfiltered [Despair] and [Fear] that blasted through the Neural Jungle, causing the entire forest of light to flicker and dim.
Aryan stood panting, the void within him howling in frustration at his messy, emotional solution. He had won, but it had cost him. He had let feeling dictate his actions.
He looked at Elian, who was shivering on the ground, and at Rohan, once again unconscious from the pain. Jaya was staring at him, her expression unreadable.
The Screaming Woods were silent. The Primordial's thoughts had recoiled from the violent outburst. But Aryan knew it was only temporary. They were deep in the mind of a god, and he was a destabilizing element, a spark of chaotic, emotional void in a universe of cold, consuming order. The real battle in these woods wasn't for survival. It was for the right to think his own thoughts, to feel his own feelings, without being consumed by the vast consciousness around him, or the infinite nothingness within.