The dead zone was a cognitive prison. The monotonous, looping error-message—input error… data stream corrupted… rebooting…—was a psychic drill boring into their sanity.
There was no peace here, only a different flavor of madness: the madness of infinite, futile repetition.
For two full cycles, they did not move. Jaya and Elian worked in shifts, their efforts a grim ballet of trauma and mending.
Jaya's blades now glowed with a horrific palette: the deep crimson of Rohan's bone-deep agony, the sickly yellow of Elian's psychic contamination, the lurid green of their own acid burns.
She was becoming a walking archive of their suffering.
Rohan drifted in a pain-fever, his powerful body fighting a war on two fronts: physical shock and the Jungle's relentless psychic pressure.
Elian, though functional, moved like a man who had seen the abyss of another's mind and found his own reflection staring back. His healing energy was a dim, flickering candle.
Aryan stood his watch, a statue at the border between stagnation and storm. He did not sleep. The void within him required no rest. He spent the hours mapping the psychic currents with a dispassionate precision that was itself a form of madness. He identified stable data lanes and turbulent emotional spikes. He watched as a particularly violent burst of [Territorial Imperative]—likely from the Parasite's influence—crashed against the dead zone's borders and fragmented, unable to penetrate the cognitive scar tissue.
It was during this vigil that he noticed the flaw. The dead zone wasn't a perfect shield. It was a buffer, and like all buffers, it had a limited capacity.
The endless loop of [Recognition Failure] was slowly building up psychic static, a pressure that was seeking release. The Jungle was trying to dump its corrupted data here, and this sector was on the verge of a catastrophic overflow.
He turned to report this, his movements economical, his voice devoid of its former warmth. "This location is unstable. The stagnant data is reaching critical mass. We have approximately six hours before this sector experiences a psychic cascade. We will be erased."
Jaya looked up from Rohan's leg, her eyes hollow with exhaustion. "Erased? What does that mean?"
"It means our identities, our memories, our core cognitive functions will be overwritten by the corrupted data stream. We will become part of the loop. Another error message." He said it with the flat tone of a meteorologist predicting rain.
The horror on her face was a distant, academic curiosity to him. The void approved of his efficiency.
"We have to move him now?" Elian asked, despair thick in his voice.
"There is an alternative," Aryan said. He pointed not back into the chaotic Jungle, but deeper into the dead zone, towards its epicenter. "The source of the loop is a damaged cognitive processor. A failed decision-node. If I can intervene, I can potentially… repurpose the loop. Turn it from a destructive buffer into a stable, localized firewall."
"Intervene how?" Jaya asked, her hand instinctively tightening on a mend-blade.
"By introducing a new command into the loop. A simpler, more stable concept that the broken protocol can latch onto and repeat instead."
"What concept?"
Aryan met her gaze, his own eyes reflecting the dull grey light of the dead zone.
"[Stillness]."
It was a terrifying proposal. He wasn't suggesting they run. He was suggesting they perform brain surgery on a god's mind, using the void as his scalpel.
There was no other choice. They packed their meager supplies. Aryan led the way, the sled's runners grinding through the psychic residue that felt like dust on the soul.
The deeper they went, the thicker the static became. The air hummed, and the looping error message began to stutter, overlapping itself into a deafening cognitive roar.
The center of the dead zone was a horrifying sight. A massive, crystalline structure—a neural processor—was fractured down the middle. From the crack spewed a torrent of chaotic, lightless data, the visual manifestation of the [Recognition Failure].
It was a fountain of madness.
"This is it," Aryan said, his voice barely audible over the psychic noise. "I need to get to the fracture."
"Aryan, the feedback…" Jaya started.
"Is irrelevant," he finished. The void had made him certain. He approached the fractured crystal. The chaotic data stream felt like a sandblaster against his consciousness, each grain a shard of broken thought and failed perception.
He ignored it. He was becoming very good at ignoring pain.
He reached out with his mind, not with the brute force he had used on the Phantom, but with a precise, invasive touch. He bypassed the screaming data stream and sought the core protocol, the fundamental instruction that was failing. He found it: a single, shattered command for [Pattern Recognition].
The void offered the solution. Not to fix it. To replace it.
He focused, pouring his will into the Null-Shard. He didn't try to mend the fracture. He imposed a new, absolute rule upon the broken processor. He overwrote the shattered [Pattern Recognition] command with a single, unwavering concept: [Stasis].
The effect was instantaneous and violent.
The chaotic fountain of data didn't just stop; it froze. The lightless torrent solidified into a grotesque, black ice sculpture of tangled code. The maddening loop in their minds ceased, replaced by an overwhelming, deafening [Silence].
The grey light of the dead zone hardened, the air itself feeling solid. They weren't in a buffer error anymore; they were trapped in a snapshot.
Aryan staggered back, blood pouring from his nose and ears. The feedback had been immense. He had forced a localized, permanent cessation of function. He hadn't healed the Primordial's mind; he had given a part of it a conceptual stroke.
He turned to Jaya and Elian. Their faces were frozen in masks of shock and fear. Even Rohan's pain-twisted features were locked in place. For a horrifying second, he thought he had erased them too.
Then, Jaya blinked. She took a gasping, shuddering breath. "By the Spark… what did you do?"
"I stopped the loop," Aryan said, wiping the blood from his face. His voice was calm. The void was sated. The problem was solved.
"The sector is stable. It will not cascade. It is now… inert."
The cost was written in the frozen waterfall of data and the terrifying silence. He had traded a raging madness for a still, dead one. They had a safe haven, but it was a haven carved out of the Primordial's living consciousness, a monument to the nullifying power he wielded.
As they settled into the chilling silence, Aryan looked at his hands. They were steady. The void was no longer a separate entity whispering to him. It was the foundation of his logic, the source of his solutions. He had saved them again. But as he watched Jaya avoid his gaze and Elian look at him with undisguised terror, he understood the price.
He was no longer just walking a path of darkness. He was becoming the darkness itself, and with each step, the light from that single, fragile thread of connection grew dimmer. The Neural Jungles had many more horrors to show them, but the most efficient horror, he now knew, was the one he carried within.