In the heart of this dark void, and despite the mind-melting horror of the situation, something happened that the entity standing behind him did not expect.
Dex smiled.
It was not a smile of mockery, but one of profound relief and realization. He remembered! He remembered that the original "protagonist" of the novel had faced this exact hopeless situation in much later chapters, and had been on the verge of being erased from existence. Dex remembered how the protagonist had survived.
The solution was not confrontation. It was not summoning the power of the Phoenix, casting counter-spells, or trying to break the physical paralysis by sheer force. Because any form of resistance was considered "energy" that this patch fed upon. The solution was simple, abstract, and ironically both incredibly simple and complex at the same time: you must cease to exist mentally in order to survive physically.
Dex shut his eyes even tighter. He breathed with extreme calmness and a slow rhythm, not to take in oxygen, but to strip every ounce of tension from his body, until it seemed as though his heart had stopped beating. He began to peel away his consciousness.
First, he tried to eliminate all his emotions. He discarded the fear of death, discarded his anger at the mercenaries, discarded his worry for his father, and even his fear for Lumia.
Second, he focused inside his head on a single image: a "blank sheet of paper." A canvas completely devoid of a single drop of ink. He thought of nothing; no memories from his past life in prison, no plans for the future, no analysis of the current situation. The moment an idea tried to sneak onto the canvas, he erased it with absolute strictness. Dex transformed internally into something akin to an inanimate object, merging with the surrounding silence to become like it; a deaf rock that does not think, does not feel, and does not fear.
The moment Dex reached this state of "mental nothingness," a radical change occurred in the entity behind him. The entity, which had been relishing torturing him by parading his memories, went mad.
This zone of silence was a parasitic entity that fed exclusively on the emotional waves, buried memories, and psychological conflicts of those it swallowed. When Dex shut down his mind and turned it into a blank slate, the entity suddenly lost its food source.
The entity screamed fiercely. It was not a sound heard by the ear, but waves of painful psychological frequencies battering Dex's skull. The entity began to circle Dex at a frantic speed, its cold breath shifting and slapping his face, his neck, and his shoulders in a desperate attempt to provoke him and force him to feel fear so he would return to "existence" as a consumable entity.
But Dex did not respond. He had anchored his consciousness to that blank sheet of paper, as if he were in another completely isolated world. This terrifying situation around Dex continued for what felt like eons. The entity continued its hysterical screaming, trying to break this mental wall for a period of time, planting visual and auditory illusions to push him to collapse.
Then, very slowly, the situation changed.
The pressure of the silence began to dissipate gradually. Dex felt the sounds of the forest slowly returning to his ears; the faint rustling of leaves, the distant hum of an insect, then the familiar scent of sulfur. Even so, thanks to his intense discipline, Dex continued to ignore his surroundings for another while, unwilling to risk opening his eyes until he was certain the mobile patch had completely vanished.
Finally, when the sensation of Earth's heavy gravity returned, he took a deep breath and opened his eyes.
For the first time since his arrival in this cruel world, Dex felt genuine relief and gratitude upon seeing the grotesque and diseased trees of the "Falus" forest. He had returned to reality. The feeling in his limbs returned, and more importantly, he felt the heat of the "Phoenix Core" beating in his chest once again, as if it had awakened from a nightmare.
He spun around quickly, panic invading his heart once more out of fear for what might have befallen his companion. But he breathed a sigh of relief, air that made his chest tremble, when he saw Lumia.
Lumia was lying on the damp ground nearby, sleeping with an angelic calmness. He approached her swiftly, kneeling down to examine her. His heart was completely at ease when he saw that her vital signs were normal; her breathing was steady, her silver aura pulsed peacefully, and there was no trace of the terrifying entity upon her.
Dex smiled broadly, piecing the puzzle together. He realized clearly why Lumia had not been affected by this cursed patch, and why the entity had not targeted her in the first place. Lumia, the "Millennium Disaster," suffered from total amnesia. She had no human past, no painful memories, and no complex emotions for this place to feed upon. Her mind, in its current nature, was essentially a "blank sheet of paper." Her amnesia, which had been considered her weakness, must have been what saved her and made her completely invisible to the eye of the death patch that thrived on emotions and memories!
Dex lay on his back near Lumia, looking up at the dark canopy of the forest that no longer frightened him as it used to. He half-closed his eyes, finally resting after all the physical and psychological horrors he had faced on this long night, realizing that surviving in "Falus" required a mind of steel more than magical power.