I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood

Chapter 246: Reflecting on Self Within the Void

“So... this is what the Sentence of the Void feels like?”

The moment she placed her head into that depression in the creature’s flesh. The very instant her skin made contact with that cold, slimy black membrane.

Pandora felt her connection to the outside world sever. Completely.

It wasn’t darkness.

Darkness, at the very least, implied a counterpart—the concept of light. It meant the optic nerves were straining, firing off that futile tension as they tried to capture rays that weren’t there.

But here...

There was nothing.

Vision hadn’t been stripped away; it was as if it had never existed in the first place. The very act of “seeing” was rendered meaningless.

Hearing suffered the same fate.

It wasn’t silence. Silence meant an absence of sound. It meant you were still expecting, still listening for a noise.

Here, the sensory channel itself seemed to have been scrubbed entirely from her cognition. She couldn’t even confirm if she still had ears, because zero information existed to prove they were there.

Touch vanished even faster.

She should have been able to feel the cold, wet tentacles winding around her—their texture, their temperature, the strength of their grip.

But in reality...

Nothing.

Her skin sent zero signals back. The boundaries of her body began to blur. She couldn’t tell where “her” skin ended and the “outside” tentacles began. It was as if the two were slowly merging, melting into a shapeless, borderless mass of matter.

Time lost its flow here.

A second could be a year. A year could be the blink of an eye.

Without shifting objects to serve as reference points, without a heartbeat or breath to act as metronomes, even the flow of her thoughts turned thick and sluggish. Like being trapped inside a massive, solidified block of amber.

“No wonder...”

The thought surfaced slowly in Pandora’s mind.

But even the thought itself felt hollow and unreal. Like an idea belonging to someone else that had just randomly drifted through her rapidly blanking consciousness.

She was starting to get it. Starting to understand why, throughout the Disciplinary Court’s history, less than half the people who went in ever walked back out.

This wasn’t physical torture. It wasn’t some brute-force psychic attack. The Sentence of the Void targeted something much more fundamental.

Existence itself.

It was proving a terrifying proposition to its prisoners in the coldest, cruelest way possible: The “self” you think you know is nothing more than a hallucination built from a pile of sensory feedback. When every piece of feedback is ripped away, when your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind can no longer prove to you that “you” exist...

What exactly is left?

Fear began to spread from the deepest trenches of her consciousness. Not the instinctual, adrenaline-spiking fear of facing danger, but a deeper, existential dread.

—Am I still here?

—Who am I?

—Did I ever... actually exist?

But Pandora was, evidently, not an ordinary person.

Almost the exact instant that first seed of self-doubt bloomed, her consciousness instinctively latched onto that familiar, intricately rigorous rune structure in her mind.

Rank-5 Meditation Method: The Quicksilver Blood Meditation.

The second she had signed the agreement with Aldrich, she’d gotten her hands on this long-coveted Meditation Method. And its actual contents hadn’t disappointed her in the slightest.

Those Rank-2 and Rank-3 methods she had scraped together and read in the past looked like the babbling of infants when placed next to the Rank-5 Quicksilver Blood. Crude. Simplistic.

Its structure was airtight, operating on a completely higher level while still managing to be accessible. Nearly every crucial node was laid out with absolute clarity, as though a true Wizard Master was standing right there, personally pointing out the path.

It had taken her less than half a month to fully memorize, master, and deeply brand the Rank-2 portion of The Quicksilver Blood Meditation into her brain.

Now, as the Meditation Method cycled into action, those runes—humming with esoteric power—began to ignite one after another inside her blank-slate consciousness.

They tangled together, pulling at one another. Her formless mental force began to flow along defined, arcane trajectories.

Carving out the very first... tangible mark in this absolute nothingness.

The effect was immediate. As the Meditation Method took over, that horrifying sensation of her existence rapidly unraveling was temporarily choked off.

The light of the runes stood out starkly against the void, like a solitary lighthouse in a dark ocean, providing a solid anchor point for her fraying consciousness.

I meditate.

Therefore, I am.

A sliver of relief washed over Pandora. It seemed that while the Sentence of the Void was terrifying, for a Wizard who specialized in mental fortitude like herself, there was a countermeasure after all.

As long as she could keep the Meditation Method spinning, she could maintain the integrity of her self-awareness. One year was a long time, but it wasn’t unendurable...

Right?

..................

The failure of the Meditation Method.

How long had it been running?

She couldn’t say. It could’ve been minutes. It could’ve been hours. It could’ve been days.

In a void that had even ground away the concept of time itself, every metric of measurement was fundamentally meaningless.

The Sentence of the Void began its counterattack.

It wasn’t an active, hostile strike.

It was something far worse. Something far more devastating:

Adaptation.

The Sentence of the Void was a bottomless abyss; it was never going to be filled by anything. When Pandora tried to use the light of her Meditation Method’s runes to fight back against the void, the void... started swallowing it.

Not by brutally snuffing them out, but by converting them into just another layer of the void.

Those runes—representing order, logic, and esoteric power—once ignited in the void, acted like drops of ink falling into an endless ocean of clear water. They rapidly diffused, fading out until they merged entirely with that pure “nothingness,” indistinguishable from the rest.

The runes were still cycling. Her mental force was still flowing along the prescribed paths.

But they were starting to lose their “meaning.”

It was like writing on a piece of paper with invisible ink. The action was still being performed, but the result ceased to exist.

As Pandora registered this shift, a freezing, bone-chilling dread clawed its way up from the deepest recesses of her consciousness.

She instinctively amplified the output of her mental force.

She pushed the runes to spin faster, burn brighter!

She tried to use a more intense radiance to puncture this darkness.

Yet the Sentence of the Void was like an infinitely large container. No matter how much mental force she dumped into it, no matter how many runes she ignited, it was all instantly diluted and swallowed without leaving a single ripple behind.

What was worse, as the Meditation Method continued to cycle, she began to feel a bizarre sort of exhaustion.

It wasn’t that her mental force was running dry.

It was that “meaning” was running dry.

It was like repeating a word to yourself a thousand times. Suddenly, it strips away all its significance and becomes a hollow, meaningless sound.

The Meditation Method itself, under the constant erosion of the void, was becoming hollow.