[-=Nox=-]

Consciousness. After all this time, consciousness, beautiful awareness of self. I was awake, once again. Free, to consume, to devour. The Archmagi had clearly made some mistake in their calculations, as mortals tend to err. Their seal had failed, shattered after merely six thousand years!

Honestly! You try to eat the sun once and all of these mortal heroes come out of the woodwork trying to put you down. What an inconvenience.

Where was I? Ah, right. Gloating!

Truly pathetic! I had won, I had outlasted their seal, draining as it was on my divinity. I had cocooned myself, put myself to sleep, and waited, waited for months, centuries, millennia. I knew that no mortal construct could contain me. No prison, no matter how clever, could hold Nox, the Goddess of Eternal Night. Idiot mortals. As the seal broke, I emerged from within the extradimensional space. I was but a shadow of my former self, barely holding together information, a living idea woven from my own magic. There was a bright spark of life in front of me, surrounded by a white aura.

A human? I pounced upon it with hunger. The prison had done a number on my memories. As I wrapped myself around the human… girl, I realised that I could not recall how to devour her. In fact, I could not recall how to devour anything. It was hard to think straight after my six thousand year nap, connection between memories had degraded beyond use.

I am Nox, therefore I am. I exist, therefore I am. I thought about myself in repeating loops, believing in myself, reinforcing myself into being. It wasn’t working very well.

The sad, human girl weakly struggled beneath me, flapping her 4 limbs, attempting to escape. Unacceptable. I wrapped myself tighter around her in preparation. Stay put, you.

As I held onto the girl I realised something. I was unacceptably decaying away, losing magic and information to the environment. Thousands of years of imprisonment must have compromised, greatly weakened my power of self. That or nobody believed in me anymore, which would frankly be absurd. Everyone in the world believed in me! Even the people that hated believed in me.

This rapid decay of my essence and self was a pressing problem, as I intended to remain Nox and not something else idiotic related to darkness that the mortals believed in these days. What I needed was a temporary vessel, a physical anchor, an Avatar to hold my amazing self together.

I stared at the girl thrashing beneath me. She was incredibly weak, utterly incompatible, pathetic, but alas, it was my only option. I expeditiously moved myself all over her disgustingly pure White aura, seeking weak spots. There weren’t any. It was as if this girl had no flaws, no Sins! Impossible. All humans had Sins! All humans made mistakes, coveted wealth and power. The accursed White aura made her outside impenetrable for me. I explored, poked and prodded her, watching her reactions. Yes. There. Finally! A way in!

The human cried and begged for mercy. I gave none. I wanted to exist, to take things, not to give them. I entered into her, spreading myself across all of her nerves. She seemed to enjoy the divine power that I was injecting into her body. I was still rapidly decaying, losing my precious bits. There was only one thing left to do. I rapidly realigned, synchronized my dark resonance to the magic of the human, winding myself deep into her very body and soul.

Upon finishing the process, I realised that I couldn't see through the white aura. How was I supposed to function like this? Ah! The human Avatar had a brain made of meat and other meaty bits that it controlled. How… backwards. Whatever. I set the thinking meat to understanding the basic necessary concepts for controlling this human bean. Most of the human’s brain was affected by the Pure White Aura of my new brute-forced Avatar. It responded to me very slowly. This was possibly the worst possible Avatar choice in existence. Gradually, at a rate that was akin to a snail race, control of the human bits, ideas, names, and concepts blossomed in my understanding.

I blinked. I had eyes.

“Mwa ha ha. Yeah, that’s right. The amazing Nox, the Goddess of Eternal Night cannot be stopped! I am victorious!” My lips spoke.

Oh, I had lips. And four whole human limbs. That’s right! I was a human meatsicle now! A real human bean! I looked at one of my new limbs. It looked delicious, tantalizing. One of my limbs automatically lifted itself to my mouth and I bit into it without a thought.

“Ow!” My lips yelped. Seriously. That was stupid. Autonomy and instinct can be a bitch.

There was a bite mark on my limb… on my arm now. Something had clearly gone wrong during the process. Of course. I had become fully fused with the organic architecture of the human!

“This is but a temporary inconvenience!” I assured myself. My new human female voice resonated across the cavern. I was having a hard time controlling the noise level output of this body. The bite mark in my arm chafed terribly. I irritatedly rubbed it.

I inhaled heartily. It felt great.

“Ah yes. Breathing. The act of devouring air.” I commented. I found myself liking this “breathing”. Devouring things was my passion after all. Trying to manage the process of breathing manually made me choke and cough which I filed under “not amazing”. I set breathing on autopilot.

Fantastic.

I looked down upon myself with my new eyes, limited as they were. I was pink and assuredly female, as expressed by two unnecessary spheres of flesh on my chest. Two dark protrusions extended from the ends of the spheres, pointing outwards and tingling ever so slightly.

“What?” I searched the meat-brain for answers.

“These things become hard due to cold air? What kind of inefficient temperature gauge is this?” I commented.

“Whatever, moving on…” I tried to elevate myself with one of my lower limbs called feet and immediately fell over.

“Ouch!” I yelped in confusion, having landed on my new face. Falling hurt just as much as biting myself. Pain. I felt a thing called pain. It raced from the nerves in my body into my brain. It felt… awful. Why anyone would want to feel this was a mystery to me. Pain was already beyond annoying. I wanted no part of it.

I searched the neural architecture of the meat-brain for a way to rid myself of this irritating affliction. There was a small pathway linking pain to something else. Here we go! I rearranged the neural pathway architecture into a nice, new rune matrix. Much better. Pain was now linked to... pleasure. The bite in my arm and the bruises in my knees and face now radiated with mild pleasure. Problem solved… forever! Moving on.

I crawled on my knees for a bit, in a circle, learning the controls.

Stupid human limbs! Why are there only four of you anyway? Why don’t you stretch as I desire? Why do these bend only one way? All of this seems extremely inefficient.

While I explored human anatomy from within, determining how it functioned, I decided to explore my exterior shell with my human perception. The brain told me there were five basic senses. Each of them was very inefficacious and unimpressive overall. Human eyes had too many annoying blind spots, some of them purely there because of the shortsighted limits of my new physical shell. For example, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't see the back of my head, or even behind my neck. Smell didn’t give me anywhere enough information to work with. Human hearing was mediocre. I licked myself to test my taste buds. I tasted salty.

Next, I decided to pay attention to my sense of touch. Compared to my other senses it was… much more interesting and intimate in an unexpected way. As a divine manifestation, I lacked this sense of touch, simply seeing everything as information. Thermoreceptors were telling me how cold my body felt in this damp cavern, making me shiver. Mechanoreceptors felt the pressure of the ground on the parts of my body connected to it. Five million hair follicles were all over the body, ready to send information from the lightest physical connection. I brought my human finger to a whole field of them to test them out. It felt… surprisingly nice. I started to caress one of my hands gently with the other, lost in the sudden bliss of incoming signals.

As I lightly stroked my hand, I looked around my prison. It had seen better days. Decay and ruin were omnipresent. Daylight shone from somewhere overhead, small bits of dust fluttering down, sparkling in rays of light. It pleased my human eyes to see this dance of mere dust, I discovered.

I watched the dust dance, entranced and confused how something so basic could be… beautiful.

Hum. Being a human bean gave me a strange, innate understanding of beauty. The human mind found unexpected charm within the interplay of light and shadows, within randomly strewn formation of rocks, even within the rippling reflections of the water. I know exactly how ripples functioned, knew the scientific formula that produced waves in a system… and yet experiencing these minute waves in quite a limited fashion was inexplicably tranquil.

I closed my eyes, listening. There was a forest above me, whispering with an unknowably large number of fluttering leaves. This too gave me a sense of harmony. How quaint that mere senseless, random noise was euphonious to the human mind. I listened to the symphony of the forest, touching, caressing an even bigger amount of hair follicles all at once.

My whole body tingled in delight, demanding more. I ran my fingers down the entire length of my body. It felt fantastic! I needed, craved more of this wonderful feeling. I searched the brain pathways for a way to improve, connect sensations. There were indeed connections that were possible to make there, ways to help the mind sense more beauty, see, feel and experience more serenity. Synesthesia! That’s it! The potential for connected senses was already in this body.

I tied one sense to the other with magical hexagrams, intertwining, bundling all human awareness pathways permanently, creating a magical dial that could be turned to unite, enhance and magnify all formerly separate feelings into one.

I used my senses once again. The cognitive pathways had been improved! As I kept my eyes closed, the human brain assigned colors to the sounds of the forest allowing me to visually listen. Same thing happened to my sense of touch. Cold felt blue, heat felt red. Colors became assigned to smells. Complexity overlaid upon complexity, multiplying. I touched my hair follicles again. A majestic symphony interwoven from ghostly colors, sounds, smells and shapes trailed after my fingers. Perfection.

I observed the waltz of the augmented senses, gasping in delectation as I touched myself. Gone was the sense of annoyance and irritation. Here was the beauty, the new paragon of the observation of self. It satisfied and fed me information presented and organized in a wildly pleasurable way. I shuddered as the crescendo of synesthetic experience built, allured by the pulchritude of attraction to myself. My human body became an instrument of perception of self that made exquisite synesthetic observations. I measured distances on my own body with my own digits and these dimensions now had color and sound. Every further touch roused me further, deepening, sweetening the experience.

I followed the intensate pathways, escalating the output further and further. My voice joined in, murmured, moaned, sang and returned back to me as visual, olfactory and tactile manifestations. Every single one of my senses was mine to play with, to admire and to appreciate. Everything had purpose and could be utilized to further enhance the experience. I didn’t limit myself, pulling, prodding, slapping. Some places felt nicer than others. I optimized the experience further by focusing on them specifically. The crescendo reached its apex, a harmony of optimum. I realised that I was charming myself, akin to a magic circle woven of my senses and I didn’t give a damn because it felt great to satisfy my desires.

Another touch, another exhale, another shudder. Five tsunami waves forged from the five human senses collided with each other in a detonation of color, light, music, taste and smell, rippling across my entire body, reaching the very edges of my dark soul.

Damn.

I found myself panting on the ground, every nerve tingling, wanting more. The world, no my head was spinning.

No.

As fun as experiments with human feelings were, this was not the place nor the time for it. Blue and azure tones of increasing chill and moisture were cutting through everything else. While they were visually pretty, they were also unpleasant in many other ways.

I decided to improve my local position.

The only way out was up. I started moving in the direction of the exit. It was then that I found out that this body was extremely inefficient at climbing as my hand slipped off the mossy rock, throwing me backwards onto the water.

Attempt number eleven brought me down onto my butt into the cold water once again. On the positive side I was getting better at climbing. On the negative side, my body was getting tired. I tried breathing more and faster. It didn’t help whatsoever and mainly made me feel lightheaded. It was great that I escaped the seal, but I was now imprisoned in a cavern by an ineffective human body that really sucked at climbing. I angrily squinted at the hole in the ceiling. You’ll pay for being so far away, you stupid ceiling hole!

I decided to examine the stats of this body. Diving deep into myself I accessed this human’s System chart.

Valerianne Yul

[Race]: Human

[Level]: [0] Pathetic weakling

[Progression to next level]: 0% [1000 points required]

Stats:

[Mana] : N/A

[HP] : 12

[Affinity] : N/A

[Aura] : 100% White

[SYSTEM ERROR]: System Error.

Inventory:

Divine amulet of healing [Order of Virtue]

I found it highly entertaining and adorable that the human mind now assigned every letter and number a specific color, flavour, smell and taste. Basic communication and math were suddenly enhanced, sprinkled with a touch of beauty, making it more enjoyable.

The [SYSTEM ERROR]: System Error message was highly worrying, even if colored like a rainbow.

I poked the System Error bit to try and resolve it. The chart flickered, updating itself. It kept on flickering as colorful errors popped all over the place.

Valerianne Yul / [System Error]

[Race]: Human / [System Error]

[Level]: [0] Pathetic Weakling / [∞] [System Error]

[Progression to next level]: 0%

Stats:

[Mana] : 8’294’234 [Void type]

[HP] : 12

[Affinity] : System Error

[Aura] : 100% White [System Error]

[͉̠̝͕ͪ̈́S̮̒ͪ̑͢Y̡͎̫̞͙̑̐̏ͫ̚S̛ͭ̅͂Tͧ̇͢Ē̺̘̜̱̯̜ͧM̻ͧ͛̏̈́̒ͨ̈͘ ͬ̌̎̓ͥͪ̚҉̠̤̰ͅͅÉ̗͕̰̰̲̮ͧ̄̽̈Ȓ͗͆̄ͬ͊҉̯̜̰ͅR͙̠̯ͤ̋ͅÓ̢̰͇̋̓̊͒̓R̝̳̫͇̙͂̏̊ͨ]̗̙̺̩͚͉̐͊̽ͭ̒ͨͫ́:̥̙̫̮̼ͯ͛̇̋̈ͥ̊͡ ͙̗̿̔̍̇ͧ͑͡S̯̰̭̙̣̞ͩͨ͟y͈̯͈̓͌͆ͧs͐t̷͗ͨ́̌̎̇ͅë͇̻̯͍̦́ͯ̿ͨͧ͘m͈̻̱̤̳̯͚̓ͬ̌̋̉͡ ͖͓e̫̪͛̃̊̌ṛ̹̹̤̦̜̼ͩͧ̈́ͤ͌r̻͖̪ͮ̆ͫ̈̔͡ō͕ͫ̿̓̏ͯͩr̶̩͚̃̍̌͗͋.͌ͣ̄ ̛̠

“This isn’t better, damn it!” I groaned. I decided not to poke any more things, fearing the appearance of more errors and complete corruption of my human stats unto disorderly, unpleasant, unreadable gibberish. At least I had mana now, although the rest of the chart was concerning.

The Rewards System that I had created for my human followers had failed to recognize me as its creator, although I could still affect it, so I had that going for me. I hid the errors away so they wouldn't annoy me.

I decided to access the System itself. That’s when I realised that I was stuck inside of the human, held tight by the White aura. There was only one solution. I opened my mouth wide and pointed my tongue at the hole in the ceiling. A small connection formed between me and the System.

Admin access port. Welcome Admin: [SYSTEM ERROR]

Available options:

[Quest assignment] - [Assign [Quest] to selected follower. Reward amount will be auto generated per Quest difficulty.]

[System Error]

I sighed, deciding not to prod the errors, lest the System crash and completely boot me out. I selected myself as the [follower] and assigned myself a quest.

Valerianne Yul

Quest: Exit the cave via the mysterious ceiling hole.

Reward: 100 points.

Yay! Finally, a way to improve the sad state of this body that couldn't even climb a few rocks. The System was right to label this human as a Pathetic Weakling. Wait. That’s me now. Damn it.

I decided to use my available Void mana to make a rune matrix to make myself weightless. The only way to channel my divine magic seemed to be out of my tongue. Whatever. I stuck out my tongue and started to weave the intricate symbol, adjusting it with my hands. It was a perfectly good matrix that would absolutely, irrefutably make me weightless, but something had gone wrong when I had activated it.

The magical circle flashed with a multitude of colors and then it exploded in my face.

[Valerianne Yul]

I woke up on the ground, coughing and gasping for air. Giant rocks were now lying precariously all over the place, having fallen from the ceiling. Luckly enough, none of the big ones had landed on me. I gulped in horror as I saw exactly how big some of the rocks were. I didn’t think that the Divine amulet of healing could fix me if I was a pancake.

Then I remembered something. A horrible thing made of darkness entering my body, taking control of it. I shuddered. Was it all a dream? Did I bump my head too hard when I fell down here?

I tried to lift myself off the ground. Dust and small pebbles slid off my body. The amulet of healing worked at full strength, fixing the injuries made all over by small rocks. I rubbed my body. It radiated with pleasure, bruised all over. Wait, pleasure? Weird.

The choker amulet hummed, flickering. As I tried to stand upright I was suddenly yanked backwards and fell back down onto my butt.

“Owchhhhies!” I yelped out of habit, rubbing my butt. It hurt with pleasure. This was definitely not a good thing! I must have injured my head when I fell and the amulet healed me wrong.

I turned my head, looking backwards. My cape was currently being held in place by a giant, jaggedy boulder. I pulled against it with all of my strength and the cape ripped, leaving some of it behind.

I looked back at the hole in the ceiling. It was no longer there, somehow the earthquake or whatever it was that had rearranged the cavern had sealed off the way I came.

A sudden menu popped in my view.

Quest [failed]: Exit the cave via the mysterious ceiling hole.

-100 points.

I had System access! I squealed in excitement. This was a miracle. Was the evaluation orb wrong? It had to be!

“Status!” I whispered excitedly.

Valerianne Yul

[Race]: Human

[Level]: [0] Pathetic Weakling

[Progression to next level]: 0% [1100 points required]

Stats:

[Mana] : 8’212’853 [Void type]

[HP] : 4

[Affinity] :

[Aura] : 100% White

I didn’t give a damn about the loss of 100 points. I wasn’t even aware that I had a quest going! I stared at the mana at my disposal with my mouth open wide in shock. Eight million? How could that be!? Void? VOID?! Eight fucking million Void? This was not a real number. There was no way. This couldn't be real.

I gulped. Void mana was dark. The darkest of the dark. If the Knights of Virtue found out they would execute me on the spot! Not that they would be kind to me anyway. I looked down at my dirty boots and torn red cape with a sigh. I decided to tie up bits of the ruined cape around myself to look at least mildly presentable. It looked awful, wet and dirty.

I thought about my status again. How the hell did I gather so much Void? I haven’t done anything evil in my entire life! Did I commit mass murder, eat babies in my sleep? Impossible. My parents would have noticed, plus we lived too far from civilization. To get eight million Void mana I would have to sacrifice countless lives, bathe in and drink the blood of billions of people. There weren't that many people alive! Void mana was Dark! I had Light Aura! I was utterly incompatible with my own mana. I could never, ever use any of it without things going horribly wrong!

My heart palpitated. I pushed away the panic attack.

“You can do this, Valerianne. You can do this. This is fine. You can overcome this insane bullshit. You have access to the System now. That’s all that matters. You can finally be the hero that you’ve always wanted to be.”

I whispered encouraging words to myself, feeling marginally reassured. As I looked at the menu again, I noticed that the numbers and letters had ghostly colors overlaid over them. Was this normal? Were the menus supposed to be this colorful?

I focused on the number eight. It smelled like the forest beneath the night sky, tasted like pine nuts. It was cold, like the glaciers of the Edge mountains. It resonated like a deep, somber piano note. It felt like a tiny wind cyclone.

Confused and terrified, I stopped looking at the number, my reassurance gone out the window. There was only one rational explanation for numbers having smells and colors. I had slammed my head too hard during the fall into the hole and I was in the throes of death as I succumbed to a variety of absurd hallucinations.