Nihility [ Isekai • Dragon Evolution ]

"Yeah" I said. "I'm someone brought here by it, without my consent I must say"

The elf mage looked at me, carefully observing me, trying to see if I was lying or not. I just waited patiently while he considered what I told him and thought.

"Can you prove it?" He asked after a few moments.

"I mean. I don't really know how to prove that I'm from another world"

"Another world? I see, so that's what the ritual does"

I paused. "You didn't know?" I looked at him with a confused face.

"I may have two thousand years under my belt, but this ritual is very, very old, and very forbidden. I only know about it because my professor, a bishop of space when he was alive, spoke about it by accident in one of his classes and made us sign a magical contract to not talk about it with anybody that doesn't know" He explained. "And forget about trying to prove it. Me being able to tell you about this at all means you already know about it"

"...Oh?" I didn't know how to react.

"Bah, forget it, it's not as interesting as you being from another world. Oh!" He then snapped his fingers, like remembering something else. "Where are my manners? My name is Farahio"

"Oh… I'm Denaru Theris" I said. He then gave me his hand which I took on my own and shook it.

"Anyway, going back to the main subject" He said. "How are you here? In exchange for us to sign the contract our professor had to tell us a bit more about the ritual, so I know it has a component that binds the summoned's soul to the summoner controlling the ritual"

"IT HAS WHAT?" I shouted as I jumped out of the chair. Time seemed to slow down as my mind went into overdrive to process that bit of information.

If it could bind someone's soul, does that make them like mindless slaves or just unwilling slaves? Was this a situation like a demon contract, where they still have free will, but when they die, their souls will be devoured by the demon? Did I have the same thing binding my soul? I didn't know. Was it destroyed when I almost tore my soul in that first temporal explosion? Was the nothingness inside my soul caused by it?

I was starting to become anxious about my friends. Even if I had this binding around my soul, I was sure I was still me, but what about my friends? How are they? I turned my senses inside, trying to follow the connection my magicules flowed backwards into my soul, but I couldn't pass through the vein-like structures that were spread throughout my entire body. I couldn't see into my soul, just had a vague sense, but that sense was telling me it was fine, but was it? What if this was how it makes me feel to not raise suspicion?

I noticed Farahio was in the middle of speaking, I noticed the small movement of his mouth as I couldn't easily hear anything as the sound waves were also slowed down from my quickened perception. I deactivated that part of the [Mathematical Cortex] and time accelerated around me.

"... visible curse. So if you don't have it, you're good" He said.

"I… Ehm… Didn't hear you. I used a skill that made me think fast and your voice became so slow I didn't catch what you were saying" I explained. I still didn't sit down, too anxious about a possible curse he was talking about.

"Oh, you have [Thought Acceleration]? How lucky" He said.

"Something like that"

He eyed me suspiciously, but continued to talk. "I said that the soul bind the ritual has is a type of curse, one of the visible ones. Meaning that if you don't have it on your skill list or on your status, then you don't have it"

I pulled my status screen as soon as he had finished saying it.

The first thing I noticed was that almost all my status had decreased by fifty percent, which explained why I felt weaker in this form than my true body. The other one was that there wasn't anything cursed on my status screen besides the weird title, but as he had said it would be on my skill list then I ignored it for now. I would come back for it later, but I couldn't at the moment.

Seeing there wasn't anything there made me sigh in relief, and then I realised I would have noticed a curse before if it was there as I already opened it a lot of times before but never saw it, making me facepalm.

"Is something the matter?" Farahio asked.

"It's just that I opened my status as fast as I could trying to see if I had this curse, forgetting I had already opened it countless times before and never noticing anything like a curse there"

"Oh, don't worry. Everybody does something like this when under anxiety, like you seemed to be"

I sat down, anxiety diminishing a little, but not by much as my friends probably had this curse, meaning I would need to find a way to break it.

"By your reaction, you don't have it. So why the face?" He asked.

"Yeah. I don't. But my friends probably have it" I answered.

"What do you mean?"

"Hm? What do you mean "what do you mean"? You are the one that told me about the curse"

"No. I mean what do you mean by friends? The ritual only works on a singular target"

That threw me for a loop. What did he mean it only works for one target? Leo was here as well, wasn't he? He sent me that message, didn't he? Was he the target and I just became unlucky and died because I was in the wrong place? Did Alex also die? Did she reincarnate like I did?

[Leonardo Silva Monteiro has been transported using Theo's Bridge]

[Alessandra Rimenes Alves has been transported using Theo's Bridge]

[Vinicius Monteiro da Silva has been transported using Theo's Bridge]

…

..

.

[Knowledge Library] told me that every single person in my class has been transported, but did it mean safely transported or like me they died? There was only one way to know. What happened to Marcos Leandro Nahala?

[Marcos Leandro Ṋ̸͍̩͂͂̑ả̵̢̝ȟ̶̟̤̗͎̀̈a̶̠̜͋͋l̴̖̤̓͒͠͝ą̵̛̮̎͌͒ has been killed by an accident during Theo's Bridge ritual]

I sighed in relief. No one had died and were safely transported. Now, what the hell happened with my surname there? The skill glitched when saying my name, what happened?

[Information not available]

Of course not…

Shaking my head, I turned towards Farahio again.

"I cannot say how I know this information, but I know for a fact that the ritual summoned at least nineteen people with it, with one extra that wasn't so lucky with it" I said.

"Let me guess. You're the unlucky one?" He asked, which I nodded. "I see… Well. This is quite different from what my professor told me, so I'm not sure I can help you much. What I can do is point you in the right direction, though. Theo's Bridge is a ritual being stored by the high echelons of the Church of Space. If anyone has used the ritual, it was them. The reason why they would use such forbidden technique is beyond me, though"

"Why is it forbidden?" I asked.

"I honestly don't know much, just that it can cause Void creatures to be summoned as well. I don't know why, my professor didn't get into details"

[Information not available]

"I see…"

"But enough of this. Tell me more about yourself. From where do you come from?" He asked, suddenly with a light behind his eyes. I wasn't sure how to proceed here. "You don't need to tell me about your life, just tell me more about the place where you are from. How are the monsters there, which gods you have, and how different is magic from what you saw until now"

That is easier than telling about my old life to a complete stranger. I then proceeded to tell him a bit more about Earth, how while it has religion it's not on the same level as here as we didn't know if the gods were real or not, but when one believed so it was called faith. And that we didn't have monsters nor magic"

"What? What do you mean there's no magic?" He interrupted me to ask his question.

"I mean it literally. We couldn't just" I then casted a simple fire spell that floated above my hand for a while and then vanished.

"So you guys just had skills?"

"...I just said we didn't have magic"

"Yes, so you must rely more on skills than us, as you didn't have magic"

"...Aren't skills a form of magic?"

"What? Of course not! Don't be dumb. Skills are skills and magic is magic. They are two completely different things from one another. How could you ask such a question?"

Ouch. Seems he didn't like it if you compared skills to magic. To me it was basically the same thing, and I was sure that anybody from Earth would think the same thing as me.

"...Right" I said, deciding to go with it. "Then no, on Earth any kind of magic or skills does not exist. And before you ask, neither does a System like you have here. We couldn't just pull our status screen like you can do in this world"

"Incredible. I would like to study this place one day, but unfortunately it is not possible"

That picked my attention. "Why?" I asked.

"It is simply not. While Theo's Bridge can easily bring someone from another world here, it cannot send them. It was designed like this by Theo himself. If you want to know the reason, go ask his clergy, they might know his reasoning better than I do"

"What do you mean by his clergy?"

"Huh? What do you mean? The Church of Space, of course"

"I just know about the God of Time and the Goddess of Life" I said. The God of Time, Zwriniz, I met personally, while the Goddess of Life I just heard her voice when she hijacked my skill to pass me a message.

Farahio just stared at me incredulously.

"Really?" He asked. I nodded. "The God of Space, Theo. The God of Time, Zwriniz. The Goddess of Life, Vida. The Goddess of Death, Maut. The God of Light, Luminos. The Goddess of Darkness, Tenessa, and the Goddess of Chaos, Somi. Those are the names of the greater ones. The ones who created the universe"

"I see…" Considering I met one of them in person, it seemed certain to assume they all were at the same level of power. Does that mean that sensation of being watched…

"Denaru?" Farahio's voice brought me back to reality. "You there?"

"Sorry. It's a bad habit I picked up since coming here" I said.

"No problem. Let me ask you. Are you going to go to the Church of Space to find out more about what happened?" He waited for my answer, and when I nodded he continued. "In that case. Would you allow me to accompany you?"

I just stared at him.