The morning light crept into Valen's quarters, casting faint lines across the walls as he sat at his desk, the black shard cold and quiet in his palm. But as the sunlight touched it, the shard began to pulse—a faint, rhythmic vibration, like the heartbeat of something both ancient and unfamiliar.
Valen watched it intently, feeling the faint resonance as it connected with his own Void Essence, amplifying it in subtle, unpredictable ways. The longer he held it, the more a strange pressure built in his mind, a sense of old memories surfacing from the depths, not his own, but buried somewhere in the shard's core.