Chapter 1 – Julian

"Huff huff huff" in the middle of a desert, there was a man breathing in an exhausted manner, there was no other sign of life or human intervention within sight, Yet he just continued to walk, in search of something only he knew. One could notice on first sight that the man had dead eyes, skinny limbs, and an aura of despair around him.

The man continued to walk till late into the evening and the sun had reached the horizon. Eating the jerky he had bought with him, he spread out his sleeping bag on the cool sand and proceeded to lye on it.

Lying in bed, the man took out a worn out diary from his bag and flipped it open. On the first page was a picture of what seemed to be a much younger version of the man, along with a small girl, and two adults. One could figure out without being said much that the picture belonged to the man's family.

The next page held a letter that was stapled to the diary. The man looked at the letter with teary eyes as he once again read it.

{Dear Julian,

By the time you are reading this, we would have already left for the capital to meet your grandparents. Unfortunately, we could not take you along with us as you have to start attending the academy from tomorrow onwards. We will however be back in a month, but by then you will already be in the academy.

We will obviously keep in contact with you via calls or text, but I'm just writing this to you to ensure that you don't get overly startled when you find the house empty. Oh, by the way, before you leave for the academy today, I have already prepared a meal for your breakfast. It should be lying on the dining table in the kitchen, so just reheat it and dig in.

Your loving mother,

Amanda forester}

As he read the letter tears started to flow down his eyes, as he read his diary, and reminisced on his memories with his parents before their untimely death, the warmth of the bag gave him comfort, eventually making him slightly drowsy.

Falling asleep Julian felt more helpless than ever, as he had yet to know why his parents were killed, and in a world filled with demons, sword master, grand mages, and monsters , a normal human was not really that much of a threat. As such, Julian had gone through many lengths to become stronger; he got various kinds of dangerous surgeries done on himself; he went to different sects to learn their martial arts, only to be told that he had no talent in anything they taught; he went to learn magic, only to be told he couldn't learn magic because of his poor talent; he looked for ruins bought to this world from the great collision, but his luck disappointed him with nothing but empty, already pillaged buildings.

Now Julian was on his last strand of hope, roaming across the desert to either death or something that would finally give him strength.

While Julian was lost deep in his thoughts,he could hear the sound of sand slowly falling on top of a hard surface. The sound was akin to the sound of sand falling in an hourglass.

Soon, Julian fell asleep, drowning in the sounds of the desert and his own thoughts. Hours went by and the sound of the sand falling indicated that the speed of the sand had increased, when all of a sudden a hole opened beneath Julian, waking the man up in the process as he fell down.

"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh" the screaming continued for an entire minute before Julian fell on top of a pit of sand. Confused by the sudden fall, Julian looked around in confusion before he realized his situation.

"Hoooly shit!" as Julian got up he started to look around and saw a ginormous gate in front of him, the cave surrounding the door was pretty worn down but, the door itself seemed to have been closed for quite a while.

Julian slowly approached the gate with hope visible in his eyes. He approached the gate carefully and checked every so often for traps, as in his journey for strength he had been to his fair share of ruins that were more often than not filled with traps.

Soon Julian was before the gigantic gate, he pored out all the strength in his body to open the gate, but the gate barely budged, and after about 5 minutes of constant pushing the gate finally opened slightly. But the tiny crack was enough for him to enter.

Julian slowly entered through the crack into a gigantic room, and as soon as he entered he felt a bright light shining unto his eyes. As he had spent quite a bit of time now in the dark, a sudden bright light proved to be quite annoying to Julian.

A couple of minutes later, Julian was finally somewhat used to the bright light of the room, a humongous library was visible to him. However, calling it a library would be oversimplifying it as, although books filled a major proportion of the grand room; piles of gold, platinum, mithril, orichalium and other minerals too filled the room; not only that a sizable portion of the room was filled with all sorts of weapons,like swords, spears, knuckles, bows, etc.

"Well shit, I finally hit the mother load!" Julian exclaimed, as he, rather than moving towards the piles of treasures, chose to move towards the massive library, for he needed knowledge far more, than fancy weaponry or endless wealth.

Moving towards the library, Julian stepped on a book that had probably seen better days. The book's cover was extremely worn out for some reason, unlike most of the books in the library as far as Julian could see, which picked Julian's interest.

Julian flipped the cover to see the title, which read "VOID".

Slowly Julian read through the manual, however the manual was quite odd in that it didn't have any text for mana control or any great techniques for combat, it was quite simply filled with quotes, and texts that talked about the deeper meaning of life and what it means to exist.

At the end of the book, there was just one quote that summarized everything the book had to say very well: "nothing is something, and something is nothing."