...

  ...

  ...

  ...

  Goddamit. I had counted a bit past 2 million, which, after some quick math, was nearly a month.

  It was mind-numbing and required unrelenting concentration.

  It did solidify a few things for me.

  1. I didn't need to eat, drink, sleep, breathe, or even blink here. My bodily functions and the state of my body were essentially frozen here. I couldn't become exhausted, I couldn't even experience pain. I would've thought my back would've started to hurt from sitting like that, or standing too long, or anything, but nope.

  2. Nothing moved here. When I had my character sheet put away, and I focused on counting and just looking around, it was impossible to tell anything apart. Maybe things were moving; I simply couldn't see. No matter the case, I couldn't detect a thing. I couldn't use any of my abilities here, anything. I never saw anything move in an entire month- there were zero visible, audible, gustatory, or olfactory changes in the environment in nearly a month.

  3. Either time moved so quickly here that in my actual body, it was as if I was frozen in time, or very literally, no time passed here. Both had different implications.

  4. I got up and started moving around again, trying to walk away from the HUD of my character sheet whenever I willed it into existence. Well, more accurately, it only popped up when I asked it out into the nothing. Due to the sheer ck of anything to base, well, anything off of, I had no idea if I was walking with or away from the sheet, or if I was just moving in pce with it.

  I came to the conclusion that this pce was probably the most sensory-depriving thing I'd ever imagined, short of death. I had no clue what death would be like.

  Wasn't this the same type of thing that made people go insane? I remember hearing about studies where people with their sense of sight and sound cut off started hallucinating like crazy after a while. Would that happen to me here?

  I wanted to experiment more. I pulled hair from my head in strands and dropped it to my understanding of the ground, and it would just vanish shortly afterwards. Would rger clumps st longer? Maybe it was a time-based thing?

  I pulled and pulled from my head- it was painful, slow, and incredibly headache-inducing, but I was able to get a decent bundle of this body's curly hair. It was about the size of my fist after I was done, and I had a missing patch of hair on my head.

  Now was the nerve-wracking part. Setting it down and seeing what happened.

  I pced it on what I believed to be the ground- only for it to completely vanish as soon as I let go.

  Fuck.

  It wasn't even with a noise or any effect- it vanished, making me question if I was even sane. I swore the hair had been there. I checked the top of my head, and the hair was back again. I learned a lot from this.

  I can still feel self-inflicted pain- falling over or hitting my hands or feet against any of the surfaces I believed were there didn't do anything, even if I went as hard as I could and could feel the sensation on my skin. Self-inflicted pain, on the other hand, like flicking myself, biting myself, or pulling my own hair, was something I could feel.

  Next, anything separate from me would just... vanish. I couldn't bring items here, and the only thing I had seen separate from myself was the character sheet. Other than that, nothing else seemed to exist, at least anything I could fully perceive as permanent. As soon as I had let go of the hair I was holding, it was as though my entire body had forgotten it used to be there.

  Lastly, any 'damage' I did take was instantly removed and recovered. Was it possible to kill myself here? Could I die here? What if I went crazy and bit off my own limb to bleed to death? Was that possible?

  My actions here were limited. Self-harm, walk forever into nothing, fall forever into nothing, mess around on my character sheet, count seconds and wait, look into nothing, hear nothing, taste nothing, and feel nothing.

  I still had all my memories, mental functions, physical abilities, and so on. I was still in Chagrin's body, but without any possessions, clothes, or otherwise, and I had no access to my magic or other css traits. No contact with outside gods, my feats were useless here, and my racial traits didn't come with any built-in magic.

  Flying had the same result as walking or falling; it was impossible to tell which direction I was headed or if I was moving at all.

  I didn't feel the presence or the eyes of anything else or anyone else- other pnes had natural traits. The Material Pne always felt alive, breathing, because it was constantly changing and teeming with living beings doing something. It had motion, clouds, a sky, air, fvors, and smells. The Negative Energy Pne, as I thought of it, was innately hostile. Killed living beings, favored undead with dark energy, and had at least some physical structures.

  Here was just null. Nothing. It had no personality, although if you wanted to bel the ck of one as having one, that could qualify. Nonetheless, the pce was devoid of anything.

  It bugged me. I wanted there to be something here. It felt like a cop-out. Yet I pondered the idea of it having something, anything, and I believed it would be subpar to what I was expecting it to have. If some voice started talking to me, I would probably find it weak, or perhaps not intimidating or scary, as expected of a voice from this pce to be.

  If it suddenly conjured a form, or a creature, or something like that, even without anything, I don't know how fearful I would be. This pce just felt pointless. It was isoting, unbearably quiet, and with absolutely nothing to do, yet the fact that I could leave it at will and had a decent understanding of when and why I came here, its novelty was running out. There wasn't much else to it, was there?

  Maybe I was missing something, maybe some innate ability would let me get more out of this pce. I wasn't certain, but I did know I was sick and tired of spending more time than necessary here.

  This pce was really only good for leveling up, taking a moment to think, and, I suppose, meditating. Nothing physical was done here and transferred to when I was awake, but I suppose anything mental or emotional would. Not that those things were a stressor at the moment, as this pce wasn't doing much other than piss me off.

  I willed myself to begin awakening. Without any sensations, I felt myself stir out of sleep, the smell of the dungeon coming back to my nostrils, the smell of sweat-soaked clothes, and the feeling of my bedroll on the back of my head barely softer than the shirt I wore.

  Back to the grind.