'AAHHHHH' Kyle was unable to make any sound, but if he could, he would be screaming. His entire world was being distorted beyond recognition, even though it was completely black. The void was endlessly empty, yet tearing him apart as it moved around and through him.

Kyle did not have a body to be injured, and the void had nothing to injure him with, but he could feel his nothing being broken into hundreds of thousands of pieces.

When the distortion of his senses stopped, Kyle kept his eyes closed from the pain he was still in.

"Kyle!" Kyle could hear someone yell his name near where he was at, but he was in too much pain to bother to look around for the source, or even determine who it was that yelled it.

'Damn this hurts!' Kyle was still in immense pain, but now he could feel that the pain was coming from somewhere inside of him, somewhere below the navel.

"Kyle!" someone else said his name, but he still could not move. From his limited knowledge of healing magic, he knew the location of most organs so that he could direct the spells and use mana more efficiently, but there was no organ in the location from which the pain was coming from.

With every beat of his heart, a new wave of pain crashed down on his senses. Kyle placed his hand on the epicenter of the pain and tried to noiselessly use [Heal], but it did not work. Kyle did not know if he even put his hand in the right place, because in addition to never ending pain, Kyle could not feel his hand touching anything.

"He has stomach pain?" The first voice said. Kyle was interested in who the voices came from, who he opened his eyes.

The place he was in was unknown to him, not because it was a new place, but because his vision was swirling like 50 colors of paint being mixed. When he turned his head to look, nothing formed, not even a human shape. Kyle could not help but roll into his side and curl up to try and reduce the pain, which did nothing.

"Get the doctor, Fred!"

"Yes!"

There was a brief exchange of dialog between two people in the room and then Kyle could hear a door slam shut.

"Asura!" Kyle was laying on his side and when he tried to speak, he made a few sounds and vomited instead.

'Why does my body not do what I want it to?' Kyle was confused and only able to think about the current situation inside his body. He could not see or speak, hearing seemed to be fine, but now he could smell vomit mixed in strange proportions with the other smells around him, though none of the other smells were particularly pleasant.

"Oh my gosh, Fred, come back soon." Someone was worried about Kyle, but he could not tell who. Kyle tried to ignore the pain inside his whole body and thought about what he could tell from his senses.

'Everything is mostly black and brown, so I am probably inside a building.' Kyle could not see shapes of things, but he could tell the general color of things in his field of vision.

'Before I vomited, it smelt familiar, so I am probably not in a strange building.' Kyle did not instantly think 'What is that smell?' and try to pinch his nose when he woke up, so it was either his home or Kathy's.

'The second voice said "Fred" so he was hear at one point.' Kyle definitely heard his father's name, so he was probably in a safe place.

'[Sleep]' Kyle did not bother thinking about anything else and cast [Sleep] on himself.

POV: Kathy Drought

'Oh no, what if Elena hates me?' Kathy was feeling extremely guilty about what happened to Kyle after Elena took her two children from Kathy's home when she left.

'Maybe the story was a little too mature?' Kathy was worried because she told Kyle a story where people died in it he might have gotten scared or done something reckless. Kyle was only 3 years old and probably should have been told a story about a happy bird or something, not the 4 heroes who defeated the demon king.

"Claire, it's not my fault right?" Kathy asked her little over 1 year old daughter and held her up in her arms.

"Kyle." Claire said and threw her arms up and down.

"I know!" Kathy started whaling and she hugged Claire, uncertain of what she would do if the same thing happened to her child.

POV: Healing Mage

"Doctor, he woke up." Fred was speaking to the doctor who was able to come by the house for the 4th time since the patient in question entered the state he was just coming out of.

"I see that, but this is something very strange. This does not match anything I have ever seen or heard about before." The doctor really had no idea what to do.

"You can't cast fancy magic on him or something? He was clutching his stomach and even threw up!" Elena was very worried about Kyle who was now sleeping somehow.

"Let me get this right, after 18 days of being in this near-sleep state, he has awoken only to grab above his navel, make a few sound, vomit, and then go to sleep?" The doctor could not believe he was called to the house again. He would have to start charging them soon for the frequent visits.

"Well, he also had a little accident..." Elena said in a sheepish voice.

"Listen Fred, Elena, I know you are in a tight financial situation, but if you call me down here again with nothing to do but look at him sleep, I'm going to have to start charging you."

"We understand doctor." Fred said while he maintained a strong look. Elena had already lost the battle of will when she brought up Kyle pissing himself.

The doctor then left the Mercer house.

'Those Mercers, honestly...' The doctor was walking back to his office in the 3rd district as he thought about the last reasons he was called to the Mercer house. The 4 previous times were for the child Kyle who had fainted or something that resembles symptoms of an anima furabatur attack, but the first time was years ago.

'It can't be a disease, Cure would have gotten it, and if he was able to catch it twice, someone else would have to have gotten it too.' Cure would remove any disease as long as the symptoms were well enough know. Only if the soul-reaping effect was a minor effect of the disease would cure not work. It was a huge mystery.

Kyle woke up from his sleep about 2 days later making it an even 20 days away from the world. Kyle tested his vision and could now see, and the smell of vomit was gone. Kyle looked at his hand and moved it. He could see every detail.

'Well, at least I didn't die again.' Kyle was happy to not have died, and was sure if he did, he would not take things slow again. His brief meeting with Asura showed that he needed to get stronger quickly, if it was even possible.

The man in the black space was clearly Asura. Asura was the only self-righteous bastard in the group, and sometimes asked Kyle in his previous life what he thought about other planes of existence. Kyle did not know how, but Asura had somehow managed to ascend from the mortal plain.

'But he...' Kyle remembered what Asura had said. It might have seemed like a small detail to Asura, but it was huge to Kyle.

'He spent hundreds of years to make that? If Asura spent over 100 years in the space, then that means that I...' Kyle was putting it together in his head, but if he was right, Kyle would have been reborn at least 100 years after his being killed and the defeat of the demon king.

Kyle laid in his bed for a few hours just thinking about the implications.

'Was is just 100 years? Everyone I knew would be dead.' Kyle was saddened by the thought of that.

'Was it 200 years? Nobody would still talk about me.' His story was probably not written down if the other heroes betrayed him, and word of mouth could only keep a legend alive for so long.

'Or even 300 years?' That was the most he could imagine himself being in the empty void for, when he was there the first time. It did not feel like 300 years, but any more would be absurd.

'I don't have anything left.' Kyle thought about everyone he knew in his past life, thinking he could visit them or their children in this one. That foolish thought was painful now that he thought about all the things he would never be able to do.

Kyle's anger from the past day turned to sadness as he thought of the friends he had being told that he betrayed the other heroes and helped the demon king. Everyone in the kingdom knew about the demonic army's invasion and the devastation they caused, so to help them would be social suicide.

It was no wonder to Kyle that the demon invasion or the heroes were not being talked about in this town, because it happened hundreds of years ago.

Kyle went over in his head all the things he had left behind. His parents hoping for him to bring fame to their simple mountain village, the children in the orphanage he trained to work together to create water using Flame and Frost spells at the same time, the village chief who wanted to marry his daughter to him, the box hermit who taught him martial techniques...

'I lift things up and put them down.' Kyle remembered something the old man said to him once. Kyle thought it was a breathing technique, lift the diaphragm up and put it down, but now he thought it was something more than just that.

'I lifted so many things to an important place in my life, and now I need to put them down.' Kyle put away the memories of people he loved and cared about who were long dead and focused on the future.

'I need to get stronger.' Kyle was determined to become more powerful than Asura, even if he had to break his vow to not use forbidden magic again. Asura had reached a level of untold power with his forbidden magic, so now Kyle would have to do the same.

A few hours later, Elena came to check on Kyle.

"Mom, what day is it?" Kyle asked her as he saw her walk into the room.

"Kyle you're awake!" Elena rushed to Kyle's bed when she heard him ask her a question. Elena crouched beside the bed and stroked Kyle's head.

"Mom, the date?" Kyle asked her again. He really just wanted to know what year it was.

"It's September 3rd." Elena said as she did not stop stroking Kyle's head. She had been very afraid of losing him after he did not wake up after 4 days like last time.

"What year?" Kyle was a little annoyed that Elena did not say what year it was, but it was probably natural to not say the year when someone ask for the date, even though he had not heard the number of the year once yet.

"The year? It's... um... oh, you were born on a very special year, so this is the year 3,003." Elena said to Kyle, a little unsure about what year it was.

'That's a little higher than I thought, but maybe it was redone to start after some event in the past.' Kyle thought as he searched for the right question to ask Elena next.

"And what event marked the first year?" Kyle knew that the calendar in his time started with the kingdoms of the human alliance forming a single kingdom, and they were on the year 4600 or something; it was not very important to remember the year after 70% of the human population had just been killed. Their calendar started on a pretty solid date, so he was wondering what other event in the past was important enough to recount the years. Kyle was not big into history so he did not know much about major events of the past.

"That was when the demon king was defeated and the kingdom was made into an empire."

"What?"