Ethan's nights became routine, a cold routine of hunting and harvesting.
He would dive into the Sea of Silence, collecting trivial fears like a fisherman gathering shells from the shore.
Anxiety... boredom... fear of a spider... they were all just small coins he added to his growing treasure of dread.
He had become efficient, perhaps too efficient, and he began to feel a strange emptiness grow with each harvest.
His power was increasing, but his humanity was eroding, turning into mere administrative competence.
On one of these nights, while pursuing a small "social anxiety" entity in the dream of a shy waiter, he felt something different.
A hidden current.
It wasn't violent, but like the whisper of water running underground.
This waiter's dream... was leaking. Its edges weren't sealed; they were bleeding into another nearby dream.
Driven by a curiosity that had not yet completely died, Ethan decided to leave his small prey and follow this mysterious current.
It was a new experience.
He moved from the waiter's dream to the dream of a truck driver who was dreaming of an endless highway.
Then he felt the current lead him to a child's dream of flying over his city.
He was traveling through a hidden network of interconnected minds, a map of shadows he never knew existed.
The current grew stronger, pulling him toward an unknown destination.
He no longer resisted. He allowed himself to be carried away, feeling himself leave the individual dreams behind and enter a deeper, more ancient region of the Sea of Silence.
Then, everything stopped.
He found himself standing on what looked like a beach of fine, gray ash.
Before him, the chaotic Sea of Silence stretched out like an eternal fog.
But behind him... he had arrived at something unlike any previous dream.
This wasn't a place shaped by one person's imagination. It wasn't even a dream.
It was something else... as if a dream had broken and opened a door to a land without imagination, without an owner, or perhaps... without limits.
The sky of this place was a sickly purple color, with no sun or moon, just a perpetual twilight.
The ground was black, barren, and scattered with charred, leafless trees, their branches twisted into shapes of silent despair.
The air itself was heavy, saturated with a silence that wasn't just the absence of sound, but a silence with a presence, a silence that pressed on the consciousness and made one feel a cosmic loneliness.
Ethan began to walk through this strange place, drawn by a force he didn't understand toward the center of this silence.
He felt the presence of another consciousness here, but it wasn't an active one.
It was ancient, vast, and... tired.
Like a final ember in a great fire that had died out eons ago.
He reached the heart of this dead world, and there, he found it.
It wasn't a monster or an entity with a definite shape.
It was just a presence, a concentration of silent energy, sitting in the middle of what could have been a throne of raw rock.
This was the "owner" of the domain, but it was an owner on the verge of fading away, barely clinging to its existence.
Ethan didn't feel threatened, but curious.
He extended his intellectual hand slowly and cautiously, and touched that dying consciousness.
There was no resistance. There was no battle.
The moment he touched it, he felt the ancient entity sigh a final sigh that lasted a thousand years.
Then it began to dissolve, not violently, but like a sugar cube in water. Its energy, its essence, its silent memories, flowed into Ethan.
A massive wave of sensations washed over him. They weren't images or sounds, but pure feelings: eons of loneliness, sadness for a lost world, and the deep calm of the void.
For a moment, Ethan felt he was about to be lost, that his identity would dissolve in this ocean of ancient despair.
But his cold ambition, his will to survive, was the anchor that held him in place.
When the last trace of the ancient entity faded, Ethan stood alone in absolute silence.
He didn't know if he had killed something... or if something in him had changed. But the ground was no longer solid beneath his feet; rather, it seemed to throb with the echo of his breath. The dead trees bowed slightly toward him, as if bowig to a king returned from a distant war.
He said nothing. But the silence understood.
And that was enough.