I sat with my thoughts for a moment. Just for the sheer fact that this skill made me immune to the magic of that goat-horned demon, and was going to reduce the time of my growth by a ridiculous amount, since it granted voluntary access to the stripped state of my consciousness that had taken over at the end of the last loop.

That thing that was me and yet not me, the mind that had drunk demon blood and crushed throats and fought without a head, I could now enter that state at will.

The warning: the hollow may not return what it borrows was the line that landed hardest.

What do you mean, may not return? By all the lights in all heaven, is this skill mine, or am I a part of the skill?

Was a celestial skill, whether broken or not, even meant for a human?

The words of that goat-horned demon entered my mind once more,

"You have the body of a Nascent Achon, you fight like a Maker... When you should fight like a Daemon."

This language I realized was not any I knew, but I was able to understand it so well that it just occurred to me that the demon was not speaking words I had heard before.

How was I able to understand a strange language I had never heard before?

I remembered drops of my blood running away from my sight when I looked into my body, and I frowned.

Then there was the fact that at the unlocking of my first Earth Gate, the system had given a weird announcement that felt so strange and out of place, but those words were still buried in my heart.

-I Charge You, Go Into Creation And Wipe Out The Children of Abaddon.

What was I getting myself into, and when would I know when I had gone past the point of no return?

The stripped state had not, technically, been me. The stripped state had been what was left when the soul burned out, and the warmth from demon kills carved out a space below the soul that could animate the body.

It was this space that had taken over when the soul could not, the Hollow Avatar. The system was now telling me that voluntary entry into the hollow state meant lending the hollow operational control, and the hollow might not return what I gave it.

Specifically, what would not be returned was unclear. Memory. Emotion. Identity. Skill. Personality fragments. The text was deliberately vague.

I would learn the costs by paying them, and this was what scared me, because there was no way I would not be using this tool in my fight against the demon.

I focused harder, and additional properties appeared.

[Hollow Avatar — Properties:

The body retains a residual imprint of the soul’s intent, allowing it to complete simple combat actions for a short duration after the soul has been removed or suppressed.

’Oh, wow, I would not call anything my body did in the last loop to be simple, but if that is considered simple actions, I wondered what complex would be like?’

This duration scales with rank. At current rank (1): approximately three seconds of independent function. Allowing the Hollow Avatar to exist outside your soul control for long risks assimilation.

’Hmm, does this mean that I should not use this skill for long if I have burned my soul? At the present rank, I am safe for three seconds, but if I extend this past these first three seconds, I risk assimilation.’

The Hollow Avatar can be activated deliberately while the soul is still present, creating a temporary autonomous combatant that mirrors the body’s physical capabilities.

When activated deliberately, the Avatar does not require conscious direction. It will act according to the last combat instructions encoded before activation.

’Well, this part is interesting.’

Damage sustained by the Avatar is not transferred to the soul, but the body’s injuries persist after the Avatar ends.

Complete immunity to fear-based effects.

Complete immunity to psychological compulsion.

Complete immunity to pain-induced shock.

Complete immunity to madness-induction.

Emotional state inaccessible to external observation.

Anima consumption reduced by 40%.

Pain tolerance: absolute.

Combat decisions operate on pre-set commands or pure threat-response logic.

Self-preservation instincts: suspended.

Mercy: unavailable.

Negotiation: impossible.

Duration: voluntary]

[Hollow Avatar — Costs:

Reintegration difficulty proportional to duration.

Emotional integration of deferred experiences upon return.

Risk of partial personality fragmentation with extended use.

Risk of failure to return at all if duration exceeds capacity.

The hollow does not learn, skills practiced in the state may not transfer to ordinary consciousness]

The final cost was the most worrying. The hollow does not learn. Whatever combat capability I demonstrated in the hollow state would not become part of my ordinary skill set the way practice did. The hollow’s execution was effective but pedagogically sterile. I would not get better at the things the hollow did because I was not the one doing them.

This was a tool, not a training method. The hollow was for situations where the cost of using it was justified by the survival benefit. It was not for situations where I could afford to learn from the engagement directly.

However, I quickly realized that even if I could not directly get skill growth from its actions, I was also benefiting in many ways.

The first was that its kills also counted as mine, obviously. The second was that I could watch and imitate its actions, since the thought process of the Hollow Avatar was open to me.

I was not too prideful to acknowledge that the Hollow Avatar was right when it said that I fought like a magical turret spitting out lightning.

However, I was an Acolyte in my second year, and I should have had decades to refine the way I fought and understand how to move around during battles, but in this situation, I did not have any excuse; either I kept adapting and growing, or I allowed myself to be endlessly killed.

The horror was real. Demon Slayer had given me a new ability. The space that had opened beneath my soul when the loop’s worst moment had carved it out was now a tool I could deploy, and the tool’s cost was paid in pieces of myself that I might not get back.

Finally, the last gift was the fact that my body was growing when I was in the Hollow Avatar’s state. Endurance, adaptability, and other auxiliary skills would still be growing.

Then the most strategic value of all was that the horned demon’s madness-inducement would not reach me in the hollow state.