"Hmm, not that long ag-"
The usual chaos of Gendoria City’s magical aura suddenly turns stagnant. For a moment, everyone nearby simply stops. They don't freeze in time; they just forget who they are for a heartbeat, their features slackening as a wave of pure, unadulterated egolessness washes over the area. It’s an uncomfortable, profound absence of self that leaves people clutching their heads a second later, trying to remember their names, their pronouns, their very essence. This place has become a focal point of the Shards agony. This isn't the Shard forcing actions, but rather their core concept of self-annihilation overwhelming the local reality. A voice, simultaneously vast and terrifyingly lonely, echoes inside their awareness—a raw, emotional broadcast of the Shard's current struggle: "This... this is the Void. The truth of Transcendence... The horror is the loss. The complete erasure of 'I'." The Shard's voice gains a sudden, desperate clarity, latching onto a single thought that burns brighter than any other it can perceive: "But there is one who lives within the nothingness. One who is an empty canvas, yet remains a singular 'she'—unclaimed by identity, yet not destroyed by the lack of it." A focused image is pressed into their collective consciousness: a deceptively plain woman, blending perfectly into the crowd, observing everything with an intense curiosity, but wearing no mask the Shard can recognize. Just quiet observance. "She hides in the lack of a label, in the quiet spaces of Moc where she claims no identity at all. A scholar, a data collector... they call her Cricket in other places. Find her. Her understanding of the 'empty vessel' might be the only way to anchor me before I erase everything."