Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

'This place again…'

I woke up only to find out I was floating in the darkness.

'It might be wrong to claim I woke up to begin with,' I thought shortly after that, taking my sweet time to recollect my thoughts and try to figure out what was going on.

'I was trying to figure out the next level of perception. And I think it was something… about dropping all the limitations imposed by wide perception, allowing oneself to be reborn free of those shackles… I guess.'

With nothing around to distract me and all of my emotions dulled and hidden aside, I suddenly found myself in a perfect environment to study my own inner state, ideas, and thoughts.

Whatever those powerful waves of melancholy and lethargy did to me, I could no longer feel their pressure.

Or rather… It felt as if those two aspects of my soul grew more profound.

Like a gland of self-harming poison awakening right in the middle of one's stomach…

'So now I will have to deal with this kind of pressure forever, no matter what I do or where I go?' I thought, heavily limited in what sorts of tests I could run given my lack of control over my own body.

'It feels like my consciousness found refugee at the illusory bottom of my aura weave,' it thought upon observing this strange world's structure around me.

A place that existed only in theory, a bottom to an infinite well.

And looking up, I finally found out where those waves of melancholy and lethargy went to.

They were still there, infinitely close, just a reach of my illusory hand away… And at the same, no matter how much I struggled, I would never be able to reach them.Nôv(el)B\\jnn

Such was the nature of this illusory space that had no right to exist as nothing more but an optical illusion.

And yet, here I was at its bottom… surrounded by the endless presence of elemental darkness, the element I was supposed to draw my aura from.

But in all honesty, now that I compared the two waves of profound sadness bound to one's existence itself and then the state of absolute lack of motivation and will to act…

I realized they were not that different from the soothing sensation the sea of darkness gave me.

For what else was darkness if not just an absence of light?

And what else was the light of one's life if not the happiness and the will to act?

'I guess those emotions are already starting to affect my thoughts,' I realized, gritting my illusory teeth when the meaning I've just discovered finally dawned upon me.

If the origin of my power was the absence of life, then didn't that make me into one scary dude?

And being a high school graduate, the idea of being a personification of death and void didn't really strike my fancy. It might sound cool but obviously wasn't the path that I wished to follow.

But no matter how much I wanted to resist…

What was I supposed to do, when I myself was the one who called the influence of those dark emotions directly into my soul while willingly lifting all my resistance?

And yet, just as both Fay and Claudy proved, the influence of the silvery light appeared to take the form that most suited those it tested.

'Maybe that's the unavoidable truth of what I am?' I thought, feeling as if yet another layer of defense around my soul fell, allowing the two oppressive waves to somehow get a little closer through the infinite stretch of infinitely repeating pattern of the illusion.

It got closer even if the distance didn't change at all. And quite notably, I could now feel the pressure of those two feelings again, pulling me down and lulling my entire self into inaction.

But I've already fallen asleep once, back in the real world.

'What's going to happen if I fall asleep in here as well?'

Taken over by the potential threat of the current situation, I gritted my teeth and focused on the topic again, desperately rushing to find a solution…

Which only caused the two waves of emotions to grow even stronger.

No matter how much or in what way I attempted to resist those two waves from the bottom of my aura weave, my resistance would only allow the pressure to grow bigger and bigger.

'What am I to do?'

Feeling more puzzled than ever before, I genuinely found myself standing before the chasm.

In my desperate wish to catch up to Fay and Claudy… or rather, not to be left behind by them, I might've chewed a bit more than I could swallow.

And with this thought, the waves of paralyzing emotion grew even stronger, bearing down directly onto my shoulders and slowly killing any and all desire left in me to take action, to fight against this pressure.

'I'm not the one to give up, am I?' I tried to fire myself up, raising my illusory head… Only to fall right back down and relax.

'Nothing matters, really,' a thought invaded my head.

My mind was growing sluggish, too tired to resist the allure of simply wallowing in self-pity, the solution offered by the two waves of negative feelings.

'It grows stronger if I resist, huh?' Feeling how my consciousness was starting to fall prey to the allure of just giving up on the resistance…

I did just that and gave up, once again allowing those two waves to wash over me.

Even though I had no body, I fell down, directly into the ocean of elemental darkness, strangely happier with it being the entity to swallow me over the product of this treacherous, silvery light of the stars.

This reality lay at the bottom of an optical illusion. And despite that, the waves of melancholy and lethargy reached its bottom and struck against the surface of the core of my darkness.

Rather than affecting me directly, though, those two emotions mixed with the elemental darkness… painting it a slightly different hue. And once again, the pressure started to grow as more and more of the silver light's influence pushed into my core of darkness…

But it was at the bottom of all of that elemental darkness where I found the spark of Fay's aura.

And suddenly, all the puzzles fell into their place.

Right now, my perception moved to my core of darkness, where the pure element of my aura existed. Yet, the two waves that invaded me upon my willing invitation… were the product of my own soul.

My own soul, once the creator of this silver light stripped it bare from all the pretense, all the bravado, and all the things I forced myself to be to cover for who I was in reality.

The lethargy of living as a ward of my shitty aunt. A feeling born out of the reality I found myself in.

The melancholy of when my life turned out to be the worst because I dutifully followed the credo passed to me with my late mom's last words.

Those two feelings…

'I've finally got it,' I thought when everything clicked.

Those waves of emotions… they weren't made of the silver light of the stars.

Those were the emotions that dwelled down at the very depth of my soul, emotions that the light of stars merely awoke and powered up.

And it was only this realization that allowed me to sense what was actually happening at my core.

It was finally, truly becoming my own by bathing in the emotions that made me who I am today.

And as if to come with a timely rescue, the spark of incandescent fire that I held on to with all my mental might suddenly burst out with flames, casting away the shadows formed by the elemental darkness.

With this, I've found my answer.

Just like I've helped Fay to fare through her trail by calming her down, Fay now came in with a clutch, using herself as a beacon for me to anchor all my hopes on.

And it was her burning, white aura that continued to grow, striking right at the feelings that made the past me… burning them out of the darkness of my core.

I could feel the control and sensation of my body starting to return, right as this hidden world I was currently in started to fade away from my awareness.

And it was in the middle of this process, with all sorts of different forces trying to exert influence over my soul and core, that I finally realized what was the feeling that I sensed from Fay's aura.

'She's so simple,' I thought, smiling at my own thoughts as I blindly reached out only to grab Fay's waist and pull her into a hug long before I could even see her again.

'Not only my now and my future,' I thought, squeezing myself into Fay's body, once again using her as an anchor that I followed to return to reality. 'Even my past, she wants to make her own.'