Combat Maid Harem

"Yes. I want to know."

[Thy world started out of nothing but a cloud of dust suspended in the eternal cosmos. Time passed slowly and indefinitely…]

Lawrend listened, and he slowly lost track of the time he slowly found himself before a dark empty stretch of the night sky. There were stars as far as the eye could see. He was in the center with nothing nearby he could reach.

He was enveloped in a thin stretch of tiny dust particles. These dust reached so far that Lawrend couldn't tell where they started or ended. They were as numerous as the countless billion billion billion stars surrounding him.

Lawrend watched this scene for an hour and realized he couldn't hear the Spirit World talking anymore. Its effects on his soul were so strong it took him that long to realize.

"What the hell?"

Lawrend looked around him. He could breathe and fly across, but the speed he traversed space was nothing before the gigantic size of the cloud of dust surrounding him.

A day passed in the blink of an eye. Lawrend used his expertise in space magic to travel farther and farther from his origin. As he did so, his sense of time faded away as there was no reference point for him to compare to.

"This is crazy. What's going on?" Lawrend asked himself as he continued flying forward at a constant pace.

His steps crossed space, but he couldn't tell if he was getting somewhere or not.

Lawrend didn't realize it but a year swiftly passed while he was still stuck in the middle of the dust cloud. He thought he could get to the end of it with his magic, but his thoughts were proven wrong as time flowed uncontrollably.

Devoid of any reference, Lawrend's mind flowed on its own time. His thoughts slowed down then would speed up. His anxiety reached an all-time high as he started missing his maids and family.

"Let me out!" Lawrend screamed.

He was reaching the end of his sanity as a decade had passed in that short-but-not-short moment. In this scale of the universe, time and space held no meaning.

Without the capability to traverse the vast distance of empty space, no being would be able to see the difference between this place and that place, or now, then, and before.

"..."

Lawrend abruptly stopped. He looked at the stars around him. He paid special detail to them down to the size of a bacteria.

"I moved, but the stars around me also moved a minuscule amount…"

Lawrend was shocked. There was no absolute point of reference for him to reliably tell if he really moved or not. Though, Lawrend believed more that he moved as he had used his space magic so much.

The minuscule movement Lawrend detected might seem nothing, but it was a spectacular amount of distance in the vast space he was away from those stars.

It was like seeing a dog run across the street but you would only see it move across one inch in your vision. Sure, you could tell it moved across the street because you can see the street, but in space, Lawrend couldn't do that. There was no street to reference the movement of the dogs(stars).

Lawrend relaxed his anxious soul by taking a deep breath repeatedly. He just realized it now, but he could still breathe as if he was in a world. From his understanding of outer space, that shouldn't be possible.

"This is not real. I knew that, but it's so realistic I forgot to check."

Lawrend studied the stars around him. Their arrangement was unfamiliar to him. The night skies of Earth were unlike it, including those from both the Human and Demon Worlds. The stars here were unknown to him.

In other words, this was someone else's starry sky; the Spirit World's memory.

"It's showing me its history," Lawrend mumbled.

He couldn't believe he didn't understand this sooner. Lawrend thought he had only spent a few days or months here. He failed to realize that he had been here for more than a decade.

If Lawrend knew that, he would realize that the being known as the Spirit World was not to be trifled with. A whole world's spirit contained so much energy.

Lawrend decided to wait instead. Even if he could leave this cloud of dust, there was no place for him to go. The nearest star would take him so long to reach he might be dead before reaching halfway to it.

Lawrend closed his eyes and decided to study his inner self. He found clues from the eye of the Spirit World that there were more to his soul. Since he had nothing better to do, he would study it.

He gave a brief thought to learning more magic, but there was no point as this body was not real. His soul was the only real thing here. Improvements there would reflect on him even if he left this illusion later.

…

A hundred… thousand… ten thousand… hundred thousand… a million years…

Lawrend had no idea he sitting cross-legged for that long. All in his mind were his memories, and his soul. He contemplated who he was. He knew his weaknesses and strengths clearly, but he was still not done.

He wanted to know how to read his own soul.

Lawrend came from a well-off family on Earth. He was a simple man who loved the sexual pleasures of life. He specifically enjoyed the company of maids.

But the Lawrend right now was very different than the one from before. He now wanted peace and to understand his soul in the search for his true self.

"The reason I exist is not because I need to, but because I happen to exist that I'm here. I can choose if I want to continue existing or not…"

Lawrend's thoughts strayed further and further. He focused on the idea of his existence. He was alive because his parents made him while having fun, but his parents were alive because of their own parents, who were also alive because of their own parents, etc.