Chapter 170 - -170
Gray walls. Gray floor. Gray ceiling. A single figure sat in the center of the room on a gray chair at a gray table. Female. Mid-thirties. Business attire. Perfect posture.
She sat completely still.
Elara walked closer, circling the figure. The woman’s eyes were open but empty. No, not empty—full of something too large to name, something that had eaten everything else and left only its own crushing weight.
"*Do you know what this is?*" the voice asked quietly.
"Sensory deprivation chamber of some kind," Elara guessed. "Psychological isolation environment."
"*Close. This is where souls go when they commit suicide.*"
The woman at the table didn’t react. Didn’t blink. Just sat there, breathing, existing, trapped in whatever space existed behind those empty eyes.
"*Her name was Sarah Chen,*" the voice continued. "*No relation to you, before you ask. Thirty-four years old. Successful lawyer. Loving family. Promising future. Depression took her anyway—the quiet kind, the kind that smiles and functions and dies in silence. She hanged herself in her apartment on a Tuesday afternoon.*"
Elara studied the figure. "Standard clinical depression pattern. Neurochemical imbalance, likely genetic predisposition combined with environmental stressors. Medical intervention could have—"
"*She’s been sitting in that chair for sixty years,*" the voice cut in.
"I’ll... attempt to optimize their working conditions and express verbal recognition of their contributions," Elara offered. "Will that satisfy the requirement?"
A long, long pause.