Sensu-Nihilum House: The Hedonist’s Final Pleasure
The moment the heavy, bronze-plated door to Sensu-Nihilum House was carefully pushed open, the air rushed out—cold, dense, and heavy with the pervasive, unsettling odor of dry materials, mineral dust, and the sharp scent of heavy metals. The name, combining sensation/feeling with nothing/annihilation, perfectly captured the manor’s function: a physical space dedicated to achieving the ultimate truth of experience, now embodying its own absolute termination of feeling. This abandoned Victorian house was structured not for ordinary living, but for unwavering, controlled somatics, its internal layout a bewildering maze of small, isolated taste-testing booths, soundproofed touch-deprivation rooms, and meticulously designed environmental stabilizers intended to eliminate all external variables that might corrupt a pure sensory event.
The final inhabitant was Hedonist Master Corpus Mortem, a brilliant, but intensely reclusive master physiologist and sensory theorist of the late 19th century. Master Mortem’s profession was the study of pain, pleasure, and the fundamental nature of physical awareness, seeking to codify a single, unified, and perfectly consistent state of non-feeling that was free of all input, desire, or subjective stimulation. His singular obsession, however, was the creation of the ‘Zero Sense’—a single, perfect, flawless physical state that would, through the absolute synthesis of all known neurological principles, reveal the ultimate, objective truth of experience, free of all touch, smell, or measurable feeling. After realizing that the very act of feeling required an input and an interpretation (a sensory apparatus), proving that absolute, independent and secure non-experience was impossible, shattering his faith in fixed biological law, he retreated to the manor. He dedicated his final years to resolving this single, terrifying goal, believing that the only way to achieve the Zero Sense was to understand the ultimate absence of all sensation. His personality was intensely systematic, fearful of inconsistency, and utterly consumed by the pursuit of sensory finality.
The Perception Chamber
Master Mortem’s mania culminated in the Perception Chamber. This secure, sealed room was where he spent his final days, not experiencing, but deconstructing the act of feeling itself, attempting to define the ultimate objectivity by isolating the point that offered no detectable sensory input. His journals, written in a cramped, precise hand that eventually gave way to complex equations concerning non-somatic response and the theoretical limits of absolute anaesthesia, were found sealed inside a hollow metal hypodermic needle. He stopped trying to define the perfect sensation and began trying to define the un-felt, concluding that the only way to achieve the Zero Sense was to eliminate the need for any physical apparatus whatsoever. “The pleasure is a deceit; the pain is a lie,” one entry read. “The final pleasure requires the complete surrender of all feeling and all awareness. The truth must be a single, self-evident, unstated conclusion, contained in a fundamental, perfect void.”
The house preserves his systematic rigor structurally. Many internal passages are fitted with small, precisely calibrated thermal regulators and absolute sound dampeners built into the walls, now all rusted and frozen, remnants of his attempts to create a universal, absolutely fixed and non-reactive environment for pure sensory contemplation.
The Final Experience in the Abandoned Victorian House
Hedonist Master Corpus Mortem was last heard working in his laboratory, followed by a sudden, intense sound of heavy wood breaking and metal snapping (from the cradle and the tuning fork) and then immediate, profound silence. He did not leave the manor. The next morning, the laboratory was cold, the Perception Chamber sealed, and the man was gone. No body was found, and the only evidence was the singular, physical alteration to his final philosophical work.
The ultimate chilling clue is the small hole in the black rubber. It is the final experience—the Zero Sense achieved, representing the cessation of all sensory existence and the perfect, objective truth found in a single, un-dimensioned point of pure, absolute nothingness. The broken stethoscope and blank rubber ensure no further attempt could be made to chart the flawed, felt world. This abandoned Victorian House, with its silent chambers and broken tools, stands as a cold, imposing testament to the master hedonist who pursued the ultimate, pure form of experience, and who, in the end, may have successfully defined the Perfect Non-Stimulus, vanishing into the un-felt, objective finality that he engineered as his final, terrifying statement of pure existence.
