“I aim to refine my significance by employing all as a whetstone, oblivious to how all beings are but water. I fade into them, like water dissolving into water.”
— Lyrics of a song written by the Mourning Actor, Lotusprayer, after gazing into the void.

Everything in the universe is meaningless, and human beings are worthless in the eyes of Aeons. If Aeons are truly above all beings, why would THEY even care about the emotions of mortals? The Self-Annihilators are individuals who have inadvertently stepped into the shadow of IX the Nihility and from that moment have lost the meaning of their own existence.

The shadow of the Nihility covers the stars equally, and Self-Annihilators may form in any world. If we call them a faction, they lack the social connections typically found in an organization. However, if we consider them phenomena, these poor souls do share one thing in common: Their various existential properties — such as corporeal body, mental cognition, and personal memories… will gradually fade away in their journey of self-annihilation.

These phenomena can hardly be explained by the laws of nature. As described in the handwritten notes of the Doctors of Chaos — Some Self-Annihilators have their skin turn into something like rotten wood, full of holes and scars. Some have their endocrine system disrupted, becoming unable to distinguish between pleasure and pain and turning numb to everything. Some lose their memories, others lose their senses… It is as if they have been deprived of the meaning of their lives by some entity, and can only keep watching in dreams and illusions as their own forms disappear into a black hole at the end of the horizon.

However, some Self-Annihilators would conceive the idea of fighting back. They join the Doctors of Chaos, vowing to do their best to cure others of Nihility in what little time they have left in exchange for their own redemption. Moreover, some of them rely on strong convictions to try to break the curse of Nihility at its root — by slaying the Aeon that slumbers in the abyss.

Dr. Primitive, No. 64 of the Genius Society, once asked before his disappearance: If IX is truly unresponsive to the universe, how could the Path of Nihility exist to this day? Perhaps, as the Self-Annihilators aimlessly traverse the cosmos, they are also casting the shadow of the Aeon around the universe. As for the few who can single-handedly withstand the encroachment of Nihility on their existences, their journey of self-annihilation is drawn out to infinity, and the road they walk is like a shadow of IX cast in the world.