At first he had been panicking, feeling helpless and suffering endlessly in the darkness, but after a while, he didn't know how long, he felt his mind calm down and realize that he wasn't going to crash into the ground any time soon, instead opting to wait for something to happen.
Later on, after having fallen for what felt like hours, his boredom grew even worse, having started counting quite a bit ago while waiting for something to happen and already having reached the stage of over four thousand units of whatever speed he was counting at, a speed he hoped to be about once a second, but that counting had now slowly turned into more of a subconscious act and resulted in him feeling bored once more but unable to do anything, still not seeing anything aside from the endless darkness but feeling weirdly safe, perhaps because he was used to flying in the air and had missed it quite a bit, not that that made him feel any better in the beginning.
After he passed a thousand counts he began to spread out his mana, just to escape his endless boredom that even surpassed the months he had spent in the back of the mind of his other self, int he place that he quite enjoying calling as it was, the trash chute, but back then he at least had the possibility of passing the time doing something, now he just had to fall and see, well, nothing.
When he reached eight thousand counts he instead began to understand something else, still feeling his mana being sent out repeatedly and his mind counting in secret, trying to hide the count from his conscious self, or maybe that was just what his mind was trying to tell himself to avoid the fact that he was going insane after what might've just been about two hours and a few dozen minutes.
On the other hand, that was everything he had been doing, he had truly, eternally, just been counting the time, passing every second, so perhaps, he had no idea what a second was anymore, not having seen a real watch, clock, or any true way to measure time in months.
Even the sun on the world where he had met Manug might have gone at a different speed, though, no matter how hard he tried, he seemed to even have forgotten the name of that world, same as the one before that, no, perhaps it was something like Karira.. he didn't remember right now, he remembered the geography slightly, remembered the species there, remembered how he had hidden in the tree, but the name itself never really came up, there was nobody to talk to anyways, and if he had ever heard it then only from books or his own insistent repeating of the word until it had turned into a senseless noise while he had been sleeping, his own mind lying to him and only telling Cades of silence.
After the count had reached eight thousand he began to regain that which he had lost, feeling his mana, however little he had been sending out, and beginning to realize what he had been doing now that he felt it nearing the end of this endless fall, or perhaps just hoping that that which he felt was the end of it, begging for a way out seeing as he hadn't even accelerated, staying at a constant speed, however fast that might be in this world but not accelerated by any gravity which made quite a lot of sense seeing as he was quite certain that what was beneath him was just endless nothing and that which was above him was just a thin layer of wood, something that had resulted in himself searching the sides, at least until he had realized that he didn't know where left, right, up down, anything, really was, still counting, still hearing the senseless scream from somewhere, and now feeling a strange call that he was destined to never truly answer, but still something he was able to anchor his mind towards.
Once he reached ten thousand he could feel his mana constantly leaving and re-entering his mind, something he had never felt before, something that he had however been researching once before but simply forgotten, something that was rumoured to be a secret technique of the crusader knight order of ancient times, a fanatical group following the legend of the crusader king, a prophecy that supposedly foretold the end of all times, but still just the technique of an order where the strongest recorded fighter was at the peak of the lord rank, and still just a order so unknown that he only knew about it because his teachers once had them answer a test about it and he had begun to really enjoy researching about that small group, though now he could not remember much about them, aside from that technique he had even been researching for a bit, a technique others had supposedly already figured out, a technique he just wanted to figure out himself without any help from others.
At eleven thousand counts an empty laughter ran through the endless nothing, and he began to tear up, telling himself that joke over and over again, realizing that he had been so ridiculously adamant about figuring out this easy trick himself and failed so many times, and finally understanding just how futile that pathetic desire of his to prove himself had truly been, his eyes changing and twitching without him even noticing as if finally understood the so-called mana sense, a basic step in the education to become a knight as he now finally understood, something he and only ever failed to notice because of the different names, perhaps the reason for why he had never ever tried to tie them together or even learn either of them, instead just opting to try it all on paper over and over again.
Right now, thanks to his new skill, he could feel his surroundings, be it that he was only feeling his own body right now, a battered and cowering body that was simply like a ragdoll with fluttering pieces of cloth of which some parts seemed to have somehow been ripped, but he also knew that this was his only way of really seeing in this endlessly extending darkness.