The automatic doors of Sunny Day Grocer slid shut behind Tian Aoyao with a tired sigh. The late afternoon sun pressed down in heavy, humid waves that clung to his skin. He shifted the plastic bag of instant noodles and soda in his grip, its crinkling a mundane soundtrack to his equally mundane thoughts.
His mop of black hair, more neglect than style, fell into his eyes as he yawned. The bold Louis Vuitton logo across his red polo shirt had long since faded from too many washes, and his baggy trousers swished against his legs with each step. He was the portrait of an unremarkable youth, thinking only of getting home before the predicted summer storm arrived.
The first crack of thunder was so immense it felt less like sound and more like the sky itself breaking apart. Tian flinched, glancing upward. The once blue sky had become a canvas of bruised purple and black. That escalated quickly, he thought, picking up his pace.
He never saw the lightning bolt.
There was only light. A searing, blinding whiteness that consumed everything. It did not strike the ground nearby. It struck him. There was no pain, only the sensation of being violently unmoored, as if some impossible force had plucked him from the river of existence. The grocery bag vanished. The humid air, the swish of his trousers, the sight of his apartment in the distance all dissolved into a vortex of screaming color and light.
Then, silence.
A deep, crushing silence heavier than sound itself.
Tian Aoyao was floating.
Beneath him stretched a majestic spiral of starlight and dust the Milky Way. Not a photograph in a textbook, but real, breathtaking, terrifying. He saw nebulae blooming in cosmic fire, the glittering arms of galaxies winding into infinity. He tried to gasp but there was no air. He tried to flail but there was no ground to push against. He simply existed, suspended in the void.
"Do not be afraid. The panic is a phantom of your biology. Let it pass."
The voice did not travel through space. It resonated inside his mind, calm, ancient, weighed with a fatigue so deep it felt eternal.
Tian's wide eyes snapped toward the emptiness before him. From the starlight itself, a figure was forming. Humanoid, yet far more. A constellation shaped into the outline of a man, its form shimmering with boundless power. Within the brilliance, Tian saw something else—a web of cracks spreading across its chest, dark and pulsing, leaking tendrils of light like celestial blood.
"W…what? Where is this? Who are you?" Tian's thoughts shaped words that somehow carried in this place.
The figure smiled, sad and gentle, as though recalling a million memories. "You stand in the space between spaces. The canvas upon which reality itself is painted. As for me… I have borne many names. The Architect. The Prime Mover. The Celestial Smith. You may call me the Creator."
Tian's mind reeled. This had to be a dream, a hallucination brought on by the lightning strike.
"It is not a dream, Tian Aoyao," the Creator said, reading the thought as if it were written in the air. "The lightning was only a conduit. A precise method to extract you without spoiling the vessel."
"Extract me? Why me? I was just buying noodles!" His mental voice cracked with panic.
"Precisely why," the Creator replied, dimming slightly as a wave of pain rippled through him. "Across all my creations, through the endless breadth of the cosmos you see below, you, Tian Aoyao of Earth, are the weakest."
The words struck like a verdict, not insult but fact.
"You have no strength beyond the ordinary. No knowledge of the arcane. Your life force flickers like a candle where others burn like suns. By every measure of power, you are insignificant."
Tian's spirit collapsed under the weight of that truth.
"But," the Creator's voice softened, "because you are untouched by power, your soul remains pure. Uncorrupted. It is a blank page, flawless, capable of holding what I must entrust."
"Entrust? What could you possibly give me?" Tian asked, his fear tangled with disbelief.
"Everything," said the Creator. "I am dying. Struck by a primordial entropy that seeks to unravel all that exists. My wounds are fatal. I will not see the next cycle of creation."
His gaze turned to the galaxy below, light dimming further. "I do not have the time to search for a hero or sage. My heartbeats are numbered. So I choose the only one I can. The weakest, and therefore the most adaptable. The one with the purest soul, and therefore the least likely to be devoured by the power I must bestow."
The truth crashed down on Tian like a collapsing star. He was not being asked. He was being chosen.
"I will make you the next god, Tian Aoyao. My cultivation, my essence, the mantle of Creator all shall be yours. If the legacy is not passed on, then every star, every world, every life will fade into nothing."
The Creator extended a hand of pure light. The cracks across his body flared violently, spilling radiance into the void.
"I have watched over this galaxy, my most beloved creation, since its first star ignited. Now I entrust it to you its safety, its future, its very will."
Tian wanted to scream, to refuse, to wake up. Yet as the luminous hand neared his forehead, existence itself seemed to collapse into that single moment.
"Do not seek to understand now," the Creator's fading voice echoed, dissolving into a torrent of light. "Only survive."
The light touched him.
And Tian Aoyao, the boy in a faded red polo shirt, knew no more.