Aegon was arguing with his neighbor about a misplaced trash bin(an argument he was losing cause he despised human interaction) when the sky, without warning, turned a blinding, impossible white.
The strategic nuclear device, a Mark 79 warhead, detonated directly above his suburban roof at an altitude of 600 meters.
In a microsecond, a fireball hotter than the sun's core vaporized his house, his body, and the argument into subatomic particles.
It was the beginning of the nuclear war that would soon wipe out humanity.
Aegon died.
His consciousness didn't fade though and was instead violently unspooled, caught in the unimaginable energy of the fission blast.
The sheer force of the explosion ripped a tiny tear in the fabric of spacetime itself.
Aegon's disembodied essence was flung through this microscopic rift, not into nothingness, but into the raging chaos of the early universe of a world he had only read comics about and watched movies of.
The Marvel Universe. Home to the planet that would soon come to be known as Earth-616 in the infinite multiverse.
Aegon hadn't realized that yet.
His soul floated while gas and dust coalesced around him. However, he couldn't see yet. He had no ears, and no brain, but somehow he heard a Ding resound in his head.
[Daily Sign-in: Day 1! Reward: Anodite Physiology]
A wave of pure, raw mana, the fundamental energy of magic, flooded his disembodied essence, forging for him a new form of brilliant, pink energy.
"Where... am I?" The thought formed not in a skull, but within the core of his new crystalline being, his voice a travelling even in the void.
His last memory was the blinding white light and the heat, a sensation he could still feel echoing in his energy signature.
"The bomb... was that it?" he wondered, his consciousness struggling to process an existence after death.
He tried to remember his neighbor's face, but the memory was as scattered as the stardust swirling around him.
Letting go, he focused on the incredible power thrumming within him, a connection to every spark of energy and matter around him.
He instinctively reached out with this new sense and felt the very fabric of spacetime bend slightly at his will.
"What am I?" he questioned, fascinated, observing his own form, a being of pure light and energy, no longer flesh and blood.
He attempted to "move," and his consciousness zipped past coalescing dust, his speed limited perhaps only by his thought.
The ding echoed in his memory, that strange announcement of a "Daily Sign-in" and a reward he had only heard of in fictional stories.
"Anodite..." The word meant something to him, an alien species from a cartoon he once watched, a race of powerful energy beings. "Weren't they supposed to be only women? Or maybe... that might have been a misconception. Oh yeah... Verdona did imply that her male children could awaken it, but just weren't lucky enough."
He realized with dawning awe that he was no longer human, but something... more.
Testing his limits, he focused on a nearby cloud of hydrogen and found he could manipulate its particles, exciting them into a soft glow.
The power was immense, intoxicating, and terrifyingly intuitive, as if he had always known how to use it.
He continued to float, a sentient star in the making, adrift in the silent, beautiful, and empty cosmos.
"Is this... space? Real space?" he thought, watching a star go supernova in a spectacular, silent explosion of color.
He felt the shockwave of energy from the dying star, and it nourished him, feeding his Anodite form. He wasn't even pushed back though, because as Anodite he was impervious to physical damage if he willed it. The shockwave that could throw him back simply passed harmlessly through him.
He had many questions but there were no answers to be found in the void, only the endless, cold vacuum and the nascent lights of creation.
Despite his lifelong aversion to human interaction, a cold, unfamiliar worry began to gnaw at his core.
He was lost in an incomprehensible vastness, with no concept of where, or even when, his home planet was.
The terrifying thought occurred that Earth might not even exist yet in this timeline, leaving him stranded millennia before perhaps the first bacteria even came into existence.
He was biologically immortal, a fact that should have been comforting but now felt like a potential curse of eternal solitude.
In a moment of stark honesty, he admitted to himself, "I hated the small talk, but that was one of the fun parts of life. Doing things I didn't want to."
He began to spiral, imagining worst-case scenarios: what if Earth was on the other side of a galaxy he couldn't even find?
The sheer scale of the cosmos was overwhelming; a million light years might as well be an infinite distance to a single, lonely being.
A dark thought surfaced: would the endless eons eventually drive him to try and end his own life, despite his immortality?
His existential dread was compounded by a deep, internal conflict over his new form.
Objectively, becoming an Anodite was the coolest thing that could have happened; the power at his fingertips was literally amazing.
He felt a thrill as he willed a nebula's gases to swirl into intricate, beautiful patterns just for his own amusement.
Yet, a part of him was deeply repulsed; he was no longer Aegon, the man, but Aegon, the... thing, the energy construct.
It only took a human as little as 45 minutes of utter silence to start experiencing disorientation, anxiety, and auditory hallucinations. It was the same with Aegon.
The humanity he had often scorned was now a ghost he mourned. The familiar skin he had had been stripped off.
He logically knew his perspective might change with time, a few century-spanning adjustment period was surely needed.
But for now, in this moment of terrifying genesis, he felt like a monster.
He would soon be a paradox: a misanthrope who desperately longed for a single, familiar human voice.
His immense power meant nothing because he had no one to share it with, no one to even witness it.
He was the ultimate spectator, cursed to watch the universe's greatest wonders unfold in utter silence.
The freedom of space now felt like a prison, its walls made of infinite darkness and its bars made of distant, unreachable stars.
"Why am I being so pathetic?" he suddenly said. "Since I can breathe in space I should just keep travelling. From one star to another, surely I would find a planet with life, there's a great possibility that humanity was not alone. Hell, we even considered that a few celestial body in solar system had great possibility of housing life. There no way in hell that there isn't at least a million worlds with life in the universe!"
And hence started his great journey through the cosmos.