Chapter Thirteen: illness
Inside a pure white room in the middle of a endless Cosmos, caelum sat in silence, his mind racing rapidly.
"This is new, very much new."
His willpower was something he had used as energy to fuel the quill, he had used it countless times to create and to shape, to manifest whatever he wanted, but that was through the quill.
But now, that same willpower was letting him see himself from the inside. Not figuratively but Literally.
His body was laid bare before him. No, not through a reflection or through some kind of memory.
'It feels like my very consciousness had detached and was navigating through my own flesh, muscle, and bone. It's like i am inspecting a work of art.'
Caelum wasn't sure if he wanted to see everything. But of course his curiosity outweighed his fear.
"Alright… let's start from the top."
With just a thought, His willpower flowed upward, drifting like an unseen mist through his skull. It didn't take long before he saw his brain.
"Hmm? It looks just like the ones in anatomy books." Twisting folds of gray and white matter, pulsing with activity. Thin veins snaked through the surface, feeding it oxygen-rich blood, keeping everything running smoothly.
His willpower moved closer, allowing him to see deeper into his brain, neurons fired like tiny bolts of lightning, synapses connected, electrical signals danced in constant motion.
He stared, very much entranced. "So this is what thinking looks like? It's so surreal!"
'The sheer complexity is wimd, this delicate balance, with just one misstep, and the entire thing could break. But still, it functioned so perfectly.' Caelum looked through his own structure, he was thrilled beyond words.
"Nothing seemed wrong, with no abnormalities at all? So...you mean I'm not a mad man? Haha." Caelum's laughter escaped his throat when found no defects inside his brain.
"I was sure I'll see some parts not working properly~" of course that was a joke, but Caelum still found it amusing to see how his own body worked.
"My brain isn't broken. That's probably good, time to go on to the next one."
Moving further down, his willpower traced the structure of his muscles.
At first glance, they were… average. Not too weak, not too strong. His bones, on the other hand looked extra sturdy.
"This is probably due to the daily plates of chicken I used to eat as a kid? Maybe, meh."
"Nothing out of the ordinary. It made him feel betrayed.
"I was dying, wasn't i? So why does my body seems perfectly fine? You can't tell me i will die just because i have an illness in one of the organs!"
What he was seeing was perfectly normal, because the root cause of his illness was in his heart. And Caelum knew it perfectly well.
But he just couldn't accept he was dying due to some illness in one of his organs, even if that organ was his heart.
As he continued to explore his own body, his willpower soon reached his heart.
As soon as his willpower reached and spread across his heart, he could see it properly.
It was beating rhythmically, like a drum that never halts.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
He wasn't just hearing it like a normal human would, His consciousness was inside it.
"Alright… don't panic. Just take a look." His willpower zoomed in, Closer and Closer. Soon his body tensed.
What he saw was a dark mass. No, not just a mass.
Something that looked like a plastic in a body made of flesh and blood, that thing wasn't supposed to be there.
It clung to the walls of his heart, spread like ink seeping through fabric. Even though he had only seen it through pictures before, he knew very well.
"This… this is my illness." The thing that was killing him. It looked unnatural, It wasn't a tumor, it wasn't a wound. It was just something else.
His willpower moved closer, peeling back layers, analyzing every detail.
The dark mass pulsated,as if it were alive. Tiny veins extended outward, leeching onto his heart like parasites.
"This isn't just affecting my heart, it....it is spreading?"
"It looks like it's burrowing deeper and..." Caelum felt like he could cry at any moment from how worse it looked from his view.
"My body isn't even fighting it somehow." No immune response, It was like his body had accepted it.
"What if this… isn't a natural or man-made disease?"
His doctors called it a rare condition. Something they couldn't cure. But now, looking at it up close, Caelum felt uneasy.
This wasn't natural.
"What the hell are you?"
His willpower pushed forward, trying to interact with it.
But when he did, a sharp, searing pain exploded in his chest, ripping through his nerves.
Caelum gasped, his vision blurred as a wave of agony crashed over him.
He pulled back without a second thought, severing the connection.
His body lurched forward, and he found himself back in the white room, gasping for breath.
His hands were trembling as his heart was pounding. Sweat dripped down his face.
"That reaction."
"Did it react to outside interference?."
His body wasn't rejecting it, on the contrary It was protecting it. Like it were something that was meant to be there.
That terrified him to his core, now Caelum really didn't know what he was dealing with.
------
After abruptly standing up, caelum paced back and forth in the white room.
The emptiness around him wasn't suffocating, even though it was an endless void enclosed by pristine walls, because his mind was far more cluttered than this blank canvas of a space.
His heart was still racing from what he had seen earlier; a writhing black mass nestled within his own heart. The illness he had accepted as an inevitable death sentence now felt more tangible. "Ugh, before it had been nothing but a vague feeling of a looming shadow over my life, but now."
After peering inside himself, caelum found out it had a much stable form. Giving off a presence that refused to let go.
He pressed a hand against his chest, he could somehow feel it. The sickness festering inside, hidden beneath layers of flesh and bone was horrifying.
"Okay… let's not spiral," he forced himself to refocus. "Thinking about it over and over won't change anything."
He tried to push away the heavy thoughts. "I have come this far because of the quill. It is an absurd power that let's me manifest objects out of nothing," Caelum looked around the white room. "And even build spaces from nothing."
"If i have been able to see my own disease with my willpower, then there had to be a way to interact with it right? If there is..Maybe there is a way to even erase it through the quill."
'But where do i even start?' caelum tried to calm himself as he kept thinking.
His pacing stopped, he turned his gaze toward the featureless room, the faint glow of distant stars visible was through the two windows he had drawn into the walls earlier.
Unlike the city-life, the silent Cosmos was unsettling. There was no wind or rustling of leaves. It was just him alone, in a world that had yet to be built.
He rolled his shoulders, cracking his neck. "Standing around like this isn't going to help. I need a plan."
His eyes moved toward the quill, resting on the smooth floor where he had left it. With a decisive motion, he stepped forward, bent down, and picked it up. When his fingers wrapped around its familiar form, a sense of reassurance washed over him.
'If I could make an entire space from nothing, if could make an entire cosmos… then I could damn well figure out a way forward.' with a resolve caelum took a deep breath and raised the quill.
With a careful stroke, he poured his willpower into creation. The ink shimmered in the air, forming the rough outline of a long, solid table in the center of the room. It was a bronze, sturdy, and wide enough table to serve as his personal workstation.
It materialized easily, compared to before, his willpower felt leagues above what it used to be.
He tapped the surface of the newly formed table, nodding in satisfaction. "First thing's first, I need a place to actually work."
He pulled out a chair with another gentle stroke and dropped into it, resting his elbows on the cool surface. His fingers drummed against the bronze as he stared ahead, thinking.
'If I want to make a proper world, I need a well thought out structure and some Rules.'
His mind flew toward the way the real world functioned; the delicate balance of ecosystems, the forces of gravity and energy, the movements of celestial bodies. But that level of complexity was way beyond his abilities. If he tried to replicate something as intricate as an actual solar system, he would probably drop dead from willpower exhaustion before he even got past the first planet.
'I'll die before I can even finish a single star.' he thought, laughing at his own limitations.
"But then again… why did i have to follow normal logic?"
"I don't." He tapped his quill against the table before dragging it across the air again, forming two new objects. A thick, leather-bound book and a pen. Both materialized instantly, dropping onto the table. Putting the quill aside, he picked up the book and flipped through the crisp blank pages, nodding.
"I should write everything down first. Then go through trial and error."
The first step was clear; he needed a foundation for this world. Something workable, that wouldn't collapse under its own weight.
He tapped the pen against the page, then wrote his first words:
"Objective: To create a self-sustaining world that can be expanded upon."
He tappext his chin. 'If I can create a world where the rules work in my favor, I might even find a way to remove that black mass clinging to my heart.'
"Does It seem like a ridiculous thought? Naa maybe it doesn't after all i have done."
He leaned forward, scribbling more notes.
"A proper world needs a stable environment, A self-sustaining world needs a natural energy source."
'The space around me is empty, meaning time doesn't even exist yet.'
"Time… how do I even create time?"
That last point made him think, twirling the pen between his fingers. He couldn't make something as conceptual as time from thin air.
"But i do need time for a world to work properly" The classroom he made before had been static. When he stepped inside, it was like stepping into a frozen moment. He could interact with it, walk around, change things, but time itself wasn't moving.
He set the pen down and leaned back, staring at the ceiling.
"I guess the first thing I should do is establish the world's laws. What works? What doesn't? What can I skip?"
he thought of something, chuckling "If I don't have to deal with physics the way real-world scientists do, I might as well abuse that."
With renewed determination, he grabbed the pen and kept writing.
"First point: Gravity should be on the same level as earth."
"Secondly: Matter should be easily manipulated by me."
" Most importantly: Energy sources should be renewable and self-replenishing."
The more he wrote, the clearer his vision became.
"This is doable," he mumbled, flipping to a fresh page.
Next, he needed to decide how to actually build. If he wanted to start with something simple, a basic landmass would be the best place to begin.
'A floating island, maybe? Or should i just create a blank landscape first, like a foundation for an entire planet?'
His thoughts raced, ideas clashed against each other as he mapped out different possibilities.
'Should i try to create water first? Air? Light? If i just defined an environment without a functioning atmosphere, would it even be livable for other creatures?'
His foot tapped impatiently against the floor. Too many possibilities and so are too many unknowns.
"Alright, I need to test small-scale first." It was the same method he had used with food, after all. Start with the basics, then refine as he learned.
He flipped to a blank page and wrote:
"Phase One: Creating a stable landmass."
If he could make this work, if he could build something with structure and function… then maybe, just maybe, he will find the answer he was looking for.
Maybe he could save himself, with that thought, he picked up the quill again, ready to get onto the first phase.