Lex stood before his old mirror, struggling to tie his worn tie. His reflection was haggard, his eyes shadowed and red-rimmed. "Today is the day," he thought. The words hung heavily in the silence of the room.
He was going to the cemetery to bury Ms. Mlinda, the matron of the orphanage who had been like a mother to him. Her death three days ago from old age had left a void in his life.
She had been a constant presence for as long as he could remember. Her nurturing spirit had guided him through every academic and financial stumble, all the way to a university he never thought he would attend.
For two days, that void had been a physical ache in his chest, leaving him able to do little but sit in silence. Now, he and a few others from the orphanage would give her the small, dignified funeral she deserved.
Lex scooped up the remote from the couch, muting the television and cutting off the news anchor mid-sentence about the rising earthquake death toll.
He shrugged on his old brown coat, the fabric of which was worn soft at the elbows.
The door to his modest apartment creaked shut behind him. Minutes later, he was at the roadside, hailing a taxi. He was unaware that the ground beneath his feet was already shifting.
"City cemetery, please," he said, his voice thick with a sadness he didn't try to hide.
As the car navigated the bustling streets, Lex gazed out the window, watching the city move past him in a colorful blur. He hoped she knew his pride and gratitude. He hoped she could feel it, even now.
As they approached the cemetery, the ground began to shake. A violent tremor seized the road, hurling the taxi across the lane.
"What's happening?!" Lex shouted. His grief vanished, replaced by raw panic as he gripped the front seat.
The old driver panicked, his eyes wide as he wrestled the steering wheel. But it was useless. The road erupted, a web of fissures splitting the asphalt apart. The taxi veered wildly and plowed into the grille of a massive truck.
The world dissolved into a deafening roar of collapsing metal and shattering glass. The force of the impact hurled him forward. For a moment, he was weightless.
Then the world became a solid mass of agony as he slammed against the back of the driver's seat. The front of the taxi crumpled like paper around him.
A searing pain exploded through his chest and limbs. Every bone felt crushed, every nerve set on fire.
The chaos around him faded, replaced by a high-pitched ringing in his ears. Through it, he could faintly hear desperate screams and the continuous, sickening crunch of compacting metal.
Warm, sticky blood trickled down his forehead, pooling in his eyebrows before dripping into his eyes. His vision swam, and the world fractured into smears of color and twisted shapes.
He blinked against the red haze, but it was no use. With each rapid, shallow breath, a fresh stab of pain shot through his ribs, warning him that his lungs were failing.
He tried to drag himself out, but his body refused to obey him. His arms felt like lead, and his legs were numb and unresponsive. Panic, cold and final, clawed at the edges of his mind. He choked it down, forcing himself to focus.
"Don't fall asleep," he muttered through gritted teeth, his voice barely audible over the chaos. "Stay awake! Stay awake!" These words became a mantra, a lifeline against the darkness that was pulling him under.
He clung to the family he had always dreamed of: a kind wife, bright-eyed children, and a home filled with laughter. He wanted that more than anything.
He wanted to give his future family the love and security he had never known and shield them from the loneliness that had haunted his life.
But dreams were just dreams.
Overwhelming pain struck in waves, pulling him deeper into a cold, unforgiving embrace. His vision darkened at the edges, and the world shrank to a narrow tunnel of fading light.
The screams around him grew muffled and distant, as if he were sinking underwater. His eyelids grew heavy, and no amount of willpower could open them.
The last thing he felt was warm blood pooling beneath him, and the last thing he heard was the faint sound of rushing footsteps. Then, his world collapsed into darkness.
When he opened his eyes, he was no longer in the wreckage. The chaos, the pain, the screams, it was all gone. He floated weightlessly, as if the world had simply let him go.
Below, the scene unfolded with silent, terrible clarity. Men worked to remove the old driver's remains from the crushed taxi. His own mangled, motionless body lay amid the shattered glass and spreading crimson puddles.
The sight should have horrified him, but it felt distant. It was like watching a play after the audience has left.
A profound calm enveloped him, as if a surgeon had excised every emotion; fear, grief, and regret, leaving only a sterile, hollow silence. He felt nothing. Not terror, not sadness, not even relief. Just a vast, echoing nothingness.
Before he could fully form the thought, "Is that me?" a force seized him. It was invisible and absolute, latching onto something deep within his core and pulling him backward, away from the scene.
He tried to resist, but his will was like a whisper of smoke against a storm. The world below dissolved not into blackness but into a true void—an absence of everything, including light and sound.
He was moving, no, accelerating. Was he falling upward? Plummeting down? The concepts had no meaning here. There was no direction, only the rush.
The calm he had clung to began to crack, and dread slowly seeped in.
"Where am I going?" This thought sparked a single point of light in the infinite darkness. Is this the transition? The afterlife?
A colder, more terrifying whisper followed. "What if there is no 'where'? What if this...this nothingness...is all there is?"
The void offered no answer, only a silence that pressed in on all sides.
Against that immense, silent pressure, a final, desperate hope flickered within him.
"Another life. Please. Even as an insect. Anything but this eternal, solitary silence."
••••
After what felt like an eternity adrift in oppressive darkness, Lex opened his eyes.
He braced for the darkness, but it was gone. In its place, an unparalleled brilliance greeted him. He was floating above a vast, still ocean that defied logic.
Its surface was not water but a dark, flawless mirror. Within its depths, the universe itself swam. Nebulae bloomed like watercolor flowers, and miniature galaxies spun, their cores of a billion stars glittering like scattered diamonds.
He looked up, but the "sky" above was empty and starless. All the light came from below: a soft, ethereal radiance that illuminated this impossible place with the glow of a perpetual dawn.
"Is this the afterlife? Perhaps heaven?" The thought brought a wave of pure relief, washing away the void's lingering chill.
This was not nothingness; this was everything.
He felt himself descend, his feet gently touching the surface of the cosmic sea. It was cool and solid, like a pane of glass, supporting his weight without a ripple.
"It's solid, or I'm not," he murmured. The wonder in his voice echoed in the profound silence.
He stared at his hand, which was now glowing with a faint internal light. He was translucent, an astral form. Bending down, he saw his ghostly outline superimposed over a swirling constellation in the star-strewn water.
There was no body below, only a soul.
The cool sensation offered only fleeting comfort. Driven by a curiosity that finally overcame his fear, he reached down and touched the starry surface with a single finger.
The moment he did, all the information in the universe poured into him.
It was not a flood, but a violation. A billion years of cosmic history, the scream of first star's birth, and the silent, crushing weight of a black hole's core were crammed into the fragile vessel of his consciousness.
He didn't just see it; he was it. He cried out, his soul flickering under the impossible weight. When he tried to pull away, the ocean seized him with absolute force and dragged him into its depths.
Lex thrashed, a frantic speck against the cosmic tide, but he couldn't escape. The deeper he sank, the more forbidden knowledge he absorbed—things no human was meant to know.
He learned the laws of reality not as equations, as he had in his previous life, but as its underlying architecture. He felt gravity as a conversation between masses; a push and pull. He perceived time not just as a river but as a dimension he could theoretically walk across.
This knowledge, which no mortal mind could contain, unraveled his soul. His sense of self frayed under the strain. The memory of his human life and emotions began to dissolve like sugar in water. He was becoming a blank slate, scoured clean by the infinite truth of the ocean.
Yet his willpower, tempered in the dark void, persisted. In a final, persistent struggle, he managed to retain a few fragments of his humanity.
His soul-body began to dissolve, not like mist but like a drop of ink in the sea, bleeding into the boundless cosmic whole.
Then, from that perfect unity, a new consciousness formed.
His new consciousness drank deeply from the shimmering waters of the cosmic sea. The process felt like a poke with a pin, yet it was over in an instant.
When finished, he rose from the ocean's depths and effortlessly hovered above its star-speckled surface.
He looked down at his new form, his mind struggling to comprehend it. His reflection revealed a body of translucent, living crystal, with swirling energies pulsing within like captive galaxies.
Stars and Origin Energy sparkled in his veins, illuminating him with an otherworldly glow and his hair flowed smoothly like starlight rivers from his head.
He could no longer identify as human. He had transcended; he was now a being of the cosmos itself. The bonds of mortality were not broken, merely submerged and rendered irrelevant by the sublime truth of his new existence.
As his awareness expanded, he realized the truth of this place. This was not heaven. He floated at the heart of a nascent universe; infinite in potential, yet silent and empty except for the shimmering sea from which he was reborn; the Origin Ocean.
"I am reborn... as the will of a newborn universe," he murmured. The words, spoken with an authority not entirely his own, reverberated through the expanse.
He should have felt awe. He should have felt the joy of a god beholding his domain.
Instead, he felt only profound, crushing loneliness and the weight of cosmic responsibility. The last stubborn fragments of Lex, the orphan from Earth, asserted themselves one final time.
Then, he saw them.
His crystalline eyes, now capable of perceiving the substrate of reality, focused on what had been invisible moments before.
The fundamental laws of existence lay bare before him, not as concepts, but as tangible forms. They were an infinite tapestry of infinitesimally small, glowing threads.
He reached out, a single translucent finger hovering near a thread pulsing with the deep, binding force of gravity. Another shimmered with the relentless, one-way flow of time.
"These are the chains that bind it all together," he observed, tracing the threads of motion, energy, and space itself with his gaze.
He narrowed his eyes, the mirage of galaxies within them swirling with intense focus.
"So delicate… yet they bear the weight of all that is and ever will be."
A new thought, cold and clear, surfaced. "Perhaps they are not delicate. Perhaps I have simply become the force that can grasp them."
His new senses continued to unfold, allowing him to hear the hum of quantum foam and the whisper of cosmic winds—the voice of spacetime itself.
These were not mere sounds, but rather, currents of pure insight into the laws of the universe.
With this transformation, the last limits of his mind shattered. He could now think in layers and dimensions, in ways his former self could never have imagined. He could contemplate trillions upon trillions of possibilities all at once.
This was both terrifying and exhilarating.
With this knowledge came an awareness of the raw power thrumming within him. He knew with absolute certainty that he could gather nebulae like sand, ignite stars with a thought, and spin galaxies into being.
But wielding such power required a currency: Origin Energy, a distilled energy from the vast Origin Ocean from which he was reborn.
Driven by this nascent impulse, he willed himself away from the Origin Ocean. He emerged into the true void of the universe; an endless, starless expanse, the blank page of the newborn cosmos.
His form, a silhouette of contained mirage galaxies, cast the first light into the primordial darkness.
He drifted through the emptiness, a solitary light traversing silent, nameless regions. Yet no matter how far he moved, the silence followed. It was a profound, absolute stillness that no cosmic wind could stir. The emptiness was no longer just around him; it was seeping into his core.
Still, he pressed on. For eons that would have overwhelmed a mortal mind, he wandered. He became a cartographer of nothingness, mapping the infinite darkness.
But the deeper he ventured, the more a hollow ache echoed within him, a void that the vastness of creation could not fill.
Time, a dimension he now understood, wore on the ghost of his soul. After hundred of thousands of years, the truth became inescapable.
He longed for connection. For a voice that was not his own. He longed for a consciousness to share the universe with him and break the eternal, crushing monotony.
He was a god forged from a man. He had fought to cling to memories of warmth and community. Now, however, he saw that struggle not as a strength, but as his greatest folly.
This realization came with an unbearable truth: Even a god can be crippled by loneliness.
As he gazed into the perpetual night of his domain, a profound sense of isolation washed over him. It was a tidal wave of despair battering his still-mortal heart—a relic trapped in a celestial body aching in ways it was never meant to.
This nascent universe was a canvas of infinite potential, shimmering with the promise of nebulae and galaxies. But to Lex, it was a desolate, silent gallery. Its beauty was meaningless without someone to share it with.
Driven by a need that outweighed cosmic prudence, he made his choice. He would not merely nurture existence; he would populate it. He would create companions, beings to share the burden of eternity and fill the silence with voices other than his own.
With a resolve that sent ripples through the fabric of spacetime, he turned his gaze back toward the Origin Ocean, the wellspring of his own being.