The light vanished.
In its place came darkness — thick, infinite, aware.
Dr. Aryan Ved floated in nothingness. Not falling. Not rising. Just existing. Alone with only one truth:
The universe no longer existed. And it was now his responsibility to bring it back — piece by piece, law by law.
But where to begin?
> "Creation," he thought, "is not an act of power. It is a sequence of logic."
He opened his mind — not eyes, for there was no light — and whispered to the void:
> "To create anything, I need mass. The most basic unit of existence."
He paused.
> "But mass alone is meaningless. It must exist in a framework. For that, I need time."
He envisioned time as a slow drip — tickless, formless, but essential.
> "Time will take... months. Maybe years. I won't count days. I won't age. In this state, I must become a silent observer — a field of consciousness stretched across the void."
And so he did.
Aryan allowed himself to dissolve — no longer in human form, but as a fabric, sensing shifts, measuring balances. Slowly, gravity awakened — not by command, but by condition.
> "Mass attracts. Gravity emerges," he thought. "That's the rule. That's how it always starts."
It took a hundred subjective years for the first stable particles to form — protons, neutrons, the smallest flickers of substance. All held together by invisible threads he had summoned with equations long buried in textbooks.
> "I endure this dark phase as a presence — not visible, not powerful, just present," he whispered.
He watched as subatomic particles began to hum, to vibrate, to cluster.
Still no light. But now — motion. Structure. Potential.
He had taken the first scientific step.
He had given the void a direction.
And as the particles gently danced in the eternal dark, Aryan felt something new echo back from the silence — not chaos, not randomness...
...but **pattern**.
**— End of Chapter 3**