I had no incentive anymore to live.
Words that weren't a supplication for sympathy—just a bare statement of fact, like observing that the sky was blue or that water was wet: My family—gone. My mother, the only person whose love had ever felt like a shield rather than a cage, had given her life in protecting me from a world that seemed determined to crush us. The memory of her most recent smile—fragile, beautiful, and in the face of oblivion—still haunted my waking hours and ambushed me in dreams.
Friends? They were seasonal storms, blowing through my life, causing sound and fury, leaving only the quiet aftermath of forgotten conversations. Names and faces blurred together, meaningless collage of people who saw my surface but never looked underneath the rot. No one ever stayed long enough to matter.
Never had a girlfriend. No such luxury. Love was something I saw from a distance, like an artifact in a museum: interesting, unattainable, and his to never touch. I would see couples walking along the hallways, their easy laughter and casual touches like a language of a country I would never visit.
Life was a quiet storm of silence and survival, each day bleeding into the next in a monotonous grayness that suffocated the soul. Existing, not really living. Waiting, a ghost haunting the hallways of its own life. Flesh and bone machinery programmed for one thing: to withstand. Foolishly still found holding on to the flickering pathetic hope that one day something will change, that the hellish, spiraling drain of this world will finally be escaped. Change is never gentle, though. It comes like lightning strikes a bare tree.
I didn't expect that it would change at that speed.
"Kai, you know you're a genius, right?" said Vincent one afternoon, his voice oily with all that false camaraderie he saved for people from whom he wanted something. He fell into step beside me in the crowded university hallway, invading my senses with that rich cologne he wore. "Why not let me prep with you, maybe a study partner?"
Not even looked him in the eye. My gaze was glued to the cracked linoleum floor. "I don't have time to babysit," I replied coldly. "So don't waste yours. Just f*** off."
"Tch." Vincent frowned, then the easy smile faltered for a moment as well. A flicker of irritation crossed into his handsome face before he smoothed it over. "Fine. At least give me your notes, you bastard."
My lips only formed a humorless twisting smirk. "I don't have any. I don't need any."
Vincent, however, stared dumbly at me, his expression engraved with a comical mixture of both outrage and envy. 'Damn this bastard' he would be thinking, 'A transcendent freak like this just makes the world unbearable.' To Vincent, my intelligence seems effortless; to me, it is desperate.
He stormed away, huffing out a frustrated breath then pulled out a small crumpled slip of paper from his pocket and tossed it toward me. "In case you change your mind, take this."
His voice faded even as his body disappeared into the throng of students. I let the paper flutter to the ground, along with everything else that had lost its purpose. I am not interested in the petty deal he is probably trying to make.
Classes were done. My schedule was empty. And my soul felt heavier than it had ever felt before.
I wandered aimlessly through the college garden: a manicured expanse of brilliant flowers and sculpted hedges that felt alien to my monochrome volume existence. This was another form of escape from the monotony of everyday routine when I saw it… something odd.
A golden light.
It hung soft in the air, pulsing like the gentle heartbeat before me, and was a perfect sphere of impossible warmth, like sunlight captured, condensed, and given shape. It didn't glare, it merely was light-pure and absolute.
My eyes went wide. My breath caught.
I'd read enough manga and web novels, devoured enough stories of other worlds to escape my own, to recognize the trope. Mysterious light. Sudden pull. Grand teleportation into a world of magic and adventure. This is happening; right now, to me?
"Well, maybe this is God's way of apologizing," I muttered, a bitter laugh escaping my lips. "Took Him long enough."
But I am not that naive. This could be a trap, a cruel trick of a dying mind. If it is a trap, there is a very real chance I will die when I touch it; but it wouldn't matter. I am already worse than dead, a hollow, empty shell waiting for the tide to wash it away. A body could still breathe, move, and eat, but a soul broken beyond repair? That is worse than any physical wound.
So without another instant of hesitation, I brought my hand forward and reached for the light.
The pain was instantaneous and absolute.
Whatever it was, it did not burn or shock; it seared. But, it was like a liquid-hot blade piercing into my chest, exploding outward and consuming my entire being. I wanted to scream—not out loud, but I screamed inside my head, each nerve, each cell, each atom of me screamed back in agonizing silence in the form of a chorus of pain. I felt my vision blurring; it seemed as if it was fracturing into a kaleidoscope of blinding white and suffocating black. My lungs caved inwards to form a void that had once inhaled air. My heart battered against the walls of my ribs like a war drum.
"Fantastic. Just my luck. Finally, I get a portal, and its only use is a death sentence."
I felt extinguished inside grace. A choking blanket, buried under ten feet of silence.
Heck, when I opened my eyes again, I had not yet died.
I was… somewhere else.
The world around me glowed with an infinite, unending golden light going in all directions to meet an infinite horizon. There lay not one tree, not a drop of sky, nor twinklings of a sun. Just luminous whiteness, a featureless void—a land of pure light afloat in a sea of serene nothingness. A place both eternal and empty.
And here… I was not solid.
I looked at my hands, and only a translucent, glistening outline was present. My body had turned faint, ghostly, a flickering echo of the form I had once inhabited, barely retaining the shape of whom I once was. My fingers glided through the air like an impression of fog, leaving no trace, not even a shred of warmth.
"What the f***…?" I whispered, my voice trembling and ethereal.
There was an elaborate chair there, almost regal in design, with a velvet upholstery and an obsidian frame, fit for royalty. But trying to sit, my hand slipped right through it, feeling a disturbing numbness cross my spectral form.
I was now a spirit. A specter. A soul unshackled from its worldly life.
A second shadow flickered behind me before I could begin to evoke the sheer impossibility of my situation. I turned, my ghostly form gliding with a weightless ease.
A man stood there—he was tall, elegant, and so impossibly beautiful that he seemed less a human than a statue hewn by god-like hands. He appeared to be human—mostly. The crimson glow of his eyes held an ancient sorrow, so terribly broken that it left suffocating darkness in its wake. A tight mask of calm, inscrutable serenity lined his face, yet grief pounded like an awful force just beneath. He stood there like a sum of thunder without sound in that void.
Then he spoke, smooth and ancient, resonating with a power that seemed to rattle the foundations of this strange fabric of reality.
"Finally," he said, a weary smile barely touching his lips. "I have found a man worthy of changing my fate."
My thoughts froze. "What?"
The man stepped forward, crimson eyes glowing faintly as they swept across my ghostly form. "My name is Ashen. Ashen Crimson. And I know you have many questions. Why you're here. What you are now. What your purpose is."
He paused, smile widening, but not with mirth—rather, the sad yet graceful acceptance of someone who had been waiting centuries for that single moment.
"But before that," he continued, "you need to understand who I am."
I blinked, my phantom heart pounding in my ghostly chest.
Whatever this place was, it was not Earth. Whatever this man was, he was no human.
And what it was going to be was nothing short of a huge change.