Today was supposed to be just another day.
Wake up. Dress in my one decent shirt. Head to yet another interview. Smile. Pretend I'm not drowning in anxiety.
And yet, like every time before…
"We're sorry, but we're looking for candidates with a more… consistent academic background."
Polite words. Fake smiles. The kind that stab sharper than an outright insult.
All because of that damn gap in my records — one year of my life where everything fell apart, and the world decided never to let me forget it.
The office door closed behind me. The city's noise rushed back in — honking cars, chatter, street vendors calling out their prices — but I couldn't hear any of it. My feet moved on their own. No destination. No plan.
The sky was overcast. My mood, worse.
I didn't notice how far I'd walked until the clean streets gave way to the older part of town — narrow lanes lined with crooked stalls and vendors shouting over each other.
One of them caught my eye. Not because of the display, but because of a single object sitting at the edge of the table.
A black bead, like one of those you keep as a good luck charm. Luck I desperately needed to find a job in this economy, with all my personal problems weighing me down.
Small enough to roll across my palm. Pitch black. Yet I felt a strange attraction to it. Lately, I had been having weird dreams in which my soul left my body and traveled to a pure void space. Maybe it was stress, I thought, and ignored them.
"How much?" I asked without thinking.
The vendor, an old man with kind eyes, smiled faintly. "For you? The price is whatever you want. This is my last day working. I'm closing my shop. I'm too old now, and my son just got promoted to manager, so I can quit." His smile seemed full of pride for his son's accomplishment.
I checked my wallet and realized the coins and crumpled notes inside were all I had left from months of scraping by.
Ashamed, I hurriedly paid all my money except what I needed for returning to my room, and took the bead in my hand.
It was cold. Not the kind that bit the skin, but the kind that seeped into the marrow. The sensation was strange — the bead was supposed to be wooden, yet it felt like energy coursing through my palm. I didn't know it at the time, but some kind of force from the bead was entering me.
I bought it not only out of superstition but because of the deep, inexplicable attraction I felt from my very core.
The old man packaged it into a small box and handed it to me. I left for my room. Once there, I placed the box near my bed and took a shower, feeling utterly exhausted.
Afterward, I changed into comfortable clothes and slept, too tired even to eat.
In my dream, I was monologuing, as if introducing myself to someone. My name wasn't special, yet it was deeply meaningful to me — given by my grandmother, whom I loved dearly.
My name literally means "universe" in my mother tongue. Quite an odd name, if I say so myself. Who names their grandson after a universe?
I used to be an atheist. At least, I thought I was. But events in my life had pushed me toward belief in the supernatural and superstitions — which is why I bought the bead.
I had no one to love in my life due to misfortunes for which I blamed no one but myself.
I wasn't strictly introverted or extroverted — a total contradiction, really. I did things for fun, without fear of consequences, and learned from the costs.
If I had to describe my personality, I'm like a certain pink-haired lady — Fujiwara — from Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Total chaos. I like to meddle in others' lives, even though I know it's wrong. It's just too much fun.
Anyway, back to my dream. Suddenly, I found myself in a void of colors I couldn't describe, swirling energies, and at the center, a core that felt both intangible and tangible. When I reached for it, something inside me broke.
An energy transformed my very existence. I woke up with a warning — a sense that my existence itself was alerting me.
"Ofofof," I muttered, taking a deep breath, feeling caught between dream and nightmare. I calmed myself, but an instinct told me I had no time. I had to prepare for something, though I had no idea what.
I reached for the box near my bed and took the bead in my hand. I didn't know why — it felt almost instinctive. I didn't realize then that the bead was drawing energy from me, activating something latent within.
The moment my fingers closed around it, something shifted.
A chime rang in my soul.
[Extracting the essence of "Core of the Primordial World Tree (dying)"]
Then—power poured in. Not fire or lightning. More like existence itself. I had never felt anything like it. My eyes could see threads connecting everything.
The bead shattered into motes of light, flowing into me. The ground split, the air folded in on itself, and an invisible force dragged me forward, like a small black hole. I wasn't falling — I was being rewoven somewhere else, or into something that seemed to reject me for being unable to exist in that universe.
How do I know this? I don't. I can't explain it. It was a subconscious foreknowledge — a certainty in my mind whose source I couldn't trace.
Light and shadow collided, swallowing me whole, leaving no trace of my previous existence.
This… is the beginning.