How did I get here?
A man floated in an infinite black void.
First came denial: "No… this can't be happening." I had just been walking… I didn't die, wasn't hit by a truck, nothing. Just a blink, and when I realized it, everything around me had vanished.
Then came anger. Why me? Why now? But there was no ground, no air, no sound. Only me, lost in that absolute void.
Next came bargaining: "If I survive this… if I get out, I swear I'll do… anything." But the void did not respond.
Depression arrived swiftly. Too much time had passed, and I couldn't measure any of it. Every second dissolved into nothingness, and my own scream sounded lost, hoarse, and broken: "Get me out of here!"
Nothing made sense. How was I still breathing? Where did the light come from that let me see as if it were natural? Every detail of the void reminded me that I belonged nowhere, that everything around me was only absence.
The silence was suffocating, so absolute it almost hurt. My body seemed to exist only by inertia, my mind spinning in circles, trying to find some reference, some point to prove reality still existed. But there was no ground, no air, no time. Only me… and the void.
Finally, a faint acceptance began to emerge. There was no relief, only a silent acknowledgment: I was alone, completely alone, and I needed to find a way to stay sane — or at least awake — in this endless abyss.
So, I began to count.
"345,046,590…""345,046,591…""345,046,592 minutes…" — each number etched into me like a wound. That meant 239,616 days, or 656 years.
"Get me out of here!" — my voice sounded hoarse, shattered.
Soon, I faced my first bout of madness. My thoughts scrambled, dissolving into the void that spread inside me. But the worst wasn't the dark silence consuming me — it was the voices.
"Just die… end it."
I lost myself in the dissonant symphony of voices. I could no longer distinguish my own from the others — everything became formless chaos.
And thus, I experienced my first madness. When I woke, my body was covered in self-inflicted wounds… and my left eye was gone forever.
— "This hurts…"
But that was only the beginning of an infernal cycle.
"What kind of evil did I commit to deserve this?"
I went mad and regained sanity twice… but I never stopped counting. Never.
The numbers became my only anchor, the sole way to cling to time.At first, I believed I would be rescued after a thousand years. Then, I waited for ten thousand.Now… I clung to the hope that, at the mark of one hundred thousand years, someone would still come to take me out.
But when the hundred-thousand-year mark came and no one appeared, I sank into madness again.
I woke after another hundred thousand years. My hope now rested on the one-million-year mark.
To avoid completely losing myself in the abyss, I built worlds within my own mind. I forced delusions, invented landscapes, created entire civilizations — anything to make this suffocating eternity slightly more bearable.
But as years passed, even my most precious memories began to fade. I no longer remembered my own name, what I was, or what the world looked like. And so… I entered another cycle of madness.
This time, I woke after two hundred thousand years.
I could no longer feel anything; the pain that once kept me tethered to reality had become nothing more than a constant background noise. Even being sane was no different from being mad.
When the one-million-year mark came and nothing had changed, I still drifted in the void… and finally, I went mad — this time, by my own choice.
"I've lost count…"
After plunging fully into madness, I lost count. The number that anchored me dissolved, and with it, any sense of time. It was as if eternity itself had swallowed me.
Without counting, there was no hope left. That should have driven me to despair, but it no longer affected me. I was… empty.
Looking at my immortal body, I realized how much I had destroyed myself: devoured my leg, ripped off an arm, disfigured my face, tore my vocal cords, split open my skull… All in search of ending that endless suffering. But no matter how deeply I hurt myself… the sweet relief of death never came. It never embraced me.
I could not sleep. I could not die. All that remained was thinking. Thinking until I went mad… and then, inevitably, over infinite time, sanity returned. Always returned. Bringing with it the crushing weight of despair.
During one of my bouts of madness, everything went dark again. When I awoke, I saw something floating beside me. It was my own body… without a head.
Looking at that disfigured piece of flesh drifting aimlessly, all I could think was:
"How did I have the strength to rip off my own head?"
Of all that was taken from me, the only emotion that remained, fragile as it was, was curiosity.
Now, I was just a head floating in this infinite void. Not that it changed anything.
Time had no shape; I had long abandoned any way to measure it. All that remained was thought. Philosophy, mathematics, science… anything my mind could salvage, even vague memories, meaningless fragments.
What I valued most were memories of manga and novels. They gave me mysteries to ponder — something rare in eternity.
After another cycle of madness — which gradually became rarer — I began to wonder: had I learned that going mad was useless? Or was I already completely insane?
"I bet on the second option. Perhaps madness is a way of sleeping?"
That's when I noticed: my jaw was gone. Where did it go? No idea. But if my jaw could vanish, so could my head.
"Now that's new," I thought with excitement — the rarest thing in the void: change.
Soon, I lost sight in my only functional eye — it had vanished too. Losing vision didn't matter; after all, what was there to see but the void? Even my body, which had once remained in front of me, was now out of sight. — A pity, I thought.
"Maybe this is how I'll die? What would you call this… devoured by the void? Maybe I fell into the void…"
I didn't really care. All that remained was curiosity and fragments of dead emotions.
The cycles of madness, once frequent, had stopped. Perhaps because I no longer needed to sleep — death was approaching?
Until I felt the place where my consciousness resided dissolve. A soft, welcoming void took its place, bringing a sensation I thought I had replaced long ago with madness… sleep. True sleep.
It was unlike any rest I had ever known. No nightmares, no sounds, no rush of time. Only absolute stillness, a complete surrender to nothingness. For the first time, after eons of torment, I felt whole — or perhaps, finally, truly free.
There was no longer a body, pain, or clock. Only a silent, infinite flow where exhaustion became forgetting, and forgetting became relief. And deep down, an almost childish curiosity arose: if all that I am disappeared, what would remain of me? Perhaps nothing. But, for the first time, nothing felt so good.
And so, immersed in the best sleep of my life, I found myself in this state upon awakening.
"What is this?" I thought, contemplating the black space before me… not as if looking at something external. Looking seemed the wrong word — perhaps it was more like feeling?
Had this space assimilated me, or had I assimilated the space? I didn't know. There were no clear answers. Something in me understood, even without understanding. And, for some reason, it didn't matter.
My perception filled all the space… or perhaps my perception was the space. I wasn't sure. Still, I began to notice tiny particles — minuscule sparks of light occasionally crossing the void. They were so simple, so insignificant, like a lost spark in infinity.
For anyone else, it would have been just a detail. But to me, it meant something more: the existence of something beyond myself. Something that moved, that existed outside my mind. An almost imperceptible event — a mystery.
"What are these particles?" I asked myself.
They were rare, but with infinite time on my side, I managed to see one cross the void of my existence. As soon as I saw it, I tried to "grab" it — using only my imagination — but it had no effect.
"Hard to grab something without hands… and even if I had them, I doubt it would help with something so small."
Soon, I discovered a trick: to capture the particles not with imagination, but with will. My will was the absolute command in this space. With force, I froze the particle.
And with that, I captured my first particle. I called it Prime. Now, even in this infinite space, a particle floated with me. The absolute void had lost its dominion; it was no longer just nothing.
"Now… what can I do with this?" I thought.