The stars stretched endlessly, an ocean of fire and dust scattered across the void. Out at the farthest edge of the cosmos, where even the brightest galaxies seemed no more than faded chalk upon a black velvet cloth, two beings sat in silence.
They were not of flesh, not bound by blood or bone, but titans woven from the fabric of existence itself. Their forms were long and strange, stitched together by rivers of starlight and trembling constellations. Nebulas crawled like living tattoos across their skin, bursting and fading in eternal bloom. Their eyes were voids that rotated with entire galaxies, black holes forming and collapsing in slow rhythm. They sat cross-legged upon a ruined world, a hollow planet cracked like an abandoned marble of creation, and from their thrones of stone and shadow they gazed outward.
When the first one spoke, his voice was calm—noble, patient, the tone of a philosopher who had carried a thousand ages within his chest.
"How curious the children of Earth have become," he murmured. "Such fragile beings, and yet in their brief breaths they conjure endless wonders. I have seen their cultures, their habits, their strange customs… and recently, these moving pictures they call anime. Tales of lives reborn, of mortals cast into other worlds. How peculiar their obsession with reincarnation—always with the promise of strength greater than before, always with power so absurd it collapses reason itself."
The second one laughed, and his laughter was like the rumble of colliding black holes. It shook the fractured planet beneath them, making the dust of ages spill into the void.
"Indeed," the second said, his voice deep, resonant, mocking and yet filled with awe. "I too have watched these stories. Mortals dying, waking anew, striding through fantasy as kings in all but name. To them, death is but a door, and through it they step into glory. What boldness! What madness!"
For a time they spoke as ancient kings might speak over a board of chess—calmly, wisely, each word measured. But slowly their tones sharpened, their words carried fire.
"It is foolishness," declared the first, and the galaxies in his eyes turned cold. "Strength alone does not forge victory. Magic, power, divinity—these are baubles compared to the mind. A human with no gift of sorcery, no inherited might, but blessed with critical thought… that one could conquer entire worlds. With invention, with reason, with technology—they would rise higher than kings themselves. A blade is broken, a spell undone, but the mind? The mind builds empires."
The second's form rippled, nebulas within him storming like waves. He leaned forward, his vast eyes burning with constellations.
"You see only half of the truth. Logic without vision is a cage. What you call delusion, I call creation. The kind of mortal they mock as chūnibyō, drowning in fantasies, eyes blind to reality—such a one is unshackled. They dream beyond rules. They craft what reason denies. Creation without logic is chaos, and chaos breaks limits. It is imagination, not calculation, that will tear open the world."
The two beings glared, and the stars trembled around them. Their words became storms. Space itself seemed to crack beneath their debate, as though existence could not bear the weight of their quarrel.
They argued for what to mortals might be eternity, yet to them it was but the passing of a breath. At last, their voices fell silent, and in the silence the hollow planet groaned beneath their seated frames.
The first celestial broke the stillness.
"Then let us end this not with words, but with proof. Let us test your fantasy and my reason upon the stage of another world. We will cast mortals into its depths, and see which rises."
The second's galaxies flared. "So be it."
They stood, and when they moved, they moved faster than the thought of light, their colossal bodies streaking across galaxies. In a single instant they crossed the gulfs of eternity and arrived before Earth. There they lowered themselves upon its moon as though it were but a pebble beneath their feet.
It was there, in the silence of that dead stone, that they spoke the rules.
The first raised his hand, and stars bent to his decree.
"The chosen must have no ties. No family to call them back, no bonds to anchor them. They must be untethered, so their will is free to walk forward."
The second nodded, his voice rolling like thunder.
"And they must know the tales of rebirth. They must be mortals who have dreamed of these reincarnations, who have watched these strange stories, so that when it happens they understand—faintly, instinctively."
The first spoke again, his voice like carved stone.
"They must be dying. Already at death's door. Let the flow of transmigration carry them gently, not violently ripped from life."
The second's eyes darkened, galaxies churning.
"And no gift. No blessing. No speck of divine favor. They live with what they already are. Nothing more."
"Nor shall we intervene," the first added. "Once the trial begins, our hands are chained. Even if they bleed upon the ground, even if their last breath fades—we must not move."
The second raised his long arm and traced a circle through the void.
"The bodies they awaken in shall be dead. Corpses still warm, no longer than five minutes fallen, undiscovered. Let no whispers of rebirth poison the world they enter."
And together, in one voice vast enough to bend the moon's surface, they spoke the final law.
"The chance of survival shall be but one in a thousand. A fragment of a fragment. Let them fight not only the world, but the cruelty of chance itself."
The words hung in the vacuum like iron chains, binding the wager in truth. The two celestials stood tall, their forms rising like mountains of living night. They said no more.
Instead, they let their will expand, stretching across the blue planet below. Not light, not shadow, but intent—pure, unshaped power. It seeped into every corner of Earth, into every alley and every hospital bed, every silent room where breaths faltered and lives guttered out. It searched, hunting for two souls: one of logic sharpened to a blade, one of imagination burning with fevered fire.
The trial had begun.
_______________________
The city at night breathed in silence. Neon lights shimmered faintly in the distance, glowing like dying embers against the sky, while the moon's pale silver stretched across empty streets. In a forgotten corner of Tokyo, an old apartment building stood crooked and weary, its white paint long since dulled to gray, its walls cracked and flaking as though the structure itself had grown tired of enduring.
Inside one of its cramped rooms lived a young man who could have passed through life unnoticed. His name was Aoshi Minamoto.
He was twenty, but his body carried the thin, frail weight of someone far older. His skin was pale, his long black hair unkempt, strands falling across eyes that always seemed to stare at the ground. His room mirrored his mind: messy, scattered, yet strangely ordered. The tatami floor was clear, but the air was heavy with clutter—papers upon papers, sprawled across every surface, covered in endless numbers and scribbles.
Equations spilled like rivers from his pen: calculus scrawled in impatient ink—
∫(x² + 3x)dx = (1/3)x³ + (3/2)x².
Physics formulas filled margins—F = ma, E = mc²—jostling for space alongside mechanical blueprints. Entire pages were consumed with circuit diagrams, sketches of gears, bolts, and crude robotic limbs half-assembled on the floor. Pieces of aluminum warped by heat, screws scattered like fallen teeth, and wires stripped bare lined the edges of the room.
At the center sat a low tea table drowning in more papers, where Aoshi crouched on a worn cushion, his pen scratching in relentless rhythm. His television flickered weakly against the wall, the screen trembling with static as a documentary on firearms played. Black powder rifles cracked open, barrels forged in fire, triggers dissected in careful detail. Modern handguns were displayed in cross-section, their mechanics explained with precision.
The images reflected in Aoshi's dark eyes. His hand moved without hesitation, filling the margins with calculations on trajectory, muzzle velocity, recoil force, energy transfer—lines of mathematics that to him were as natural as breathing.
Aoshi Minamoto had lived a life that felt like nothing. Orphaned young, he had no family, no friends. He had barely reached the first year of high school before poverty cut him off from education entirely. Since then he had drifted, working at a dull convenience store, earning enough to survive and no more. He was unremarkable, invisible—except for the strange brilliance locked inside his mind.
Yet Aoshi never thought of himself as a genius. To him, formulas were not triumphs but pastimes. Invention was no different than sketching or daydreaming. It was simply fun. Fun to imagine how steel bent under pressure, fun to map the stress lines of an airship, fun to scrawl nuclear equations on cheap printer paper as though he might one day build a bomb in his kitchen.
Lately, his obsession had shifted toward machines of war. Rifles, cannons, ships, even jet fighters. A documentary on Napoleon's campaigns had once drifted into his life through the randomness of an internet algorithm, and ever since, he had been hooked on strategy, battle, and the tools of destruction. He fantasized sometimes—not often, but enough—that he might lead an army, that he might command machines of his own making, that he might change the fate of nations.
Most of the time, though, he simply scribbled. Alone, unseen, unnoticed.
Anime found its way into his life on rare nights, but those viewings always left him uneasy. He watched stories of heroes reborn in grand worlds, gifted with power, surrounded by friends, romance, endless possibility. Aoshi envied them. He despised them. Those characters were everything he was not. And sometimes, when his room fell quiet and the buzz of the television faded, he would stare at his reflection in the black glass and wonder if his life had meant anything at all.
That night, as the clock ticked past midnight, his body betrayed him. His chest clenched as though gripped by an unseen hand. His throat tightened, breath ragged. The pen slipped from his fingers.
Then came the cough.
A harsh, wet sound tore from his lungs, spraying red across the papers in front of him. Blood stained his equations, smeared across his blueprints, turning ∂²u/∂x² + ∂²u/∂y² = 0 into something grotesque. His frail body convulsed, his hair sticking to the sweat on his face as he toppled sideways onto the tatami.
Another cough, more blood. The metallic taste filled his mouth, spilling across the floor. His vision blurred, his body trembling violently as the strength left him in uneven waves.
"...Shitty life," he rasped, spitting crimson onto the wood. His voice cracked, bitter. "Everything… pointless. Born just to… rot."
The word cancer slipped from his lips like venom. He cursed the world, cursed his own birth. Tears bled from his eyes, unbidden, streaking down his pale cheeks. Alone, in a room filled with forgotten inventions, Aoshi Minamoto's life ebbed away.
His sight dimmed. The last thing he saw was a paper stained red, numbers dissolving into meaningless blotches of blood. Then the darkness closed in.
Silence.
For one heartbeat, the room was still. Then the silence deepened—thickened—until the world itself seemed to hold its breath. The cheap wall clock froze mid-tick. The hum of the television cut off. Even the drifting particles of dust hung motionless in the air.
And then the air cracked.
It was not sound, but the tearing of space itself. A jagged fracture spread across the center of the room like shattered glass. From the wound spilled light and void, colors no human eye was meant to see, the bleeding fabric of reality itself.
Through it stepped a figure.
He was vast and terrible, yet his form was compressed to fit the human room. His skin was made of the night sky, stars burning beneath the surface. Galaxies spun in his eyes, whole worlds birthing and dying in their depths. He was the Celestial of Reason, the one who had quarreled upon the broken planet with his counterpart, and now he had come to claim what was his.
The being looked down at Aoshi's lifeless body, his expression unreadable. When he spoke, his voice was calm and deep, echoing like an ancient song.
"Yes," he said. "This one will do."
He raised his hand, and from the corpse rose a fragile light. It was small, trembling, shaped like nothing and everything at once: Aoshi's soul. It flickered weakly, as though it might scatter into dust at the faintest breeze.
The Celestial gazed upon it with the patience of eternity. His galaxies swirled slower, his voice rumbling in satisfaction.
"No bonds to tether him. No ties to drag him back. A mind sharp enough to split empires, and a hunger buried so deep he does not yet see it. He has dreamed of other worlds, though he pretends otherwise. He understands enough to walk forward. Yes… perfect."
He closed his hand around the soul, encasing it in a shimmering sphere of cosmic power. The fragile glow steadied, no longer flickering, locked away from the corruption of the void.
For a moment the Celestial lingered, the vast weight of his presence pressing against the walls. His gaze drifted across the lifeless boy, the blood, the scattered equations. Then, softly, he spoke again.
"Has my rival chosen yet?"
There was no answer, only silence. The being did not wait. He folded himself back into the tear in space, the fracture sealing shut behind him as though it had never been.
The room was left exactly as it had been—silent, frozen, ordinary. Except that where Aoshi Minamoto had once been, there remained only a husk of flesh. His soul was gone, carried into the hands of eternity.
The first candidate had been chosen.