[Reboot]
I am Ark of the Magentania line. I often wonder if I was rescued. Was it Cia? Or perhaps it is a miracle of Fate that I am even here to wonder. My father's wealth appeared like a sudden storm; he looked at the markets, saw the truth behind the numbers, and built an empire from nothing.
Without that gold, and without Cia, my world would have surrendered to the dark. I am, by nature, a still pond—unbothered, yet easily rippled by the right stone. I was born lazy; my mother says I didn't even kick for days in the womb, too content to simply exist. I like the quiet of indoors. I draw, though my hands cannot yet find the shapes my mind sees. In school, they call me slow of body but swift of spirit. I am not "smart"—I simply do what is asked. But a distance was growing inside me, a quiet gap no one else could see.
I began to build laws to protect my heart. My memory is a sieve, yet my mind is a forge. I could see the cliff ahead—the higher grades, the moment my simple tricks would fail, and my thoughts would finally collapse under their own weight. My father would see it, but he could not stop it. My brain would have turned into a machine of overthinking, spiraling into a void I couldn't control. What heights would I have reached? And what would it have cost me to stay there?
What if Cia had never appeared to give me a new horizon just as my mind began its descent? And why does a businessman like my father keep a laboratory hidden away? I suppose it doesn't matter now.
(As Ark drifts into the veil of sleep)
You will wander for an eternity, Ark. You will never truly grasp the price your soul would have paid for the deluge of forbidden knowledge. You would have hungered for the ancient and the new until your intellect soured into a sinister geometry—a place where logic breathes its last. You would have lived in the shadow, fearing the end of life and the curse of immortality with the same breath.
In every reality, your kind exists: those devoured by their own internal architecture. Not destroyed by the world, but drained dry by the subconscious. The most terrifying metamorphosis is not of the body, but of the self during a single lifetime. You would have become a ghost in your own school—the "happy" genius, the favorite of teachers who crave the eccentric, yet you would have remained hollow.
By the time you reached manhood, you would have either sought the silence of the grave or become a hollow vessel, chasing whims because you realized that actions are nothing—only the weight of regret is real. You would have been haunted by the choice: "Could you, or should you?" Even I, the Voice of the All, would fear such a destiny. To calm a mind that is drowning in insight is the greatest labor in existence.
You are a child of fortune. You have gold to distract you, and a friend who whispers "weird" truths until the impossible feels mundane.
You were saved, Ark. But the debt remains.
I just want to sleep in peace.