There was no light.
No sound.
No direction.
Only the weightless, endless dark.
Arin Varma's final memory was of blinding light and tearing metal — his experiment collapsing, a brief sensation of being pulled apart, and then nothing.
Now, there was… this.
He couldn't feel his body. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't even tell if time existed. Panic swelled in the silence.
> "H—Help—!"
No voice came out. There was nothing for sound to move through.
Instinct made him try to breathe — and in that moment, something shifted.
A strange, cold force rushed into him from every direction. It was heavier than air, denser than light, yet for the first time since his death, something filled the emptiness inside him.
He gasped — and the pressure became air.
It wasn't perfect. The breath didn't calm him — it burned, raw and alien — but it was something.
> What… was that? Energy?
He didn't know. He just knew he'd pulled something into himself. When he tried again, more flowed — subtle, infinite, formless.
Then, he tried to open his eyes.
A spark.
The energy he'd drawn in twisted, changed, and became light.
A blinding, sharp radiance burst outward, scattering in every direction — but there was nothing to stop it. It spread forever, bouncing endlessly in the nothingness, creating reflections that weren't reflections at all — just the same light looping on itself, trapped in an empty dimension.
It illuminated nothing.
It simply was.
> No earth… no lab… no body… just me.
He waited for fear to return, but there was only quiet. Endless, empty quiet.
After some time — or perhaps centuries — the panic faded. In its place came a calm curiosity.
He noticed that even without breathing, he was still drawing in that strange, silent energy. It trickled through him constantly, subtle as thought.
> It's everywhere… infinite. I'm absorbing it… automatically?
He focused on it — and something inside him resonated, a faint vibration of will. He imagined the Earth. Blue seas, brown land, white clouds.
At first, nothing happened.
But he didn't stop.
He tried again, shaping the memory more clearly — the texture of soil, the solidity of stone. The energy twisted… condensed… and then—
A speck of dust appeared.
Tiny. Barely visible. But it was real.
He felt it.
> I… did that?
The moment matter appeared, something changed. The light he'd created earlier finally had something to touch. It bounced off the dust, scattered, and returned to him faintly, carrying the soft echo of color.
It was beautiful — the first fragment of reality in an endless void.
Encouraged, he kept experimenting.
Dust became sand. Sand became rock. Rock became clusters, drifting and orbiting around him. The energy kept flowing, shaping, combining, forming crystals, metals, gases.
Each time he created something new, the darkness grew richer, less empty.
He lost track of how long he worked. Time didn't seem to matter anymore. There were only experiments and results — patterns, reactions, and subtle changes that made the emptiness feel less like nothing.
At some point, he grew bored of rocks.
> If I can make matter… can I make life?
He thought of the seas of Earth. Of water — the foundation of biology.
He gathered energy and willed it into existence.
The first droplets shimmered in the void — heavy, perfect, impossibly pure. They floated, then merged into a thin layer of liquid. He added more energy, expanded it, added traces of salt, minerals, and gas.
It wasn't much — a floating sphere of faint blue liquid, glowing faintly under the recycled light. But it was his.
He smiled — though he no longer had lips.
Then came lightning.
He imagined storms. Energy snapped through the void, striking the liquid again and again until it churned and foamed, tiny bubbles forming beneath the surface.
He built a small, artificial sun nearby — a steady light source to warm his creation.
Then, one day — or one millennium — something changed.
A flicker within the water. A vibration that wasn't his.
He looked closer.
Microscopic specks were dividing — living — feeding on the minerals he'd added. Simple, fragile, perfect.
> Life…
He didn't know how long he watched them. He didn't need to.
He just knew that watching them move filled the silence inside him in a way nothing else had.
Then he noticed something strange.
The flow of energy from the void — the one he'd always felt — was faster. Stronger.
> Did… life affect it?
Curious, he began experimenting again. He expanded the water, using more of the absorbed energy to enlarge it into a small lake. Then he tried something new: directing the energy directly toward the cells.
At first, it worked. The energy drifted toward them gently — but just before touching the water, it changed.
It became something else — a new kind of energy he couldn't recognize.
When it touched the cells, they screamed without sound and died.
> No! Stop!
He tried to cut the flow, but it was too late. Half the life he'd created was gone. The rest floated lifeless in still water.
He felt… cold.
Not the cold of the void — something deeper. Regret.
Then he noticed movement.
A few of the dead cells had changed — faintly glowing. They weren't dead. They'd mutated.
They began absorbing the new energy on their own, and when they did, he felt a tug — a faint echo of resonance.
As they absorbed it, he absorbed more energy too, as if they were extensions of him.
A cycle.
A feedback loop.
> So… this is growth?
He watched, fascinated, as the surviving cells began to divide again — faster, stronger, more resilient. Each one burned with a faint light of its own, feeding from the strange energy that had once killed them.
For the first time since his death, Arin didn't feel alone.
The void was still endless.
The silence still absolute.
But now, within that emptiness, something small, fragile, and alive was breathing — and with every pulse of its life, so was he.