Tenebrous Singularity

Requiem for the Summoned

Reincarnation. A second life. A fresh start.

A man, crushed by debt, hollowed by solitude, exhausted beyond repair, finally decides to let go. He throws himself off a rooftop, not expecting salvation, not hoping for miracles—just an end. A release from the weight pressing against his skull every waking second.

But then he wakes up. Not in hell, not in an abyss of nothingness, not in the void of oblivion he had prepared himself for.

Instead, he opens his eyes to a throne beneath him, a kingdom at his feet, and a family that loves him. The weak, broken man of his past life erased in an instant, replaced with a ruler, a protector, a savior.

A happy ending.

The idea alone was enough to make people sigh in longing. A world beyond this one, offering absolution. A chance to cast off all burdens, to rewrite the script of life, to escape from mistakes that had piled too high to undo.

Typical isekai nonsense.

People romanticize the idea of a reset because they refuse to acknowledge the truth—that their suffering is not fate's doing but their own. They pray for a miracle, for someone to reach down from the heavens and undo all the failures they let pile up. They cling to the illusion that their misfortune is someone else's fault. That if only they were given another life, another chance, another roll of the dice, they would finally be free.

But freedom isn't given. It's taken. Earned. Fought for.

My life was not the worst. I had a home, even if it was small. I had a mother, even if she was distant. I had an education, even if I didn't know what I wanted to do with it. To some, my life was a dream. To others, it was average. To me? It was something I never once considered running away from. Because I understood one thing:

At some point, life stops being dictated by circumstances and starts being shaped by decisions.

And the people who fail, the ones who complain, who blame everything but themselves, are the ones too weak to take responsibility for the choices they made.

So don't complain.

New life isn't real.

Isekai is just a fantasy.

Live a life without regrets, without excuses. Solve your own problems. Overcome hardships, or let them crush you. But don't sit there, begging for another chance you don't deserve.

That's what I believed.

Yet here I was.

Drifting.

Weightless.

Detached from all sensation.

I couldn't feel my body. Couldn't hear my heartbeat. Couldn't tell if I was breathing or if I even had lungs anymore.

A dream.

I wished it were a dream.

But it wasn't.

I was suspended in something I couldn't see, couldn't touch. No walls. No floor. No horizon. Just an endless, abyssal void stretching in all directions. It was neither warm nor cold. Neither suffocating nor freeing.

It was nothing.

Was this what death felt like? Was this the end?

A crack between space and time.

I had no way of knowing how long I had been here. Seconds? Hours? Days? Did time even exist in this place?

I tried to move. Nothing. No resistance, no surface to push against, no limbs to control. I was a mind without a body, a thought drifting aimlessly in the dark.

Then it came back. The memory.

The crash. The fog.

I remembered the feeling first—momentum yanking me forward, my seatbelt biting into my chest. A sound followed—the gut-wrenching screech of metal twisting, of glass splintering into countless tiny shards. And then—the pain.

A tearing sensation across my stomach, something sharp slicing into me. Blood. Warm, sticky, soaking through my clothes. My fingers had trembled, reaching for the wound, but the moment I touched it, the pain flared, white-hot, and I—

Everything went black.

And now, I was here.

Floating in the aftermath.

No body, no sound, no way to scream or panic or struggle.

Just thought.

I tried to speak. No voice came.

I tried to move. No body answered.

I tried to breathe. No lungs expanded.

So this was it, then.

This mistake, this accident—just another consequence of my own decisions. I should have stayed home.

Maybe this was what my mind did in its final moments—fabricated a space, stripped it of sound, light, and sensation, and left me adrift in the void, weightless and unanchored. Perhaps this was how consciousness unraveled, not in a flash, but in a slow and deliberate descent into nothingness, where even the concept of time dissolved. A place where thought stretched thin, flickering at the edges like dying embers, resisting oblivion for just a little longer before fading, piece by piece, until there was nothing left of me at all.

I didn't expect this.

And now, here I am, floating in this nothingness, wondering if the idea of reincarnation doesn't sound so bad after all. I should have gone to the party with a little more enthusiasm, made an effort to talk to someone new. I should have tried to enjoy myself instead of being hesitant, unsure. I should have taken the chance to live, just once. But now, that choice has been stripped away, leaving only silence and stillness in its wake.

Are these regrets?

Perhaps.

I wonder if my mother ever replied. If she read my message too late, long after I was already gone. What would she think when she realized that I had actually gone to my first party—something she had probably wished for me, a small step towards normalcy—only to never return? I can almost imagine her unlocking her phone, expecting to see a follow-up message, only to be met with silence. Would she blame herself? Would she think she should have called me back home, that maybe I would have listened?

The weight of guilt sits heavily in my chest. It's strange. I have never really felt guilt before, not like this. There was never much to regret about my life—because I had never really lived in the first place. Would I have been happier if I had just stayed home, browsing the internet, wrapped in the comfort of my usual solitude? If I had done what I always did—exist without ambition, without drive, without wanting more—would I have been spared this fate?

Maybe this is just nature's way of erasing the unwanted, clearing away the specks of dreamless lives that serve no purpose.

Reincarnation doesn't sound so bad now.

The thought lingers, and as time stretches, I feel my consciousness shift. My eyes—if I even have them anymore—search past the dark, desperate for something, anything. Isn't this the part where some supreme being appears, offering me a new life in another world, bestowing power and purpose upon me like the stories say? I could almost laugh at myself. Even now, I grasp at fiction, hoping for a narrative that makes sense of this.

But then, something changes.

I can't move my eyes, but I can sense.

The darkness around me—solid, endless—begins to shift. At first, I don't notice it. My mind is too numb, too detached. But as time stretches—seconds, minutes, hours, or maybe days—it becomes undeniable. The dark is not as still as I thought. It is moving. Stirring.

Swirling.

The endless abyss, once impenetrable, begins to twist in slow, deliberate motions, like ink dissolving in water. Black and gray bleed into one another, forming shadows that drift and fold into mist, into clouds, into something that almost breathes.

And then—

A storm.

It starts as a whisper, a disturbance at the edges of my perception. The swirling mist quickens, folding over itself, rotating around me in slow, calculated revolutions. It tightens, builds, growing faster, stronger.

And soon, I realize—I am at the eye of it.

Was my consciousness finally letting go?

I didn't want it to.

The thought of fading into nothing—of dissolving like mist into the abyss—unsettled me more than the idea of death itself. If this emptiness was all that remained, then I had to hold onto something, anything. A thought, a memory, a shred of self. But what if I had already begun unraveling, piece by piece, without even realizing it?

I strained to feel something—fear, pain, even regret—anything to prove that I was still here. But the void was quiet. Indifferent.

I hope not.

Everything around me is moving. And I, weightless in the center of it all, am still.

The black and gray twisted around me, shifting, curling, expanding in slow, deliberate swirls. There was no light, no flashes of lightning to break its form—just the ceaseless motion of the storm. It was hypnotic, an endless spiral that made my vision blur and my thoughts slip further from my grasp.

I considered closing my eyes. Maybe if I shut them, I could ground myself, hold onto something real. But the thought terrified me.

What if I lost myself?

What if everything stopped the moment I did?

What if I ceased to exist the moment my vision surrendered?

The questions gnawed at me, irrational yet paralyzing. I couldn't take the risk. Instead, I let the spiral consume my sight, dragging my mind deeper into its rhythm. The longer I stared, the more I felt my thoughts thinning, dissolving like sand slipping through fingers. My mind was going numb, my sense of time eroding. It might have been days. Months. Years.

I tried calling out. My throat felt constricted, as if my voice had never existed. But somehow, I managed to let out a single whisper.

Stop.

A word barely spoken. Barely heard.

But it listened.

The storm froze. The spiraling mass of black and gray halted, its flow breaking into absolute stillness. It wasn't gone—the dark clouds still hung thick, unmoving—but their motion had ceased. The silence that followed felt unnatural, heavy, pressing against me from all sides.

Time passed. If time still existed.

Then, the clouds began to shift again—but not as a storm. They receded, folding in on themselves, drawing back into a form, a shape. The shades of gray blended, stretched, and then—I saw it.

A face.

It was crude, undefined—nothing but shadows forming the contours of eyes, a nose, a mouth. But it was there, unmistakable. It loomed before me, its presence suffocating, its sheer scale vast beyond comprehension.

At this point, I didn't know what to make of it. My thoughts were sluggish, tangled in the numbness that had wrapped around my mind for what felt like an eternity. There was no rational explanation, no instinctual reaction that felt appropriate. I should have been terrified, awestruck, or even confused—but I felt nothing.

My body refused to move. My breath, if I was even still breathing, was shallow, barely noticeable. My heart should have been racing, but instead, there was only a dull, steady rhythm, as if my body had yet to understand the gravity of what it was seeing.

So I just stared.

My eyes, hollow and unfocused, remained locked onto the shifting, towering figure before me. I wasn't processing it, not truly. It was simply there, an undeniable presence in the void, something beyond comprehension, beyond definition.

It watched.

And I, lost in the weight of its existence, could do nothing but watch back.

And all of a sudden, as if something had driven a blade straight through my heart, a sudden, unbearable pain surged through me.

I gasped—no, I screamed. My voice returned in a soundless cry as my body, long stripped of sensation, came alive all at once. My thoughts roared back into existence, my senses reignited, my breath came in ragged gasps. I could feel. I could move.

I could fear.

Because what lay before me was not just a shape.

It was a presence.

An enormous, impossible shadow, drifting through oblivion, watching me with a gaze that reached beyond flesh and soul.

A supreme being.

______________________________________________________________________________

Through the fractures of time and the unseen threads of reality, where the echoes of forgotten worlds still linger, there exists a labyrinth—vast, unrelenting, and unknowable. It is not bound by land, nor sky, nor stars. It stretches beyond the reach of mortal comprehension, winding through the marrow of existence itself.

Some say it was placed there by a force beyond gods, a hand unseen, an architect without name. Others claim it was never made but has always been—a law unto itself, a structure without origin, an inevitability that predates creation. A prison. A trial. A cruel jest upon all who are cast into its depths.

It has been called by many names, across ages and civilizations now turned to dust. The Abyssal Coil. The Nameless Crucible. The Godslayer's Path. The Maw of Eternity. The Evernight Labyrinth. The Cruel Game. Each world speaks of it in hushed voices, each tongue shaping its own warnings, but the meaning remains unchanged—a place from which none return unchanged, if they return at all.

Within its ever-shifting corridors, governed by laws beyond reason, exist those who were chosen, summoned, or simply taken. Not all were born. Some were shaped. Molded by unseen forces. Others were imagined, willed into existence by minds long since crumbled into oblivion. They do not belong to a single time, nor a single place. Their fates are bound to one purpose, though many do not yet know it: to seek the end of the labyrinth, to unravel its secrets, to grasp the key to its undoing.

Yet, for all their struggle, none have seen its final gate. None have reached the threshold beyond which the labyrinth ceases to be. For each step taken forward, the path shifts. For every answer gained, new questions arise. It devours those who walk it—mind, body, and soul—until they are either unmade or become part of the endless machinery that drives its existence.

How did the labyrinth come to be? Who laid its foundations upon the fabric of worlds? Does an end truly exist, or is it merely a lie whispered to keep the lost from falling into despair? If it cannot be ended, then can it at least be stopped? Halted before it consumes all that remains?

There are no truths in this place. No righteous cause. No villainous scheme. No guiding hand of justice. Only shifting paths, endless corridors, and the slow, creeping suffocation of time. In this game of chaos, where the rules change with each breath, good and evil are meaningless. Right and wrong are illusions. To survive is the only law.

And as the labyrinth spreads, consuming worlds, devouring futures, swallowing light itself, the stars begin to fade one by one.

Until, at last, no stars remain.

______________________________________________________________________________

The shadow spoke no words. Nor did I.

As much as I wanted to recoil, to turn away, to retreat into the empty vastness around me, I realized something strange. I was not alone. And that, in a way I couldn't fully understand, gave me a measure of comfort.

The grotesque face—if it could even be called that—stared at me with a silence heavier than the void itself. No features, no expression, just an abstract formation of black and gray, shifting ever so slightly, yet never changing. It watched, and I watched back.

My heart pounded in my chest, a lone rhythm in the endless quiet. I could move—at least, I felt like I could—but there was no sensation beyond the boundary of my own body. No temperature. No air against my skin. No ground beneath my feet. Only the deep, resonant hum of the space around me, an oppressive vibration that seemed to come from the figure itself. A soundless sound, stretching across infinity.

I tried to think—to grasp the logic of this place, to piece together some understanding of what had happened to me. But thoughts drifted like mist, forming and dissolving before I could hold onto them. That was, until one solid realization surfaced.

This all began when I whispered a single word: stop.

That was when the storm had frozen. That was when the shifting void had given way to stillness. That was when it appeared.

If my voice held that power, then maybe… maybe the next step also depended on me. Maybe I had to speak again for something else to happen.

But not yet. Not until I was ready.

I had time—endless time, or none at all. Either way, I had already spent what felt like years here. Or perhaps my senses had deceived me. I no longer knew the difference.

So, I let time stretch further. My heart steadied. The fear that gripped me softened into something else. Not quite acceptance, not quite understanding—just an adjustment to the unnatural reality around me.

The face did not move. The clouds did not shift.

I tested my body, reaching out, stepping forward. But no matter how I moved, I remained in the same place. There was no resistance, yet there was no progress either. A space without direction. A place where action held no weight.

I felt no thirst. No hunger. Even the concept of death, the natural fear of it, became distant—an old memory of another life, barely worth acknowledging.

What mattered now was this. The darkness surrounding me. The face before me. The silence stretching between us, deeper than the void itself.

And so, after what felt like an eternity, I decided.

To speak.

To face whatever came next.

To ask the figure before me—

What are you?

There was no reply. No immediate shift, no visible reaction. The void remained still, its swirling mist unchanging, as if my words had dissolved into nothing.

But then I noticed something.

The face was not still.

It never was.

At first, I thought it was frozen—an unmoving silhouette carved into the shifting void. But as time stretched on, I began to see it for what it truly was. It was not still. It was never still.

The darkness around me churned, slow and ceaseless, like ink dissolving in water. Wisps of black and gray twisted and recoiled, threading through the abyss with a silent, unnatural rhythm. They coiled inward, forming the vague contours of a face, only to unravel, disassemble, and reform again—never truly solid, never truly whole. The more I stared, the more I understood that it was not taking shape for me. It was not a manifestation brought into existence by my presence.

It had always been here. Watching. Waiting. Thinking.

A constant presence in the void, aware of my arrival long before I became aware of it. I had been floating in blindness, in ignorance, assuming myself alone while it observed, silent and unyielding, waiting for me to speak first.

Then, without warning, it moved.

Not a twitch, not a sudden shift, but a slow, deliberate unraveling. The black mist stretched outward, parting and twisting into tendrils that arched through the abyss like grasping fingers. The contours of its face stretched with it, features warping, distorting, yet never fully breaking apart. The empty sockets where eyes should have been expanded, swallowing the space between us. The low, thrumming hum that had filled the silence grew deeper, richer, vibrating through my very bones.

And then it spoke.

A voice, or something close to it. A soundless echo that crawled into my mind, bypassing my ears, speaking directly into the hollow of my thoughts.

I thought you weren't capable of speech.

The sound—if it could be called that—rippled through the abyss, shaking the fabric of this place, pressing against me like a tide. The sheer weight of its words sent a shudder down my spine. It did not speak like something encountering another for the first time. It spoke like something that had already considered me. Already judged me. Already known me.

The thought settled deep within me, and for the first time, true fear took hold.

It had been here long before I arrived.

It had been watching.

And it had only been waiting for me to break the silence first.

Silence followed.

It wasn't silence. Not truly.

The hum—the deep, droning vibration that filled the space—had changed. It was subtle, almost imperceptible, but it was there. A new resonance layered beneath the ever-present murmur, a slow, deliberate pulse threading through the void.

And then, like ripples in stagnant water, the shadow stirred.

Not in a sudden, violent motion, but with a creeping inevitability. The black mist coiled and stretched, its edges unraveling like threads pulled from a frayed fabric. The contours of its face shifted, not with any organic motion, but in an unnatural, almost deliberate way—warping, twisting, reshaping itself in a manner that felt thoughtful. As if it had been waiting. As if it had already decided how it would respond.

A tremor passed through the airless void, sinking into my very bones.

Then, without a mouth, without breath, without sound, it spoke again.

The words did not echo. There was no space for sound to travel, no air for vibrations to carry. And yet, I heard it—felt it—like a tremor deep within my mind.

The shadow, this presence that had lingered in silence, had been watching me. Measuring me. Not as something passive, not as some cosmic phenomenon responding to an anomaly in its space, but as something aware. Something thinking. Something waiting.

The mist that shaped its hollow visage did not settle. Its form shifted, warped, reassembled. The more I looked, the less I understood—like staring at a shape that refused to be defined. Its edges rippled, stretching and unraveling like smoke caught in a wind I could not feel. And yet, the face remained. The empty sockets, the slant of its absent mouth, the vague resemblance of something once human but twisted beyond recognition—it did not disappear.

It had been waiting for me.

Why am I here? I asked, forcing the words out.

My voice sounded thin, distant, as though I were hearing myself speak from across an immeasurable void.

The shadow did not answer immediately. Instead, it loomed, its formless body shifting in ways that made my mind ache to comprehend. When it finally responded, its voice carried no inflection, no trace of emotion.

Because you are dead.

A cold weight settled in my chest. I had already known. The moment the car struck, the moment my body twisted and the pain became unbearable before fading into nothingness—I had known. But hearing it spoken aloud, confirmed by something that existed outside all reason, made it real in a way I hadn't been prepared for.

I swallowed, though there was nothing physical to swallow. My body was gone, yet my mind clung desperately to the illusion of form.

And this place? I asked. What is this?

The figure shifted again. The black mist that composed its shape unfurled, stretching into the darkness before collapsing back in on itself. Its presence pressed against me, as if the abyss itself had weight, had mass, had will.

This is where the forgotten come.

A pause.

This is where the lost remain.

The words carried a finality that sent something cold skittering down the hollow remains of what should have been my spine.

The forgotten. The lost.

I hesitated, staring into its shifting form, waiting for it to elaborate. It did not. The silence stretched, thick and heavy, suffocating without air.

I had to speak.

What happens now?

For the first time since it had begun speaking, the shadow moved. Not just the shifting of its form, not just the eternal swirl of its existence, but moved. The distance between us shrank, though I had not seen it cross the space.

It loomed.

It was impossibly vast, yet unbearably close.

You do not belong here, it said.

I do not belong here.

Of course, I knew that already. But hearing it said aloud, in that voice—one that seemed to reverberate through the very essence of this void—made the fact settle into my bones. A cold certainty.

Should I ask what it is? Would it take offense if I did? It seemed ancient, unfathomable. People who hold power, who exist above others, tend to expect recognition. Even in my world, the powerful didn't tolerate ignorance; the higher one stood, the less patience they had for those beneath them. And this being—this shifting, endless form—was beyond anything I had ever known. If there was a hierarchy to existence, it stood at its summit.

I hesitated, weighing my words, then asked, How can I leave this place?

Silence.

It did not answer, nor did it react. The void remained as it was—unmoving yet constantly in flux, the darkness folding into itself in infinite layers, dissolving and reforming like waves crashing against an unseen shore. Time stretched, or perhaps it collapsed altogether. The only constant was its gaze—if I could even call it that. That formless face had no eyes, no features to mark its expression, yet I felt its awareness pressing into me, dissecting my every thought before I could voice it.

Did it even hear me? I wondered. Should I repeat myself?

Before I could, laughter—low, guttural, and unplaceable—rippled through the void. It wasn't merely sound; I felt it, a vibration that ran through my entire being, as though the space around me itself was laughing.

I heard you the first time.

The voice carried amusement, but it was the kind that made my skin crawl. The kind that belonged to something far beyond my understanding, something that saw humor in my struggles the way one might find amusement in an insect crawling in circles, unaware of the foot poised above it.

Get out of here? it mused, the words laced with an eerie curiosity. Where exactly would you go?

The question unsettled me. I had assumed the answer was simple: Away. Anywhere but here. But the way it phrased it made me question myself. Where was I trying to go? Back to my world? Back to that mangled corpse in the wreckage, frozen in time beneath the glow of my mother's last message? Was there even a world left for me to return to?

What do you mean? I asked.

The thing laughed again, softer this time, almost like a whisper passing through the void.

This place—this Eternal Void—is the highest domain of salvation. There is nothing beyond it. It is the peak of all worlds, the abyss that lies above the shadows and below the deep, ruled by The One Who Wanders in the Darkness."

Its words were not merely spoken; they were imposed upon me, as though the knowledge had been carved into the very fabric of my being. The highest domain. The peak of all worlds. A place above existence itself.

Then, was I already dead in every conceivable sense? Not just from my world—but from all worlds? Was this the true end?

There is nothing beyond here, it continued.

I tried to process its meaning, but the weight of those words pressed down on me. I understood, yet at the same time, I didn't. No beyond? No elsewhere?

Then where can I take refuge? I asked, my voice quieter than before. Where can I go?

There is no 'outside' to the Eternal Void.

This thing—whatever it was—held all the answers, but it spoke in riddles, as if it enjoyed watching me struggle to piece them together. Then if I cannot go outside, I thought, can I go inside?

You said this void covers the worlds, I pressed. Can I enter the worlds instead?

For the first time, the shadow shifted in a way that felt intentional, deliberate. It leaned forward—or at least, the darkness condensed, as though a great force was folding in on itself. The sensation was suffocating.

Then, a sound—one I could only describe as a snicker, though it carried the weight of a thousand dying stars.

Entering and exiting worlds is a miracle done by gods. A puny soul like yours cannot do such a thing.

A puny soul. The way it said it made it clear that, in its eyes, I was insignificant. A speck of dust clinging to the edges of a far greater existence. It had no reason to acknowledge me, yet it did. That alone was terrifying.

But its words weren't a denial. They were a boundary. A rule. Which meant there was some way for a soul to enter the worlds.

Then… is there any other way? I asked, carefully choosing my words.

The shadow stirred, shifting like ink dissolving in water. It had expected me to give up. It wanted me to give up. But I didn't.

Silence stretched between us. The hum of the void grew deeper. Then—

You are a stubborn one, for sure.

And for the first time, I felt something from it. Not amusement. Not condescension. Something far more dangerous.

Interest.

The void around me thickened, pressing in from all directions. The formless mass of darkness shifted once more, and though it had no face, I could feel it smirk.

There is a way.

The words slithered through the silence like a whisper in the dark.

I swallowed, bracing myself. How?

A pause. A lingering moment stretched between my question and its answer, but I already knew—whatever it was about to say would change everything.

Then, finally, it spoke.

The Labyrinth.