A strange sensation pulled him back to consciousness—like being dragged from the depths of a bottomless ocean.
He opened his eyes.
There was no sky. No ground. No stars.
Only an endless void, stretching in every direction. A place without color, sound, or time. He floated weightlessly, his body adrift in a sea of nothingness.
Then—pain.
A burning sensation surged through his veins, as if his body were being rewritten. His mind pulsed with fragmented visions—stars collapsing, civilizations burning, a million voices crying out and then fading into silence.
And the voice from before.
"You are not meant to exist."
He clenched his fists. "Then why am I still here?"
Something shifted in the void.
A ripple. A distortion in the fabric of reality itself. From it, a figure emerged.
It wasn't human. It wasn't anything he had ever seen before. Its form constantly shifted—one moment, a towering silhouette wrapped in shadows; the next, a celestial being made of pure light.
The entity stared at him, though it had no eyes.
"A lost fragment... an anomaly... a mistake."
Its voice rang directly in his skull, sending shivers down his spine.
He gritted his teeth. "I don't care what I am. Just tell me where I am."
"You stand at the edge of existence. The place between what was and what will be. A soul without a world... a traveler without a path."
The void trembled. Cracks of light splintered across the darkness.
"You are being rejected by reality itself."
Before he could react, the world around him collapsed.
The void shattered like glass, and his body was thrown through a tunnel of spiraling lights and chaotic energy.
He was falling.
Through space. Through time. Through existence itself.
A new journey had begun.