1. The void never counts
I woke up in the void.
No ground beneath me. No horizon to guide me. Just endless, suffocating nothingness.
There was no light, no darkness—only absence.
I floated, weightless, yet I was not free.
I felt no warmth, no cold. No hunger. No thirst. My body remained whole, sustained by something beyond my understanding, as if energy itself endlessly coursed through me. I was neither alive nor dead, yet I endured.
The only proof of my existence came from within.
Thump.
A heartbeat. A single pulse in the void.
Thump.
It repeated—steady. Certain. The only thing anchoring me to myself.
But that was not the real problem.
What do you think is the greatest enemy of a sentient being?
Not predators. Not nature. Not even death.
It is thought.
With nothing to perceive, nothing to distract me, my mind turned inward, spiraling endlessly. No sound. No movement. No change. No escape.
I knew I would go mad.
I couldn't stop it. So I let it happen.
I laughed. I screamed. I whispered nonsense into the abyss.
"KEKEKEKE—where was I again?"
"Ohh~~ HAHAHAHAHA!"
"It's nothing, nothing, nothing at all!"
My voice slashed through the silence, but the silence did not answer.
There is NOTHING.
My words fell empty, swallowed by the abyss.
And then—amidst the chaos, something surfaced.
A thought.
Small at first. A flicker in the abyss.
The only thing keeping me from dissolving into nothingness was the one thing I could still feel.
Thump. Thump.
The rhythm of my own heart.
I held onto it. Focused. Clung to it as if it were the last thread tethering me to reality.
Time passed—or perhaps it didn't. But I counted.
One beat. Then another.
One plus one.
A simple thought. Absurdly so. But in the void, it was everything.
"One beat of my heart. Then another. Together, they are always two. Never three. Never anything else. But why?"
A trace of order formed within the chaos.
"A rule…? Who decided this? Why do multiple ones combine to form something greater?"
I had known this before. I had lived by these rules. And yet, how could I be certain?
Had I simply accepted the world as it was?
Had I ever questioned why?
I counted again. Numbers. Patterns. Sequences. They did not emerge from nothing. They followed something deeper—something absolute.
I lost my mind.
And then I found it.
Madness and sanity. Delusion and enlightenment. A cycle that repeated endlessly, spiraling upward.
My thoughts consumed themselves, feeding upon their own contradictions, collapsing and reforming into something new.
With each iteration, my mind unraveled and rewove itself, shedding its former limits. The boundaries of thought stretched, fractured, and then expanded beyond recognition—until at last, my very cognition transcended its innate constraints, evolving into something capable of grasping everything.
And then, at last—understanding bloomed.
I reached a conclusion.
Numbers were not mere symbols. They were echoes of something deeper. A hidden order beneath the surface of randomness. A law that existed not because someone created it, but because it had to be.
I dug deeper.
Division. The Pythagorean theorem. Newton's laws. Einstein's equations. None of these were human inventions.
They were discoveries.
Truths that had always existed, waiting to be seen.
Mathematics was not a creation—it was a revelation.
Numbers were not real in themselves; they were shadows of something greater. Tools to impose order upon chaos. A coincidence, and yet an inevitability. A paradox.
"The void never counts."
"Yet I do."
And in that instant, my mind cracked open.
I saw it.
Patterns. Sequences. Ratios—woven into every breath, every motion, every fabric of existence.
Gravity was not merely a pull. It was an equation.
Light was not just illumination. It was a waveform.
Matter itself danced to an unseen rhythm, shifting, vibrating, obeying rules I had only begun to grasp.
I saw beyond numbers.
I saw the fundamental truths that shaped all things.
And then—the void stirred.
Something was watching.
Something that had been waiting.
And for the first time…
It spoke.