In this world, death was not forgotten.It had never existed.
From the first breath of humankind, no one had ever taken their last.
They bled, but their wounds sealed. They aged, but only to seventy-five—then the process halted, as if the body itself refused to decay. No sickness could claim them, no weapon could end them.
Humanity endured eternally, untouched by endings.
The people thought it natural. After all, how could one fear something they had never known? They built their empires without urgency, raised monuments to themselves, and watched the world bend beneath the weight of their forever.
Yet everything else still perished.
Beasts rotted in the fields. Forests died and regrew. Oceans dried and returned. Stars lived and burned away. Only humanity remained constant—watching the universe cycle through death and rebirth while they stood still.
In time, even the wisest began to sense it: the world itself was moving on without them. The flow of creation circled endlessly, yet humanity stayed anchored in a single moment.
They were not blessed.They were stuck.
Without death, they could not learn the worth of life. Without loss, they could not love without greed.
And so, as the eons stretched thin, the question began to whisper across generations:
"If we were never meant to die… were we ever truly meant to live?"
The question spread like rot through the perfect world, until curiosity turned to obsession. Philosophers became heretics. Scientists became zealots. Some sought to create endings—to prove that humans could be undone, that something greater still ruled over them.
From that obsession, the first prototypes of the Essence Eraser were born.
It was not meant to kill—no one even understood the word. It was meant to return. To pull humanity back into the cycle of life and loss that the rest of existence had long accepted.
They only wanted to find the beauty in ending.But what they discovered… was how to end everything.
The First Unmaking;
They called the first experiment modestly: a null test. A hidden crucible, an obedient machine, a handful of living things taken from the wild and set beneath the device's cold mouth. No one had words for "death"—only for absence. The machine hummed, the air bent, and all trace of life simply left the bodies as if someone had plucked a note from a song. The corpses remained, intact and warm, but the spark that had made them alive was gone. Silence pressed against the lab's glass like a hand.
Those who watched did not recoil. For many, relief came first. For the first time, something that had been unknowable — an ending — stood visible and controllable. Scholars sighed with vindication. Priests called it the return of meaning. Kings and warlords called it a tool. What began as an academic obsession became a temptation: if life could be unmade, then unmaking could be used to prune away what had outlived its purpose—famine, pestilence, entire enemy populations.
The method of forging the device did not stay secret. In a single private forum, a disgruntled architect posted schematics the way a poet posts a stanza—believing the world needed to see the truth. It spread like a virus among the powerful: a leaked plan reached a small court, that court bartered it to a corporation, that corporation sold it to an admiral, that admiral traded it for fuel. Within one generation the knowledge had been reverse-engineered, simplified, weaponized. A thousand workshops with a thousand different names produced variants—some crude, some elegant, all catastrophic.
Ambition made the rest inevitable. Feuds that had simmered for centuries flared into wars that spanned systems. Armies no longer sent soldiers to die; they sent devices to erase. Cities were cleansed of life in tactical strikes. Entire species were culled not for survival but for convenience. Rulers rationalized. Scientists justified. Markets commodified the technology with cold, clinical indices: unit cost, field range, erasure—measured in kilowaves of living potential. The moral language of the world withered; in its place, a ledger grew.
Desperation brought innovation. To make the eraser effective across the vacuum and distance of space, engineers of cruelty devised a way to amplify its field with stellar engines—four titanic blue stars repurposed as carriers, their fusion fires tuned into channels for the erasing waveform. When the stars sang together, the field rippled outward like a tide across cosmos. Systems went quiet in hours. Whole constellations dimmed as if someone let out breath. The weapon had grown from an instrument of mercy into an instrument of extinction.
Chaos reaped chaos. Nations that could not build stars bought off those who could; alliances shattered into vultures circling the last markets of power. The last century of the universe became a frenzy of theft and salvage—ships plundering archives, cults hoarding schematics, emperors igniting engineered suns to make room for their legacies. In the end, there was no winner, only a silence that spread in every direction.
And in that silence, one thing happened that none of them intended. The eraser did not destroy life so much as gather it—extract its essence and lodge it somewhere else, a place the instruments could not read. When the last harmonized field ran its course across a region of space, the bodies remained, the lights died, and the essence of what had been alive vanished into a resonance no sensor could chart. In one last lunatic attempt to harness and contain that resonance, the weapon bowed back upon its operator. Where the blade of intent had been, a hollow opened—an aperture into something beyond physics. A single human being found himself at the center of that aperture as everything else went out like a candle.
He did not go out.
Instead, he took it all.
The field collapsed into him as if into a basin. The stolen, scattered sparks of countless lives flowed inward and pooled in a space no map had known. For a heartbeat that expanded into an epoch, a realm of windows — of moments — winked open around him. Then everything went black. The universe grew quieter than quiet. Only one heartbeat remained to mark its passing.
When the last echo faded, the galaxy had a single name for what remained: the last living thing.
The Source Realm;
Jac awoke without breath.
He drifted in a place that was not space but between spaces—an expanse without stars, without direction, without sound. Around him floated countless shards of light, thin and curved like glass. When he turned toward one, it rippled and opened, revealing a world within: mountains, oceans, skies, people. Life.
Each shard was a window.
He reached for one. It pulsed faintly under his touch, then showed him a city of silver towers beneath a red sun. Another showed an endless sea devouring a continent. Another, a forest where the air glowed blue with drifting spores. Everywhere he looked, something lived. Everywhere he looked, something died.
For a long time, he did not understand. He was sure he had perished with the rest of them—yet here he was, awake in a silence that felt alive.
Time had no meaning there. It might have been minutes or millennia before he stopped trying to measure it. Confusion dulled into acceptance, and acceptance hardened into thought.
"So this is what remains", he murmured, though no sound left his lips. A vault of moments… a map of all that was.
He named it the Source Realm—the only name that felt true. It was not an afterlife nor a heaven; it was before and beyond. A place outside causality where the roots of existence tangled together.
He soon learned its cruel wonder: the windows did not show a single history. They showed every history.
Some worlds bloomed differently—civilizations rising earlier or later, new stars being born where others had died. But in every reflection, the same pattern unfolded. Sooner or later, humanity found the design for the Essence Eraser. Sooner or later, someone lit the stars and erased creation.
And each time, when the last light dimmed, Jac stood once more in this same endless realm.
There were versions where he tried to interfere—sending echoes of himself into the worlds before they fell. There were versions where he waited in silence, hoping the pattern would break. None of them ended differently.
Every reality collapsed into this stillness, this Source Realm, with him at its center.
He stopped counting how many times he'd seen everything end. He stopped hoping that anything could change.
Until, somewhere among the infinite windows, he saw one that flickered differently—its light unstable, its pattern unwritten. A world where the laws of creation were still young, ungoverned.
For the first time in ages beyond measure, Jac felt something stir within him.
If all paths lead here, he thought, then perhaps I must begin where paths have not yet been made.
He turned toward that window, reached through the light, and stepped into the beginning.