823 Years Ago – 2024
Yoo Seung-yoon died in an alley that smelled like piss and rotting garbage.
Not how he'd imagined going out. He'd always figured it'd be a heart attack at his desk — another late night debugging code, energy drinks stacked like monuments to poor life choices, his body finally saying enough.
Instead: wrong place, wrong time, wrong fucking city.
The gang firefight had erupted without warning. One moment he was walking home from the convenience store, ramyeon and beer in a plastic bag. The next, muzzle flashes lit up the narrow street like a strobe light, and something hot punched through his chest.
He'd dropped the bag. The beer can rolled away, foaming.
That's gonna stain, he thought stupidly, watching his blood pool on the concrete.
The gangs kept shooting. Nobody noticed the civilian caught in the crossfire. Nobody cared. In Seoul's forgotten districts, people died every day.
Yoo pressed his hand against the wound. Blood leaked between his fingers, warm and slick. His game developer brain tried to calculate blood loss rates, time to unconsciousness, survival probability.
Zero percent.
He laughed — bubbling, wet sound.
All those late nights finishing the game. All that crunching to meet deadlines. For what? To die in an alley at twenty-nine, alone, surrounded by strangers who'd step over his corpse on their way to work tomorrow.
The world dimmed at the edges.
I had things I wanted to do, he thought. Places I wanted to see. A game I wanted to finish.
I wasn't done yet.
Darkness took him.
But that wasn't the end.
The Void Between
Yoo's soul scattered.
That wasn't supposed to happen.
Normal souls — when they died — went… somewhere. Heaven, hell, reincarnation cycle, oblivion. Pick your mythology. But they went intact.
His didn't.
The moment of death coincided with something else. Something vast and incomprehensible touching Earth for a fraction of a second — a tendril of cosmic energy, searching, cataloging, analyzing this insignificant planet for future use.
It brushed through Seoul. Through that alley. Through Yoo's dying body.
His soul fragmented like glass under a hammer.
Pieces of consciousness scattered across dimensional barriers. Some fragments dissolved immediately, unable to maintain cohesion. Others drifted in the void between realities — not alive, not dead, just… existing.
Time didn't work normally in the void. Seconds could be centuries. Centuries could be heartbeats.
Yoo's fragments floated. Disconnected. Each piece containing memories, personality fragments, skills. But none whole enough to be called a person.
I'm forgetting, one fragment thought — the piece that held his name.
What was I? another wondered — the piece containing his profession.
Why does this hurt? whispered a third — the emotional core, forever replaying that moment of death.
They drifted apart. Slowly losing coherence.
In another thousand years, there would be nothing left — just background radiation, cosmic dust, forgotten.
But 823 years after his death — subjective time; actual time was meaningless here — something changed.
The void pulled.
The Gathering
Two entities started a game.
Aethon and Chaos, positioning themselves above Earth like grandmasters over a chessboard.
Their power was so immense that reality bent around them, creating ripples that propagated backward and forward through time.
One ripple touched the void where Yoo's fragments drifted.
Pull.
The fragments felt it. After 823 years of dissolution, suddenly there was direction. Purpose. A destination.
Come, the energy seemed to say. You are needed.
The fragments moved. Slowly at first, then faster. Like iron filings drawn to a magnet, they began to coalesce.
The piece holding his name found the piece holding his memories. They merged — awkward, painful, like torn flesh knitting back together.
Yoo Seung-yoon, the combined fragment remembered. I am — I was —
Another piece joined. His skills — coding, game design, system architecture. The analytical mind that could break down complex problems into manageable components.
I made games, the growing consciousness recalled. I created worlds.
More fragments arrived — his personality, sarcastic, tired, cynical but fundamentally decent. His determination — the part that stayed up seventy-two hours straight to fix a game-breaking bug because players deserved better.
The emotional core was last. It came reluctantly, still carrying the pain of death, the regret of an unfinished life.
When it merged, Yoo Seung-yoon was whole for the first time in 823 years.
And he screamed.
Not physically — he had no body. But his consciousness shrieked with the agony of reformation, of pieces forced back together, of memories flooding back all at once.
I died I died I died I died—
Wrong place wrong time bullet through chest beer can rolling—
I wasn't done I wasn't ready I had things to do—
The scream echoed through dimensional barriers. Then, gradually, it faded.
Yoo's consciousness stabilized. Whole. Aware. Confused as hell.
Where am I?
He couldn't see. Had no eyes. Couldn't feel. Had no body. But he was aware — more aware than he'd been in the void's timeless drift.
What happened?
Memories sorted themselves. Death. Fragmentation. Void. Time. So much time. Then gathering. Then—
Now.
Am I dead? Is this the afterlife?
Before he could process further, something grabbed him.
Not physically. But he felt it — cosmic energies wrapping around his reforming soul like fingers around a marble. Lifting. Pulling. Directing.
Where are you taking me?
No answer. Just movement.
He was being dragged through dimensions, through barriers that should have been impassable, through layers of reality his human mind couldn't comprehend.
Then — impact.
The Womb
Yoo slammed into something.
There was flesh around him. Warm. Wet. Confining. His consciousness pressed against biological matter — a body, but not his. Wrong size. Wrong shape.
What the—
He tried to move. Couldn't. His awareness was trapped in this tiny space, this cramped prison of flesh and fluid.
Oh god. Oh no. No no no no—
Understanding hit like a second death.
He was in a womb.
I've been reincarnated.
Panic surged. He tried to reject it, tried to pull his consciousness back out, tried to escape—
Pain.
Blinding, excruciating pain. His soul and this body were binding together, melding at a level deeper than physics. He couldn't separate even if he wanted to.
The binding process was wrong. Normal reincarnation — if such a thing existed — would start fresh. New soul, new body, natural development from conception.
This wasn't that.
His soul was adult. Fully formed. Complete with twenty-nine years of memories, personality, skills.
Trying to cram all that into a fetal brain was like downloading a terabyte of data onto a floppy disk.
The body convulsed. He felt it — his first physical sensation in 823 years. Tiny limbs twitched. Heart stuttered. Brain matter tried to accommodate consciousness far too large for it.
I'm killing this baby, Yoo realized with horror. My presence is too much. This body can't handle—
Then something else activated.
A voice.
Not external. Not the baby's. Something that was now part of him, born from the merger of his reforming soul and the cosmic energies that had gathered him.
"I am Akasha Archive," the voice said calmly, clinically.
"Initiating emergency protocols. Adjusting host body to accommodate consciousness. Estimated time: 47 hours. Warning: process will be extremely uncomfortable."
Who the fuck are you?
"I am your innate skill. Born from the unique circumstances of your reincarnation. Designation: Akasha Archive.
Function: information storage, analysis, optimization.
I am not external. I am you."
Before Yoo could process that, the adjustment began.