"Before creation, there was only silence. Before silence, there was thought trying to remember what it was."
The light was gone.
No, not gone—erased.
One moment, Crystal had been falling through light. The next, there was nothing.No ground.No sky.No sound.
Only nothingness.
She didn't know if her eyes were open or closed; there was no difference. The darkness—or whatever it was—had swallowed everything, even the concept of direction.
She tried to move, but her body didn't respond. Or maybe she didn't have one anymore. She couldn't tell.
Her mind whispered to her: Move.But there was no movement.It was as if the thought simply vanished before reaching its destination.
Crystal tried again, harder this time—lifting her hand, turning her head, anything—but the commands dissolved in the same emptiness.
A strange thought crossed her mind.
Am I floating… or lying down?
She tried to look, but there was nothing to look at. No light, no form, not even shadow.
Time didn't exist here. She couldn't tell if a second or a century had passed.
She opened her mouth to scream. Nothing came out. Not even silence.
Even the idea of sound felt foreign, as though it belonged to another world entirely.
For a long time—maybe minutes, maybe eternity—she drifted like that, trapped between existence and nothingness.
At first, her thoughts were sharp. She counted memories like beads: faces, voices, battles, laughter.But as the void continued, those memories began to fade, not all at once, but in fragments.
Her sister's smile became hazy. Her master's voice grew faint. The battlefield that had once reeked of blood and steel now seemed like a distant dream.
She tried to hold onto them, clutching at the fragments in her mind, but they slipped through her grasp like smoke.
"What… was I?" she tried to think. "Who… am I?"
No answer.
Her name—Crystal—started to sound wrong in her thoughts. Like a word spoken by someone else.
Something deeper was unraveling. Her sense of self began to disintegrate.
The longer she stayed, the more meaningless everything became.
What was "up"?What was "down"?Why was she thinking at all?
Each question hollowed her further, until she could no longer separate thought from nothing.
Her mind drifted like a leaf in a bottomless river.
At some point—she couldn't tell when—the questions changed.
No longer "who am I," but "what is anything?"
What is existence?
What does it mean to be?
Had I ever truly existed… or was I simply a dream?
Her thoughts tangled and frayed. She tried to remember the sensation of breathing, of touch, of pain—but even those had no meaning now.
Existence itself began to dissolve, thinning until she wasn't sure if she was the one thinking or if the void was thinking her.
Maybe she was the void. Maybe there had never been anything else.
The idea frightened her for a moment—then even fear faded.
She was forgetting what fear felt like.
Her consciousness dimmed, collapsing inward until only a faint whisper remained—a single spark of awareness drifting in the dark.
Then even that started to fade.
At the edge of oblivion, she wondered one final thought:
Maybe this is what dying truly means.
But just before her mind could vanish completely—
A light appeared.
Small, faint, but unmistakably there.
It flickered before her like a candle in a storm, cutting through the nothingness.
Her fading thoughts instinctively reached toward it.
The light pulsed once—and became a screen.
Green. Familiar.
[Host body has been found through time.]
Starting extraction.
Error: Body too young.
Moving forward a moment in time.
Restarting extraction... 10%... 30%... 50%... 70%...
The words glowed softly in the void. Crystal stared at them—if "staring" was even possible here.
The sight of something—anything—filled her with something she hadn't felt in what could've been eternity.Hope.
She tried to move toward it. Her will struggled to form, sluggish and uncertain, but she tried anyway.
Her voice—or the memory of it—echoed faintly. "Please… don't leave."
The green light didn't respond. It simply continued to flicker, lines of text streaming across it like ripples in the dark.
Extraction process stabilizing...
Crystal focused all of herself on that single point of light.
She clung to it as if her entire being depended on it—because it did.
That small green screen became her anchor.
She could feel her thoughts sharpening slightly. The endless fog that had filled her mind began to thin. She was something.She existed.
"I'm… here," she whispered, though the sound still made no noise. "I'm still here."
Her consciousness pulsed faintly, the green glow reflecting across what remained of her soul.
She pushed harder, forcing her awareness into focus, using the screen as the center of her world.
For a moment, it worked. The nothingness receded just a little. She could feel again—not her body, but the shape of her own will.
The screen reacted.
Extraction complete.
Proceeding to inject soul into body...
And awakening system.
The words glowed brighter, flooding the void with their light.
Crystal could feel herself being pulled—slowly, gently—toward something new.
The emptiness around her began to ripple. The void trembled as if resisting the pull, but the green light only grew stronger.
For the first time since her death, Crystal felt something other than despair.Not peace. Not joy.Just the faint, trembling realization that she was not gone.
Her last thought before everything faded into green light was a whisper, faint but certain:
"I exist."
The green screen pulsed again, steady and rhythmic, like a heartbeat in the emptiness.
New words began to appear, lines forming one after another in front of her.
[1%...][5%...][7%...][20%...]
Each number shimmered faintly before fading into the next, their glow cutting through the surrounding nothing.
Crystal watched, mesmerized. The more the numbers rose, the more real the light felt.
[Creating link from host body to current soul...]
She didn't know what it meant. But she didn't care. The words were something—something real.
As she read them, she felt the faintest pull deep inside her, like invisible threads trying to tie her back together.
She closed her eyes—not that it made any difference—and focused.If she had to will herself into existence again, then she would.
Her thoughts reached toward the glowing screen, her will wrapping around each word, each number, as if feeding on their light.
"I'm not gone," she thought. "I still exist."
The light flickered, brighter than before, as if answering her determination.
[45%...][68%...][90%...]
Her surroundings began to tremble faintly. The nothingness rippled outward, like a vast ocean stirred by an unseen wind.
Crystal could feel something shifting—not around her, but within her. A pulse, faint but growing stronger with each passing second.
The screen flared once more.
[100% - Link established.]
The words burned themselves into her mind.
A low hum filled the void, followed by a burst of emerald light.
[Restarting system...]
That was when it appeared.
A light—different from the green glow of the screen—emerged above her.It was soft at first, a whisper of warmth that touched the edges of her fading soul.
Then it began to grow.
The light descended slowly, tendrils of radiance reaching out and wrapping around her—if she even had a "her" anymore.
The sensation was strange. Comforting, yet heavy.It felt like being pulled through layers of her own existence, like sinking into herself while rising at the same time.
The light coiled tighter, wrapping the nothingness that was her form into a defined shape. It clung to her, surrounding every fragment of her soul, holding it together.
She didn't fight it. She welcomed it.
The glow enveloped her completely, sealing her within a cocoon of light.
For the first time in what felt like eternity, Crystal felt weight—presence—being.
The void trembled again, and the green screen flickered once more.
[System reboot successful.]
The words echoed softly as the light drew her deeper into its core, dragging her toward a world she could not yet see.
And as the final trace of the void began to collapse behind her, Crystal's last thought was a whisper of defiance and hope.
"If this is rebirth… then let me begin again."
"Even in nothingness, chaos remembers its name."