Chapter 1: The Cosmic Lottery
The darkness.
That was my first and only coherent thought during a span that could well have been a blink or a geological eternity. It wasn't the familiar darkness of an unlit room or of squeezing your eyes shut. It was an absolute blackness, a fundamental and oppressive absence of everything.
There was no up or down, no cold or heat, not even the persistent feeling of my own body, that physical anchor we take for granted until it vanishes. It was just... consciousness. An "I" distilled to its purest essence, stripped of flesh and bone, drifting in an infinite sea of nothingness.
'Am I dead?', was the next logical question, one that arose not with the urgency of panic, but with the quiet resignation of someone confirming an inevitable diagnosis.
'Yes, it seems so. I remember the dry burst, the brutal impact on my chest, the glacial cold spreading from the wound. I remember the blood, hot and metallic, and then... this. The silence after the noise.'
The panic my mortal mind would have expected never arrived. How can you panic without a heart to accelerate into a hammer against your ears, or without lungs desperately fighting for air you no longer need?
My existence had been reduced to an endless internal monologue, a solitary echo in a cathedral of void. To combat the madness I felt creeping at the edges of my consciousness, I tried to impose a routine.
I started counting. One, two, three... I counted until the numbers lost their meaning, becoming empty syllables. I lost count after what felt like several million, a feat of memory that my organic brain never could have achieved.
When counting was no longer enough, I resorted to memories. I reconstructed my life piece by piece, with an almost painful clarity. I relived the taste of the office coffee, stale and bitter, the touch of the cracked plastic of the bus seat, the smell of wood and spices of my cologne. I remembered every movie I watched, every line of code I wrote, every book I read. I relived my death a thousand times, not with the trauma of pain, but with the detached curiosity of a scientist studying a specimen under a microscope.
The reflection provided momentary solace, a small spark of meaning in the void. But the void is patient. The void erodes.
'Ah, I wonder how much time has passed,' I thought, feeling the edges of my sanity beginning to fray again. 'Literally, I've gone mad and sane at least three times that I can count. I remember the first time I lost my mind. It was a silent terror. In a world of darkness, the only thing you have is your mind, and when your own mind becomes the monster, there is nowhere to run. It's terrifying. With no one to talk to, see, hear, converse with... each time I feel myself ceasing to feel things. Not on the physical plane, but the emotional one. Before, I was terrified of being alone; now it's just a fact, an environmental condition in the course of my prolonged visit to the darkness.'
The madness became a tide. It came in waves, dragging the remnants of my identity with it, and then retreated, leaving me stranded on the shore of exhausted lucidity.
'Ah, the beautiful darkness. I wish I were more creative to create a poem, or an analogy for my current situation. But words feel hollow here. They are just more noise in the silence.'
I began to call out, not with a voice, but with a pulse of pure intention, a flare of consciousness launched into the void.
Hello darkness, my old friend…
'HELLO... IS ANYONE THERE?'
'Hello?'
'Hello, whoever you are, please. Even if you're a cosmic entity, I don't care if you want my soul or to corrupt my mind. That would be better than this absolute, crushing, unbearable nothingness.'
'Hellooooo…?'
'Helloo?...'
'Hello...'
'La…'
'….'
'….'
'….'
'Oh, hello again, sanity. I think I lost my head again. Is this the tenth time it's happened? Or the eleventh? I've lost count of the times I've lost count.'
A sigh that wasn't a sigh, an exhalation of pure mental fatigue, passed through my being. 'Yes, I'll definitely be staying here for a while longer.'
Time ceased to have meaning. Boredom became my only companion, a boredom so deep and existential that madness seemed like an entertaining alternative. And just when I thought I would dissolve into that nothingness, that my consciousness would simply turn off again, this time forever... something answered.
….
The voice, or the idea of a voice, resonated in Leo's consciousness, not as a sound, but as an imprinted truth.
The impossible polyhedron floating before him stopped spinning. One of its countless faces, one that displayed a spiral galaxy of a vibrant purple, lit up softly. The light did not project outwards, but seemed to fold space-time around it, attracting the nothingness and giving it shape.
A new structure materialized in the limbo. It did not grow or build; it simply transitioned from non-existence to existence. It was a wheel, or something resembling a wheel, of a size so colossal that Leo's consciousness felt like a grain of dust beside it. It was not made of wood or metal, but of a substance that looked like solidified light, a dark crystal that absorbed the faint glow of Leo's consciousness and returned it multiplied in a spectrum of colors he had never seen.
The wheel was divided into countless segments, each engraved with strange, fluid symbols that shifted and twisted as if they were alive. They were not letters of any known alphabet, but pure concepts. Leo, thanks to the strange perception granted by his new fused consciousness, could sense the meaning of some of them.
'Skill template? Like in a video game?', Leo thought. The absurdity of the situation was so overwhelming that if he had had a face, he would have smiled. His entire life, a search for simplicity, had culminated in being processed by a cosmic bureaucracy to reincarnate with a random character sheet.
It was the ultimate complication, a joke of such a vast scale that it was almost poetic.
Leo concentrated. He didn't know how to "manifest intent" without a body, but he focused on the idea of the wheel spinning, on the memory of movement, on the simple desire for something, anything, to happen.
The great wheel responded. With a sound that was both a deep hum and the chiming of a thousand crystal bells, it began to spin.
Slowly at first, then faster and faster, until the individual segments became a blur of light and color, a whirlwind of potential destinies. The symbols on each segment glowed intensely, each representing a life of power, genius, tragedy, or glory.
Leo watched, hypnotized. He saw concepts pass that his human mind could barely graze. "Control over Gravity," "Affinity with Entropy," "Mastery of Sound." And among them, he recognized names from the stories he had loved in his past life, echoes of his personal data archive projected into this cosmic lottery.
He saw the "Tony Stark's Intellect" pass, glowing with the cold, blue light of an arc reactor. He saw the "Goku's Saiyan Power," burning with a golden, furious aura. He saw the "Spider-Man's Spider Sense," vibrating with a pattern of red and blue energy webbing. He saw the "Urahara Kisuke's Template," a complex and deceptive symbol that seemed to change shape every time he looked at it. He saw the "Ging Freecss' Nen Talent," a pure, adaptable energy that promised limitless freedom.
Each was a promise, a life of complications and wonders that dwarfed his previous existence. The wheel spun, a carousel of impossible futures.
Leo didn't know what that meant, but he waited. The sound of the wheel was hypnotic, and for a moment, he wondered what would happen. Would he become a genius inventor? A star warrior? A hero swinging through skyscrapers? The irony was delicious. He, who had never wanted anything, now found himself on the threshold of being able to be everything.
The wheel began to slow down. The blur of colors separated back into individual segments. The chiming of the bells grew slower, each note hanging in the limbo with a heavy finality.
Click. Click. Click.
The "Saiyan Power" passed. The "Stark's Intellect" passed. The "Spider Sense" passed with a flash.
The wheel stopped.
The segment that remained facing him glowed with a soft, mysterious light, a color that was both all colors and none. The symbols on it were more complex, more ancient than the others. And the name that resonated in his consciousness was not familiar to him at all.
There was silence. Leo waited for an explanation, a description, an instruction manual. None came.
'Timothy Hunter?', he thought. 'I've never heard of him.'
The cosmic administrator offered no clarification. The result was the result. The template had been assigned.
…..
The colossal dark crystal wheel stopped, its last echo of crystal bells fading into the stillness of the limbo. The segment that had sealed his destiny, "Timothy Hunter's Talent," glowed with a soft, enigmatic light before the entire structure began to dissolve.
It didn't break or vanish; it simply lost its definition, its edges blurring, the solidified light becoming ethereal until it merged back with the nothingness from which it had sprung.
Leo was alone once more, floating in the void in front of the geometric administrator.
'Timothy Hunter?', the thought spun in his new consciousness, no longer as a simple question, but as a piece of data without context, a file with no program to open it. 'A wizard? A hero? A villain? Or just a guy with an unfortunate name?' The lack of information was almost worse than having obtained a template he didn't like.
The "Saiyan Power" was simple: you get angry, you turn blonde, you shoot energy blasts. The "Stark's Intellect" was understandable: you build things, you are sarcastic.
But "Talent"... was a variable so vague, so empty of meaning, that it was overwhelming. It was a complication wrapped in a mystery.
'What does it mean?', he projected the thought, this time with a desperate urgency. 'What is the talent? Where am I going? What are the rules?'
The geometric entity remained motionless, its polyhedral shape indifferent to his growing panic. The questions were irrelevant to the process. The system was not designed for user comfort, only for its function.
'Wait! No! What do you mean by random?!', Leo conceptually screamed, feeling a panic he hadn't experienced since the moment of the car accident. The first wheel had been a lottery, yes, but at least he had seen the options. This... this was falling blind. Would he go to a fantasy world? A science fiction utopia? Or a cosmic horror hell where his "talent" would be useless?
The uncertainty was a torture worse than the nothingness he had endured. He had resigned himself to his fate, he had accepted the randomness of the wheels, but the imminence of the next step, the plunge toward a life he hadn't chosen, with a power he didn't understand, in a place he didn't know... was terrifying.
It was the only farewell, as personal as an automatic "thank you for your purchase" message. And with those final words, the geometric figure began to lose its definition. Its sharp edges softened, its faces showing universes became blurred, and it folded in on itself, disappearing into a point of non-existence.
Leo was alone.
For an instant.
The next, the entire limbo seemed to contract around him. The nothingness, which had been his only constant, became a whirlwind. He felt an irresistible pull, not up or down, but inward, as if the entire universe had turned into a cosmic drain and he was trapped in the center of the vortex.
The sensation was overwhelming. If he had had a body, he would have screamed. The stillness was replaced by dizzying movement. His consciousness, which had floated freely, was compressed, stretched, and dragged through a tunnel of non-space. Colors he had seen on the first wheel, sounds he had heard, sensations that had no name, bombarded him from all directions.
It was the process of birth, but on a cosmic scale. He was being poured from one plane of existence to another.
And then, his senses, which had been dormant since his death, began to return, but in a disorderly and chaotic way.
First came the sound. Not a clear sound, but a heartbeat. A rhythmic, deep, constant beat that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Thump thump. Thump thump. It was an organic sound, alive, and strangely comforting amid the chaos of transit.
Then came touch. The sensation of heat. A damp, enveloping heat, like being suspended in a warm ocean. He felt a soft, constant pressure around him, a containment that was not a prison, but a refuge.
After that, the light. Not a bright light, but a reddish, diffuse glow, like looking through closed eyelids on a sunny day. It was a soft, pulsing light, which seemed to move to the rhythm of the heartbeat he was hearing.
And finally, the awareness of a body. Not the body of a twenty two year old man, but something much smaller, more compact. He felt the strange sensation of having limbs he didn't quite know how to move, a body that didn't fully belong to him yet.
Leo's data archive, his twenty two year old life, was still there, intact. But now it was locked up, encapsulated within a new consciousness that was awakening. It was like an old operating system installed on a new, powerful computer, present but not active.
The fall ended. The chaotic journey through the void ceased. He found himself floating in this new state, in this red, pulsating warmth, adrift in the current of a new life. The simplicity he had longed for was gone forever. The complications were just beginning.
The fall through the tunnel of non-space ended with a feeling not of impact, but of compression. It was an immense, overwhelming pressure, from all directions at once, as if the entire universe was squeezing him through the eye of a needle. The reddish, diffuse glow that had been his only visual companion intensified into a blinding white light, and the rhythmic heartbeat that had been his soundtrack accelerated, becoming a deafening thunder.
And then, for the first time in what felt like an eternity, he felt the air.
It was a shock. A torrent of cold, sterile air that flooded his newly formed lungs, forcing them into action. It was an act of violence, an effort so monumental that his entire new, tiny body convulsed in response. A sharp, tearing sound escaped his mouth, a sound he did not control, a primal cry of a biological system forcibly set in motion.
The world was a sensory overload. The light was too bright, stabbing his unaccustomed eyes. The sounds were a confusing cacophony: soft voices speaking a language his data archive recognized as English, the rhythmic beeping of a machine, the rustle of cloth. The smell was antiseptic, metallic.
'Is this... birth?', thought Leo's consciousness, a silent, terrified observer trapped inside the small, crying body. He was trapped. The control he had, even the passive control of his consciousness in the limbo, was gone. He was now a prisoner in a cage of flesh that did not obey his orders. His arms and legs flailed without his permission, his lungs screamed without his consent. It was the most absolute loss of control he could imagine, a complication taken to its most intimate extreme.
He felt the touch of hands. They were not a mother's hands. They were firm, efficient, covered with the slick sensation of latex. They wiped him, weighed him, measured him. The movements were clinical, not loving.
"A healthy boy," said a voice, muffled, as if heard underwater. "Three and a half kilos. Time of maternal passing... 02:14 AM."
"And the father?" asked another, more tired voice.
"Not listed on the record. He left as soon as she was admitted. Another case for the system," the first voice replied. "A shame. He's a beautiful baby."
The voices confirmed the fear that was forming in Leo's consciousness. His first experience in this new life was not going to be one of love. It was going to be one of isolation.
Leo's data archive, his twenty something year old life, was there, intact.
He could remember the philosophy, the pizza, the accident.
But those memories felt distant, like the plot of a book he had read a long time ago. They were encapsulated, separate from the new and overwhelming sensations bombarding his new consciousness.
It was an old operating system on new hardware, present but inactive, running in the background while the new operating system, the baby's, was booting up for the first time.
The baby, driven by instincts that were eons old, cried, not out of pain, but out of hunger and the shock of existing.
Leo's consciousness, the university student who only wanted an easy life, could only watch, a ghost in the machine, as his new life, the most complicated one imaginable, began not with an embrace, but with the sound of a plastic tag being tied to his tiny ankle.
Leo's chapter had ended.
Timothy Hunter's prologue had begun.