Cycle 214,223: The Scream That Blinds
In this run, Noctis steps into a world built out of sound instead of solid matter. The grass looks like glass and sings thin, cutting notes every time the wind brushes past. Rivers don't just flow; they hum, their currents twisted into minor keys that scrape along his nerves. Above him, the Existence falls from the sky like a star folding into itself, coiling into the shape of a serpent. Its eyes burn in the shapes of letters from a language no living mouth remembers how to speak.
When it roars, the roar doesn't just echo—it becomes the world.
The sound slams into him and hardens into invisible chains. He can't move. Every organ in his body crumples under that pressure. Bones turn soft, then liquid, under the force of a perfect, lethal harmony. He doesn't simply die; he is taken apart and scattered into notes, into the music of his own destruction.
When he returns to the threshold, something strange follows him back.
A melody clings to his mind—the exact rhythm and pattern of the pain. He finds himself humming it under his breath, not as a reflex, but as a tool. He begins to use that remembered rhythm as a timer, a way to measure how many seconds he lasts before the roar hits, and to explore whether the scream can be met, redirected, or broken.
Cycle 600,370: The Fractal Tide
This cycle opens on a shoreline where the rules of matter have been reversed. The ground moves like water—solid rock flowing in slow waves—while the sea behaves like thought. The waves are not simple curves of water but rolling equations and sharp-edged formulas, crashing and rewriting themselves in patterns that hurt to look at.
The Existence arrives as a cathedral made entirely of wings.
Its structure beats. Every time those countless wings rise and fall, they erase parts of the coast, tearing entire sections of the world out of existence. Sand, stone, and even time vanish in the wake of its motion.
One feather drifts down.
As it touches the ground, it unfolds into an intricate maze—a labyrinth made of repeating corridors and recursive traps. Each hallway splits into smaller and tighter routes, hunted by faster, more efficient predators that exist only to kill him.
Noctis adjusts.
He stops trying to dominate the pattern and instead shrinks himself to its smallest possible element. He becomes the size of a gap, the shape of an exception, slipping into the tiny spaces the design itself overlooks.
For a moment, it works.
The cathedral trembles, its structure folding inward, turning itself inside out to respond. In the next instant, his body is gone. He feels himself become nothing more than a single note on a god's musical staff—heard, judged off-key, and snapped out of existence for being slightly wrong.
When he returns, he clings to the lesson: hold the pattern longer. Stay inside the structure one heartbeat more. Always plan one move deeper than the last time.
Cycle 1,000,414: The Paradox Garden
The Gate opens onto a garden made of black flowers.
Their petals don't just fold space—they bend time. Each blossom he brushes shows him a life he never actually lived: himself as a merchant, as a father, as a thief, as someone who never reached this trial at all. The images are vivid and wrong, overlapping fragments of alternate lives that never had the chance to be real.
The Existence is the gardener here.
It stands taller than the trees, a massive shape in a dark robe, its face smooth and featureless. In its hands are golden scissors that cut not leaves, but futures.
With every step Noctis takes, something is taken from him.
A thought evaporates. A memory blurs. A skill he fought to earn becomes harder to recall. Moving forward feels like paying a toll with pieces of his identity.
When he finally charges, trying to close the distance and strike, the scissors snap shut.
In that single, closing motion, his being is clipped out of every timeline at once. Past, present, future—each one loses the version of him that tried this path.
Oblivion.
But just before he is erased, he grabs one of the black flowers and drives it into his own chest. Its stem pierces his void like a spike of light and grief. When he appears again at the threshold, that fragment is still with him, buried deep where even the Gate's rules cannot fully reach.
Cycle 3,300,888+: The Feast of Forgotten Truths
He is thrown into another ocean, but this one is made of mouths instead of water.
They churn and crash together, each one speaking or screaming. Some tell secrets. Some confess lies. Some relive memories that may be his or someone else's. As he swims, tongues wind around him like tendrils. Teeth bite into him, tearing through flesh and something more delicate.
Underneath the chaos, there is a strange kind of order.
The noise is not only noise; it is music. Sometimes, in its shifting tones, he hears what might be his mother humming. Sometimes, he hears his own voice, speaking words he never remembers saying.
The Existence takes the role of conductor now.
It raises no weapon. It simply guides the chorus, directing certain mouths to open or close. Each time the song changes, he is devoured in a new way—soul chewed through lyrics, skin shredded by whispered accusations, his mind pulled apart by names and faces he cannot fully catch.
He dies over and over.
But with each death, some buried truth shakes loose and drifts up: an idea about who he was, a realization about why he fights, an understanding of what he has been trying not to see. Even though his feelings are still numbed, he begins to recognize the shape of regret, the weight of guilt, and how to continue moving even with both pressing down.
He learns to identify which voices in the choir must be silenced, and which can be used. Even if his heart cannot fully respond yet, his mind remembers the flavors of these truths and stores them for later.
Evolving Mindset—From Void to Glimmer
Across these endless cycles, Noctis' mind changes.
At first, there is nothing but instinct. He acts like a machine built for survival: move, react, adapt, attack, die, repeat. There is no room for self-reflection. Being alive simply means continuing the pattern.
But repetition itself becomes a teacher.
Slowly, between one failure and the next, reflection appears—small at first. He begins to notice patterns in the Existence's behavior, in the rules of each new world. He starts not only to react, but to anticipate: if it roared here last time, what happens if he is already behind cover before the sound reaches him? If the maze folded this way, how far can he push it before it changes direction?
He discovers he can sometimes carry things forward.
Memories that should have faded linger. The system's strict laws show tiny points of weakness, hairline cracks that yield when leaned on in exactly the right way. He realizes that persistence itself can bend the rules, not openly, but by wearing them down.
Between deaths there is darkness.
At first, that dark is empty. Then, faint sparks begin to appear—not feelings, not yet, but ideas. The fragment of grief from the paradox flower. The echoes of truth from the devouring choir. They press against the inside of his emptiness, shaping it. They do not give him comfort. They give him instructions.
They whisper: survive longer. Die differently. Turn each erasure into something that cannot be fully undone.
He comes to understand that even his emotional void is its own kind of weapon.
If he cannot feel fear, fear cannot control him. If pain cannot make him stop, then pain becomes just another piece of information. If he cannot break from despair, then he will always stand back up. Death stops being an ending and becomes a line of code to overwrite.
Each cycle writes something new into him.
In the middle of all the static—of erasures, resets, and broken memories—something solid grows. It is not warmth. It is not kindness. It is a will: not just to continue as empty space, but to exist on his own terms.
A will that demands to remain. To endure and press outward until the cage breaks, until even the impossible must yield.
Cycle 4,555,771: The Coral Labyrinth
He returns to consciousness surrounded by water again, but this time the sea feels old and crowded.
Coral stretches in every direction—towers of tangled bones, arches made of fossilized ribs, spires that might once have been the spines of dead gods. The whole ocean is a maze of hard, twisting growth.
The Existence does not show itself fully.
It appears as a shimmering distortion moving through the reef, a prismatic storm weaving between branches. It never stays in one place long enough to fix his gaze on it. It is always slightly ahead or above, always hunting.
Noctis learns to move like a shadow.
He keeps his motions tight and efficient, turning his body into a blade slipping through narrow gaps. The Existence reacts by rewriting the maze as he goes. Reefs slide aside or crash together. Corridors close like jaws. Sometimes, a single look from that shimmering distortion is enough to snap coral apart, sending clouds of razor shards spinning through the water.
He drowns many times.
Water fills his lungs. Coral slices his skin and memories alike, scouring away names, faces, and facts. But over long stretches of effort, he begins to track the storm's wake—the way the water moves just before the Existence passes, the subtle shift in color when the labyrinth is about to twist.
He starts using the world instead of just surviving it.
He breaks knives from coral branches, carving crude weapons from the same structures that once trapped him. He chips new tunnels where none existed, using paths the Existence does not yet know. He stops acting like prey fleeing a predator, or even like a hunter chasing a beast.
He becomes something else—an enduring element, a pattern within the maze that refuses to be deleted, reshaping the battlefield with every rebirth.
Cycle 12,404,920: The Palace of False Spring
His next awakening arrives on a warm breeze.
Before he can see anything, he smells the world—flowers, fresh grass, clean water. When his eyes open, he is standing in a garden locked in perfect spring. Cherry blossoms drift lazily through the air. Fountains pour clear water over carved stone. Sunlight filters through gentle leaves.
The Existence is here, too, dressed for this new role.
It takes the shape of a gardener once more, its face now formed by crossing cherry branches, delicate blooms hiding whatever lies beneath. Its eyes are old pools of sorrow set into that floral mask, watching everything.
The trap is not loud this time.
Every flower hides a needle. Every petal that brushes his skin leaves a cut too small to see but deep enough to matter. The air is rich, scented with sweetness, but every inhaled breath carries slow poison. Soft soil that looks inviting turns heavy and suffocating the moment he relaxes, swallowing him in tender dirt, pressing him back into the ground.
He dies over and over, wrapped in gentle colors and mild warmth. No screaming. No dramatic collapse. Just a quiet, peaceful suffocation, as if the world is trying to comfort him to death.
Eventually, he adapts in a new way.
He stops resisting pain. Instead of trying to avoid every cut and every toxin, he begins to let them in. He trains himself to move with wounds already forming, to think past poison flooding his veins. Pain becomes noise in the background, something he acknowledges but does not obey.
Within that palace, he becomes a figure made from scars and missing pieces—gliding between blossoms, invisible to the false peace that tries to claim him. The garden can no longer lull him. Beauty, comfort, and rest become just another battlefield to cross.
Cycle 32,185,587: The Hourglass World
In this cycle, he wakes in a desert made of crystal sand.
Above him, time is visible. Countless streams of glittering grains flow upward into the sky, each trail a glowing thread of moments running in reverse. The ground underfoot crunches like glass. Every step sends a small shockwave through the dunes.
The Existence appears as a cloaked figure standing on a dune, its head replaced by a floating hourglass. Sand pours inside the glass in strange directions—sideways, upward, in loops. Its voice, when it speaks, is twisted in order.
It always tells him how he will fail before it sets the failure in motion.
Sometimes, as soon as he begins to run, he finds the figure already waiting where he was headed, as if it had always been there. It sifts through the flow of sand around them, stirring the streams until moments crack and crumble. Each word it speaks erodes a purpose, making his reasons to move feel thinner and thinner.
Often, he is erased before he can move at all.
Other times, the world plays backward. He feels deaths unravel as if they never happened, only to live through them again in reverse—pain sliding back into unbroken flesh, fear rewinding into confusion.
Across what feels like forever, he starts watching the sands more than the figure.
Patterns emerge. Streams of time with similar textures. Loops that recur. Delayed falls that hint at possible openings. He stops trying to move in time and instead shifts with it, stepping between flows rather than through them.
He learns to dodge endings that were already decided, slipping into thin spaces between cause and effect. With each rebirth, he writes new endings where none existed.
At last, in one cycle among endless others, he reaches the cloaked figure.
He does not approach as a desperate challenger, begging for a different outcome. He arrives like a mirror—another shape built around an hourglass heart, something that understands that time can be negotiated, bent, and rewritten.