Subject 89-Beta was no longer a Subject. It was debris.
It tumbled through the crushing silence of the Void, a piece of driftwood caught in a hurricane of impossible physics. The mathematical probability of survival was technically non-zero, but only in the way that a snowflake technically has a chance of surviving a blast furnace.
The body was a ruin of paradoxes. The left arm had withered into the desiccated bone of a centenarian. The right leg had regressed into the soft, unformed cartilage of a fetus. The torso was a roadmap of scars where the dimension's friction had tried to scrub his existence away.
Yet, he did not dissolve.
Perhaps it was the residue of the golden clamps, or perhaps the universe simply refused to let him off that easily.
His trajectory ended not with a crash, but with a sudden, absolute stillness. He had hit the Boundary.
It was the membrane between the Nothing and the Something. Here, an Entity waited.
It had no shape that a human mind could process without snapping. It was a presence—vast, ancient, and unknowable. It floated in the dark like a deep-sea leviathan observing a drowning sailor. It did not have eyes, yet it saw. It did not have a heart, yet it felt.
It leaned closer, inspecting the drifting meat.
Interest, the Entity projected. It circled the body, sensing the anomaly.
The corpse was not a corpse. It was breathing, a shallow, ragged rhythm. The face was frozen in a rictus of silent screaming—brows furrowed, mouth open, eyes darting rapidly behind closed lids.
It was sleeping. It was dreaming. It was screaming.
A Nightmare, the Entity mused. The vessel sleeps, but the pilot is gone.
It sensed the emptiness inside the chest. The Seat of the Soul was vacant, hollowed out by the crude science of the insects back at the Terminus. Yet, the connection remained—a silver, invisible thread stretching infinitely back through the Void, vibrating with the panic of the original soul trapped light-years away.
To the Entity, this was not a tragedy. It was a curiosity.
Astral projection, the Entity thought, though the concept was too small. To walk abroad without a body is a feat of ascendants. To live as a body without a soul... that is a torture of the damned.
The Entity felt a flicker of an alien emotion. Pity.
It was a cruel end. To be a hollow shell, trapped in an eternal nightmare, feeling everything but understanding nothing.
The Entity laughed.
The sound was not acoustic; it was a ripple of gravity that shook the surrounding emptiness. It was a laugh of caprice, of a god deciding to interfere simply to see what would happen.
You lack a pilot, little vessel, the Entity seemed to say. I cannot give you yours back. But I can give you a lantern.
The Entity reached out. It did not use a hand; it used a concept. It gathered the stray background radiation of the Void, the dust of dead stars, and the echoes of forgotten prayers. It compressed them into a small, dim sphere.
It was not a true soul. It lacked the fire of life. It lacked the complexity of a spirit born of nature. It was a False Spark. An artificial consciousness.
The Entity pressed the spark into the boy's chest.
It didn't burn like the original soul. It sat in the empty cavity, glowing faintly—a cold, pale light. It could not generate power. It could not fuel an Aspect. But it could do one thing:
It could receive.
Like tightening a loose wire, the False Spark latched onto the invisible silver thread connected to the original soul. It solidified the bond. It didn't bring the soul back, but it turned the lights on.
The body gasped. The expression of the nightmare didn't vanish, but it changed. The chaos of the dream sharpened into the clarity of Awareness.
Wake up, the Entity whispered.
With a motion that felt like a flick of a finger, the Entity picked up the boy's drifting form. It turned him away from the Void and toward a tear in the reality fabric—a swirling, chaotic wound where space was folded over itself.
It was a place where seven universes were bleeding into one. A grinder of worlds. A graveyard of gods.
Go, the Entity laughed again. Struggle.
It pushed.
Dev—aware, terrified, and fundamentally incomplete—rocketed into the tear, falling toward the convergence of the Seven Realms.