Still, I felt an attraction toward it. Down here, at the empty bottom of the ocean where nothing should exist but stone, sand, and the suffocating weight of endless water, a single fracture lingered in reality itself.
A lone anomaly, a wrongness, a piece of the world that didn’t belong.
Who wouldn’t be drawn to it?
The silence around was absolute, yet that crack called to more loudly than a hundred voices. So, like any foolish but curious soul, I moved toward it. Slowly, cautiously, step after hesitant step, my eyes locked onto its faint glimr.
At first, I thought it was just a shard of glass. Then, as I neared, it beca clear that it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t just a crack. No, it widened, deepened, unfolded into sothing greater.
A fracture. A rift.
A gate... A doorway to... sowhere else.
That thought lodged in my chest, and I couldn’t shake it off no matter how much I tried.
"Hahhh..." I let out a breath. "I should be cautious. Anyone sane would walk away. But... a deeper part of wants to step through, to see what lies beyond..."
The truth was simple—I had already died once. What worse could possibly happen now?
That was the reasoning I clung to. But still... sothing gnawed at the edges of my awareness. The feeling of eyes pressing down on , of a presence I couldn’t see. I wasn’t alone here. Soone or sothing was watching. Assessing. Waiting to see what I would do.
My brows curled into a frown. "Tsk."
I clicked my tongue and pushed the unease aside. Dwelling on it would change nothing. Instead, I raised my right hand, hovering it just above the rift.
The crack pulsed.
It was alive. It throbbed faintly, like a heartbeat. As though it was reaching for , trying to pull closer. But I could sense another force restraining it, holding it back, refusing to let it fully connect.
"Haahhh..." A sigh escaped , heavy and resigned. "Even if I die here, what does it matter?"
I let the words flow. "I don’t carry many burdens. I don’t owe anyone. I’ve already done everything I could to please the people around , lived whatever life I was given... what little I could achieve, I achieved. And if it all ends here, if this is where my story stops..." My lips curled into a bitter smile. "Then it amounts to nothing. Just like everything else."
My gaze lingered on the rift. And the words that followed ca without thought, instinctual.
"But maybe that’s what makes my life interesting... because I did what I wanted. Even if I was shackled with debts, responsibilities, duties I didn’t ask for—I tried to relieve them in my own way. I didn’t just crawl. I chose. And so, even if I die now, I won’t regret it..."
A pause.
Then, softer than a whisper, almost ashad, I added:
"Not like I’m physically capable of regretting..."
That was it. The final straw. The push I needed. My thoughts went silent after that, no more hesitation. I didn’t try to reason or analyze. I just leaned forward and plunged my head into that crack.
And then—
The world changed.
At first, I still saw the ocean floor. The cold silt, the unmoving waters, the eternal night pressing down like a coffin lid. But then it flickered.
The scene stuttered like a faulty lightbulb, blinking between states too quickly to follow. Flickering, stuttering, flashing—until suddenly it all cut out.
Like static snapping off, it was gone.
Darkness swallowed whole.
From that darkness ca movent. A shift in the void. Then the movent sharpened, resolved, bled into light.
Auroras.
Ribbons of color, flowing and dancing across the black canvas like the northern skies I once saw on Earth. Shimring blues, radiant greens, trails of white gliding across unseen winds.
But even that bled away. The auroras dimd, the colors lted, replaced by a vast purplish void that churned like liquid fire.
It ignited around , flas of violet and black. They did not burn, yet they wrapped my entire body, seeping into , consuming , as if testing whether I would crumble or endure.
Then, slowly, inevitably, that too shifted.
The flas parted, and a vision took form before .
A land.
A land without end. An endless plain stretching into infinity, beneath a sky too vast and strange to describe.
All around crawled creatures—deford, grotesque, malford reflections of animals I knew. They resembled the beasts of my ti, yet twisted, incomplete. A nagerie of half-shapes, the beginning drafts of life itself, made flesh.
And I stood there, caught between awe and dread, in a land where creation had not yet been perfected.
"Creation had not yet been perfected..."
That sentence buzzed in my mind like an irritating insect. My eyes widened and then narrowed into a sharp slit, as if my body instinctively recognized the truth before my mind dared to believe it.
"I... I have regressed back in ti... back to an age when creatures were still crude sketches. When nothing was refined, nothing was polished. This... this is the beginning of evolution itself."
The words sounded insane, ridiculous even, yet every fiber of my being scread that it was the truth. Those malford, misshapen things crawling and twitching across the land—what else could explain them?
Their jagged limbs, misplaced eyes, grotesque organs barely functioning in so twisted approximation of life. They were... prototypes. Drafts before the final design.
Yes, surely I had regressed back to the primordial stage of existence.
But before my thoughts could spiral further, the ground itself interrupted .
THUD—
It wasn’t just a sound. It was force. The earth shook beneath , the vibration crawling up my spine. A miniature earthquake that made the soil tremble, stones quiver, and my balance waver. My head snapped toward the direction of the tremor, instincts screaming that sothing vast had moved.
And then—
I saw it.
At first glance, it resembled a lizard. But that comparison was almost an insult to the monstrosity before . Its skin wasn’t scaled—it was plated, glistening like the glossy shell of a cockroach, layers overlapping in a grotesque armor.
Its face was a nightmare of misplaced anatomy: mandibles jutting out at sharp, unnatural angles, and eyes—too many eyes—swarming its visage, scattered without symtry, each one darting and twitching independently.
But none of that compared to its size.
It was colossal. A malford giant that made feel like a speck of dust. I wasn’t even the size of one of its nails. My entire body could be crushed beneath a single careless twitch of its foot, erased without effort.
And yet, for all its horrifying enormity, it was not looking at .
Its cluster of shifting eyes... were staring upward.
"At the sky? What... why is it staring at the sky?" My voice faltered as I tried to read its intent. It wasn’t daydreaming. Those countless eyes were all locked onto the sa fixed point, high above, sothing in the air that I could neither see nor sense.
The creature let out a sound then.
A sound my ears could not properly process. It was language, yet not. aning tried to form in my head but collapsed into raw static, leaving more unsettled than silence ever could.
And then—
It moved.
The ground shuddered violently as its gigantic body surged forward. In one instant, it was on the ground; in the next, it had launched itself skyward with impossible speed.
Logic crumbled as I watched its grotesque form ascend—cockroach-like wings erupting from its back, thrumming violently, carrying that monstrous weight into the sky.
"Running...?" I muttered, my throat dry. "Is it... fleeing from sothing?"
It wasn’t the posture of a predator seeking battle. Every motion of its vast body scread desperation. Fear even. That malford titan wasn’t hunting... it was escaping.
"Odd... why would sothing like that ever need to run away?"
But my words died midway.
Because the scene before shifted into sothing far more disturbing.
The plain stretched endlessly, an open expanse of dry soil and pale grasses, and upon it were countless creatures. Dog-sized at most, covered in coarse fur like a bear’s, their bodies lumbering clumsily on five crooked legs.
They were herbivores, peacefully chewing at the grass, disgusting though they were. Their faces resembled squashed, rotten fruit, skin sagging and warped in hideous ways.
I almost gagged at the sight of them. Yet as hideous as they were, sothing about the peace of their mindless grazing felt... tolerable. At the very least, they weren’t attacking anyone.
But then, the peace shattered.
One by one, their bodies convulsed. Their distorted faces twisted further in agony, limbs locking, spines arching as if invisible chains were tightening around them. They made sounds, guttural and raw, like the screams of a dying animal mixed with the gurgles of drowning.
They were suffocating.
But—suffocating on what?
I whipped my gaze across the plain. There was nothing. Just grass, earth, and open sky. Yet, inexplicably, every single one of those five-legged beasts writhed in agony as if their very air had turned against them.
It was cruel. It was unnatural.
I could only watch as the creatures squird, writhed, and convulsed, their bodies jerking violently against an invisible force crushing them from all directions. Their final sounds faded into silence, their forms slackened, and one by one, they collapsed lifeless to the soil.
The silence that followed was worse than their screams.
Sothing shifted in the air.
Above the dead plain, a distortion shimred. Vapor, thick and heavy, began condensing from nothing, swirling together as if pulled by unseen hands. A mass ford—a mist. Slowly, it began to pull.
It sucked in the corpses.
The mangled remains of the five-legged abominations rose into the air, dragged helplessly into the thickening vapor. Flesh, bone, and blood—all absorbed into that hungry mass.
I stared, unable to comprehend.
"What... what in the hell is this place?"
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