The Oasis - Shortly After Death
The void was supposed to be peaceful. It wasn't.
The alley. The blood. His mother's face when he'd told her he'd take care of everything. The images didn't flash—they detonated inside him, each one a shrapnel of guilt tearing through whatever he'd become. He was screaming, or trying to, but there was no throat, no lungs, just raw consciousness being shredded by its own memories.
Then something in his core clicked.
It wasn't external. It was him—some new architecture in his soul activating like an emergency bulkhead. The terror didn't vanish. It was still there, a hurricane howling behind a steel door, but now there was a door. A separation. He could think around the pain instead of drowning in it.
The Dampening.
He tested it carefully. Thought about his mother waiting for money that would never come. The grief surged, crashed against the barrier, and stopped. Not gone. Managed. The sensation was alien—like discovering he could suddenly see in infrared, perceiving his own emotions as data instead of experience. The panic was still there, a screaming signal in his mind, but muted now. Filtered. He could observe his own terror with cold, analytical clarity, watching his fear through soundproof glass.
I'm dead.
The thought should have destroyed him. Instead, the Dampening caught it, turned it over like a specimen, filed it away. Yes. Dead. Fascinating. Proceed.
He was awareness without anchor. A thinking thing in a pearl-white void that stretched forever in no particular direction.
"Are you alright?"
He spun—or whatever counted as spinning when you had no body. A woman stood there, and she was the first thing in this place that felt real. Warmth radiated from her like heat from summer pavement, an actual sensation against his formless being.
"I'm Cariel. A Path guide." Her smile was professional, but her eyes lingered on him a fraction too long. "Follow me. We need to keep moving."
She walked. He followed. The void shifted around them, gaining texture, and suddenly there were others. Hundreds of translucent figures drifting through the space like jellyfish in deep water. Above each head floated a crown of light—some molten gold, warm and holy. Others a hungry, pulsing crimson that made his new soul recoil.
"The Hails," Cariel said, walking faster. "Everyone gets one. They determine your destination."
Klein looked up at his own space. Empty.
"The souls are being sent to abandoned worlds," Cariel continued. Her voice had the rehearsed quality of someone who'd given this speech too many times. "Reincarnation. A fresh start. The primordial testing grounds from before humanity's rise."
"Why?" The word came out flat. The Dampening smoothed the edges off his curiosity, made the question feel academic rather than desperate.
"The real Heaven and Hell are full." She said it like she was announcing a delayed flight. "The Three Pillars—the fundamental structure of the afterlife—are fracturing under the weight. Seven billion souls and counting. This is emergency triage."
Other souls began to notice him. Their Hails flared, and they recoiled, pressing away from him like he was diseased. The golden lights dimmed. The crimson ones writhed.
"They're afraid of you," Cariel whispered. "Their Hails are warning them about something undefined in your signature."
"Where's mine?" Klein asked again, that same flat tone. The Dampening kept the panic at bay, but underneath it, something was screaming. Why don't I have a Hail? What am I?
Cariel's smile tightened into a grimace. "Let's keep moving."
They reached a gate.
Calling it a gate was like calling the ocean "some water." It was a wall of crystallized light so massive his consciousness couldn't find its edges. Beyond it lay a city—no, a concept of a city. Towers of impossible angles that hurt to perceive. Rivers of aurora flowing upward. Geometries that his mind kept trying to process and failing, leaving static at the edges of his vision.
It was the most beautiful thing he'd never wanted to see.
Because it was dying.
Cracks spiderwebbed through the architecture. Where they intersected, reality bled. Souls melted together in a painful, prismatic glare. The light itself seemed sick, flickering like a failing fluorescent. The air groaned under spiritual weight, reality bending like glass about to shatter.
"The Oasis," Cariel said quietly. "The last stable point in the afterlife. You're seeing the Three Pillars fracture in real-time."
A voice filled the space. It wasn't sound. It was pure light given linguistic form, bypassing his non-existent ears and writing itself directly into his consciousness.
"Cariel-chan! You've brought me an interesting one."
The temperature dropped to absolute zero and rose to the heart of a star simultaneously.
"Lord Illumi," Cariel bowed so deeply she nearly folded in half.
"Where are you?" Klein asked. The Dampening allowed a bluntness that should have been terror, stripped away the instinct to grovel before divinity.
"I am the light you see by," the voice replied, and Klein felt himself being examined. Not looked at. Dissected. Every atom of his being X-rayed by something that understood matter at a level beyond physics. "Curious. A paradox. Your soul is in perfect balance between Order and Chaos. This cannot naturally occur. You should not exist."
The space twisted.
Between one moment and the next, a man stood before them. He wore a perfectly ordinary grey suit, the kind a salaryman might wear to a forgettable office job. But reality groaned around him. The void bent like fabric under too much weight. Just looking at him made Klein's new soul ache with the pressure of his presence.
"Lord Godfather!" Cariel's voice cracked. "This is—you can't be—"
"Kahiramura Klein," the man said. His voice was normal. Human. Somehow that made it worse. "I've been waiting for you. Eons, actually, though I wasn't conscious for most of it. Just a function. A protocol waiting for its condition to be met."
He turned to address the light. "He has a Hail. It's mine."
The temperature plummeted. "An unsanctioned intervention. You've broken protocol."
"I am the protocol," the Godfather said calmly. "The Neutral Protocol. A cosmic if-then statement that emerged from the base laws of reality itself. Not designed by God or the Demon God—older than them. I'm the universe's answer to a logical paradox: what happens when a soul achieves perfect balance?"
He looked at Klein with something that might have been satisfaction. "You chose integrity when it mattered most. That final moment in the alley, when you deleted Miguel's number instead of selling out a stranger to save your mother. That was the culminating expression of a life spent in the gray. Every kindness despite poverty. Every temptation resisted. Every lie told to protect others. All of it weighed against your sins, your rage, your moments of cruelty born from exhaustion."
He paused. Looked directly at Klein.
"Your mother will mourn you for the rest of her life."
The word "mother" wasn't a word. It was a detonation.
The Dampening didn't break. It was overwhelmed. The image of her face—not smiling, not laughing, but frozen in that last moment when she'd looked at him with such desperate pride, believing her son would send money for treatment—erupted through every barrier his new soul had built. The guilt wasn't an emotion. It was a physical force, a pressure wave that tore through his being. He felt himself fragmenting, his consciousness splintering into a thousand screaming pieces of I left her I abandoned her I failed her she'll die thinking I didn't care I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm—
No.
The thought was a spike of cold iron he drove into his own mind.
Not again. Not here. I don't get to fall apart.
He focused on the Dampening itself. Not as a shield—as a tool. The architecture was there, crystalline and logical, activated by the Neutral Protocol when his soul had achieved perfect balance. He grabbed it like a drowning man grabs driftwood and started building. Each memory of her was a wave trying to crush him, and he caught them, one by one, and forced them into structure. The logic of her sacrifice. The mathematics of her love. The cold, hard certainty that falling apart now would dishonor everything she'd given him.
It was like rebuilding a dam with bare hands while the flood tried to tear him away. His entire being was shaking, something like sweat pouring off his essence, but he was doing it. Brick by mental brick. Wall by desperate wall. The Dampening wasn't removing the pain—it was giving him the tools to manage it, to function despite it.
The storm didn't stop. But it stopped winning.
When he looked up, the Godfather was watching with something like satisfaction. "You see?" he said to the light. "The material is strong. This is what balance creates—not apathy, but the ability to feel everything and still act."
"You risk the entire afterlife for this instability?" Illumi's voice had gone from curious to glacial. "The energy signature from a balanced soul would propagate across all realities. It would be a beacon to the things outside. The Void Hunters. I cannot allow this risk."
The light changed.
One instant, it was illumination. The next, it was a solvent.
The pain was beyond description. Not burning—unmaking. Klein felt the edges of his soul begin to dissolve like flesh in acid. A high-pitched whine filled his being as his memories started to static out. Rico's face when he'd shared his food. Annie's invitation to church. The taste of his mother's cooking. The color green. Not forgotten—erased. Unmade from the fundamental code of his existence, his soul being scrubbed away by holy light that decided he was an error in the system.
[WARNING: Spiritual dissolution in progress. Integrity at 87%... 84%... 79%...]
The Dampening provided percentages like they mattered. Like they weren't just measuring how fast he was being deleted from existence.
Klein didn't think. He moved.
He threw up his hands—barely-formed constructs of will—and focused everything he had into a single concept: NO. A faint grey energy flickered around them, his own essence shaped into something like a shield. It cracked immediately, fault lines spiderwebbing through it, but he poured more will into the gaps. It felt like holding back a physical weight with muscles he didn't have. Like his soul was a muscle and it was tearing, each fiber screaming as he forced it to do something it wasn't designed for.
"I EXIST!" The roar came from somewhere primal, some core of self deeper than the Dampening. "YOU DON'T GET TO ERASE ME!"
He focused on his name. Kahiramura Klein. Four syllables. He used them like a pry bar, jamming them into the dissolution, forcing the concept of himself to persist through sheer bloody-minded refusal. The mental strain was a physical tearing in his core. His fragile new soul frayed at the edges, unraveling like cheap thread, but he grabbed the memory of his mother's smile and grafted it into the gap like a desperate patch. Then Rico's kindness. Annie's warmth. Every moment of his life that proved he mattered, weaving them together into a shield of pure stubborn existence.
It held. Barely.
"Stop!" Cariel threw herself between him and the light, her own essence flaring into a shield. It was beautiful—iridescent and complex, the work of something that had existed for eons. The light hit it and the shield screamed, cracks racing across its surface like lightning. "My Lord, please! He's just a soul! He doesn't understand what he is!"
"He is an error. The system must be purified."
"Stability through genocide," the Godfather said, and his voice held an edge of something ancient and cold. "A classic failure state. The empathy you cultivated over eons is already fading, isn't it? You're reverting. Becoming pure function again. Light without warmth."
He gestured.
Space tore.
Not like fabric. Like reality was a living thing and he'd just opened a surgical incision. On one side of Klein, Illumi's light began to condense, pulling itself into a sphere of crystallized silence. Just looking at it made Klein's thoughts start to slow. It was the most terrifying seduction he'd ever felt—a numbness that whispered promises. No more pain. No more fear. No more struggle. No more guilt about his mother. Just perfect, eternal peace. Stasis. The screaming panic in his core went quiet. Just for a moment. Just a taste.
It would be so easy to let go. To sink into that beautiful nothingness and let his struggle seem like a distant, silly memory. To stop existing as a person and become just... nothing. Safe. Peaceful. Dead in a way that even death hadn't achieved.
On the other side, the tear in space revealed something else.
A void that howled. Not with sound—with possibility. It was chaos at the atomic level, reality still deciding what it wanted to be. The abandoned worlds, the primordial testing grounds where God had experimented with different models of life. Colors that had no names screamed across impossible physics. Shapes that couldn't exist tried to form and failed and tried again. It looked like annihilation. It looked like being ripped apart by a universe still learning how to exist.
It looked like life.
The choice crystallized in his gut like a shard of ice.
Cariel's shield shattered.
The sound was a musical note that meant ending. The corrosive light washed over her, and she screamed—a sound of pure essence being unmade. Her form dimmed, flickering like a candle in wind, but she kept her arms spread, kept her dying shield between him and oblivion.
She was burning for him.
Some stranger in the afterlife, some ancient being who owed him nothing, was choosing to die so he could have seconds more to exist.
That was it. That was the final piece.
Klein looked at the cocoon of perfect silence. Felt its pull. Felt how much easier it would be to just... stop. To let the guilt and pain and exhaustion finally end.
Then he looked at the chaotic, screaming void. At the terrifying, beautiful possibility of continued existence.
The image of his mother's face, not in grief, but in the proud smile she'd given him when he left for Manila, flashed behind his eyes. Rico's tupperware, warm in his hands. Annie's voice offering a free breakfast. Fragments of a life that was messy, and painful, and his. The silence offered none of that. It offered an end to the pain, but also an end to them. To the memory of every good thing.
He turned his fragile buffer, every scrap of will he'd built, away from Illumi's light. Pointed himself at the tear in reality like an arrow. His soul was fraying, the dissolution eating at him from all sides, but he had just enough left for this.
"I am not an error," Klein snarled. Every syllable cost him. Every word was carved from the last reserves of his being. "I didn't ask to be born into poverty. I didn't ask to watch my mother die slowly because I couldn't afford her treatment. I didn't ask for any of this. But I'm here. And I made choices. Good ones and bad ones and everything in between. That's not an error. That's a life."
He lunged.
Not walked. Not floated. He tore himself from Illumi's grasp like an animal gnawing off its own leg to escape a trap, grabbed the edges of the doorway with hands made of will and desperation, and pulled himself through. The light tried to hold him, tried to drag him back into peaceful oblivion, but he kicked against it, screaming defiance into the void.
"I choose to LIVE!"
The Godfather's smile was the last thing he saw. "The System will guide you. Try not to die."
Reality snapped like a rubber band.
The light vanished. Illumi's presence withdrew, leaving behind a silence that felt like solemn judgment. Cariel's fading form gave him one last smile—pain and pride mixed together.
"Good luck," she whispered, her essence dissolving into motes of light. "Show them what balance really means."
Then the Oasis screamed.
Not around him. Not at him. The entire structure of this stable space—the last point of order in a collapsing afterlife—had one collective seizure and vomited him out. Klein wasn't falling. Falling implied direction, implied physics, implied rules. He was being expelled into the abyss, his consciousness stretching on a rack of impossible geometry. Time dilated. Compressed. Became a möbius strip eating its own tail.
And in the howling void outside, he saw them.
Shapes of absolute negation.
Things that weren't creatures because "creature" implied they were part of creation. These were the opposite. Holes in reality shaped like hunger. The Void Hunters. They turned at the scent of him—a balanced soul, unprecedented, wrong, a beacon of impossible equilibrium in a universe built on binary absolutes—and they turned with interest that felt like being noticed by an avalanche.
The Dampening strained. The architecture buckling under impossible pressure. But it held. Just barely. Klein clung to its cold logic like a man clinging to a rock in a flood, because it was the only thing keeping him from dissolving completely into the screaming chaos.
My turn, he thought, and the thought was almost funny. Almost triumphant.
He'd survived Manila. He'd survived poverty and grief and impossible choices. He'd survived death itself.
What was one more impossible thing?
Almost.
The world didn't dissolve.
It shattered.