Darkness.
Not the comforting quiet of sleep, but a suffocating vastness. Like an infinite sea of void stretching beyond space, time, and reason. There was no breath, no heartbeat, no body. Only the ragged shape of a soul that had burned away everything: life, love, loyalty and more in its final curse.
That soul was Cain.
He drifted.
No, he fell.
Again and again, deeper into nothingness, the remnants of his mind shattered and reformed under pressures no mortal being could survive. Memories flickered like dying flames—Talia's betrayal, Korin's trembling spear, the golden light of Zeus laughing down from on high.
Cain wanted to scream. To fight. To tear free of this cosmic grave.
And then...
Thump.
Something stirred beneath him.
Not a sound. Not a light.
A pulse.
It echoed through the abyss like the beat of a heart older than the universe. It wasn't loud, but it commanded. A single throb of will that cracked the weightless silence like thunder tearing through a funeral dirge.
Cain's soul twitched in response, drawn forward like a bull carcass hooked on a slaughterhouse chain.
The deeper he fell, the stronger it grew.
Thump.
Reality warped.
The emptiness began to shimmer as fractal shapes coiled through non-Euclidean geometries. Ribbons of energy, like veins of dark matter, twisted through the void, converging on a single impossible point: a jagged, floating crystal pulsating with power.
A God Gem.
Not just any gem—Cain knew this with a clarity beyond knowledge. He didn't even know what a God Gem was or what power was within this. But merely sensing the relic was enough for him to know it all on an instinctual level. Just like how animals knew how to breath upon birth.
He knew this was the source. The singularity of destruction. The unclaimed heart of annihilation itself.
The God Gem of Annihilus.
It didn't call out like a savior. It didn't beckon with compassion.
It demanded.
And Cain, or what was left of him, was claimed.
As his soul neared, a barrier erupted between him and the God Gem. A wall not of stone or magic, but of reality itself. It shimmered like a glass dome in the void, resisting the descent of something that should not exist.
Cain's essence slammed into it.
The pain was indescribable. His soul shattered, reknit, shattered again. It felt like being stabbed through a thousand nerves he no longer had.
But the Gem did not let go.
No, it wrapped around him.
Tendrils of black-violet light burst from the crystal, coiling around his fragmented soul like serpents. They bled into him—threading through every crack, every curse-born scar—and then pulled.
Cain roared as the energy ignited. Flames burn of the void surged through him, and with a thunderous shriek of reality buckling, he was ripped through the barrier.
The void shattered.
And Cain tumbled into a new world.
He wasn't conscious—his thoughts had long since dissolved—but the soul felt.
It spiraled, a comet of violet flame, whipping across a strange, infinite realm. A world ringed by constellations and jagged moons, dotted with floating temples and titanic beasts slumbering within clouds of celestial ether.
The God Gem Realm.
He spun across vast oceans teeming with flying leviathans, over desert cities with domes of glowing crystal, through forests where trees grew sideways from floating mountains. His soul dipped lower, drawn toward life.
Toward bodies.
Hosts.
Like a key testing locks, he plunged into the chest of a warrior mid-battle. A white-haired man, roaring with fury—Cain's soul hit resistance. It slammed back out like fire rejected by flesh.
He tried again.
A scholar meditating in a tower—rejected.
A woman wielding twin daggers made of lightning—rejected.
Again. And again. The soul flew like a bullet of wrath, thrown from host to host. Every time, it was cast out violently.
Too strong. Too foreign. Too broken.
Until finally... A flicker.
A whisper.
A dying breath.
There. In a ruined battlefield on the outskirts of a crumbling village, a body lay crumpled beneath shattered stone. A boy—barely sixteen. Blood pooled beneath him. Bones cracked. Breathing shallow.
Death imminent.
And yet despite all odds...
The soul fit.
Barely.
It was as if the dying body opened, not because it was worthy, but because it was empty enough. A broken vessel for a broken soul.
Cain's essence lunged toward it, and reality screamed in protest.
Cain's awareness flickered.
Then snapped back as a hurricane of agony crushed him.
He couldn't see.
He couldn't breathe.
He couldn't move.
It was like shoving a mountain through the eye of a needle. Like cramming the sun into a candle. His entire consciousness was compressed, twisted, and sealed inside a dying human body.
He let out a soundless, cosmic howl.
Every memory, every moment of betrayal, every ounce of fury shrieked through him.
The body wasn't built to contain it.
Veins bulged. Skin smoked. The boy's heart almost burst.
Cain's mind collapsed into a point of unbearable pressure.
And just before the blackness took him, he heard it.
A voice—familiar, urgent, human.
"—I found him! Gods, no—no, don't die on me! Not again!"
He couldn't place it. Couldn't respond. Couldn't think.
Then—
Darkness.
In the distance, the God Gem of Annihilus pulsed once more. A heartbeat in the void.
And the world shivered.