Chapter 1 - At the end of the account, there is only me left, or not
Ken did not understand what had deposited him there. A clear break with the day before, a blurred amnesia like a bad dream, whose fragments vanished at the slightest effort of concentration. Until yesterday, the wet and cold planks of a Parisian bridge were his only refuge. The acrid smell of the river, a mixture of mud and gasoline, and the constant whispers of the sleeping city rocked its precarious nights. It was a shroud of indifference that enveloped his fragile body, paradoxically protecting it from the gaze of the world.
Today, the relentless sunburn on his bare skin was the only tangible reality. He walked an infinite desert, each step raising a cloud of fine sand that infiltrated everywhere, stinging his already irritated eyes, clinging to his chapped lips, leaving a bitter taste. The rough texture under his feet, alive, recalled a raspy and endless tongue, a constant punishment in this hostile immensity. An uncomfortable nudity, almost obscene under this merciless sky, left him exposed, vulnerable. Strangely, he still wore his torn homeless clothes - shreds of dirty fabric clinging to his emaciated figure, his bare feet martyred by the heat of the ground, whose surface seemed to vibrate under the burning rays. It seemed that he had been teleported to a world as he had seen in webtoons, those fantastic stories of transmigration, which he sometimes consulted the rare times when a little money allowed him to access a screen. But there was a fundamental difference: his original body had been projected here. His body, now, was just a mass of sweat dried into salty plates, the sand sticking like a gangrene on his skin. Every pore screamed his thirst, every cell of his being called for water that was nowhere.
Ken was eighteen years old, the age of hopes and promises, the age when the world should open up. However, his reflection in the invisible mirror of the moving sand only sent back a worn, prematurely old image. He was too small for his age, his thin bones drawing a fragile silhouette under the harsh light of the desert. Too thin, his ribs protruding like the bars of an empty cage, a promise of eternal hunger. Too silent, his slow and measured movements, imprinted with instinctive caution, each gesture calculated to save precious, vital energy.
His hair, ink black, dust and rough, did not capture any slight. They hung lifeless on his forehead, shading an emaciated face whose features seemed to have been erased by the test. His eyes were the real abyss. Two dark orbits, a bottomless abyss where all emotion seemed to have drowned. No anger, this incandescent ember that sometimes animates the most desperate, which feeds rebellion. Don't be afraid, this primitive alert that keeps you alive, that scares away danger. Just... a sidereal void, a cold nothingness that sucked light and sound, an abyss of terrifying calm. We could have dived into it without ever reaching the bottom. And his skin, white as a corpse, contrasted violently with the ocher of the desert. He was neither handsome nor ugly, he was perhaps stone among others, but he had never met anyone who looked like him, a singularity that made him unique.
The world before
Before this world, arid and ruthless, there was the other. A blurred memory, tinged with gray and regrets, like a photograph yellowed by time. The one who was called "the real one". Ironically. The one where he was born, a tiny and insignificant point on an indifferent planet. The one who had ignored him with relentless constancy.
Ken had no father. But he had a mother. And a young woman who was the same age as Ken now, or a little younger: her soft face framed by black hair, perpetually confused in the meanders of a life too heavy for her fragile shoulders. She loved him. It was a fragile certainty to which he still sometimes clung, in the darkest corners of his memory, an illusory buoy in the ocean of his childhood. Then she was dead, carried away by a disease as banal as it was relentless, which had eaten her in silence. He was four years old, an age when the world is still made of bright colors and careless laughter. His death had tarnished everything, plunging his universe into an eternal monochromy.
Since then, he had grown like a stain of moisture on a faded wall, an ignored presence that no one bothered to clean, that no one really noticed. He had learned the hunger that rumbles the bowels, a throbbing void that became his constant companion. He had known the icy bite of the rain on his skin, the uncontrollable chills of nights under the stars, the promiscuity and violence of impersonal shelters, where every day was a struggle for a corner of bed. He had learned the bitter taste of lies and broken promises, the endless nights populated by silent nightmares, the fleeing glances of the hurried people who passed by without ever seeing him, as if he were transparent, a shadow among the shadows.
He had known snippets of affection, furtive gestures of tenderness quickly extinguished, like fireflies extinguishing at dawn. He had also learned to be wary, to erect invisible walls around his heart, an impenetrable fortress. He had loved, awkwardly, briefly, ephemeral friendships swept by the wind of fate, straw fires going out as quickly as they had been lit. He had hated, in silence, this indifference of the world, this ordinary cruelty that crushes the weakest without a look. He had dreamed, especially at night, of illusory escapes, of better worlds where his place would exist, where he would no longer be a ghost. He had fallen, over and over again, getting up each time with the desperate tenacity of those who have nothing to lose, those whom the bottom can no longer frighten. He had survived. A simple observation, without glory or pride, just a breath that persisted.
The new beginning
And today - he had woken up here. Without any memory of the transition. For no apparent reason. Without the slightest bit of explanation. A new absurd chapter opened in his already chaotic existence, a cosmic joke of which he was the victim. And you know what? He didn't care. Because by dint of living in a cruel world where logic and justice seemed abstract concepts, changing the world fundamentally did not change anything to its state. The absurdity remained the same, only the decor differed.
He continued to walk. The sun, ruthless, was a blade of fire planted in his neck, hammering him relentlessly. The heat radiated from the ground, rising in invisible waves that deformed the distance, transforming the landscape into an unreal, moving canvas. His feet burned on the incandescent sand, each grain a needle under the plant, but he had learned to ignore the pain, to relegate it to the background, to melt it in the constant whisper of his exhausted body.
No one came to meet him. In this desolate expanse, he was the only moving soul, a tiny point lost in the immensity of ocher and white. No one was waiting for him. The very idea of an expectation, of a hope in something or someone, seemed strangely foreign to him, a dead language that he no longer understood. But he continued. An obscure and tenacious force pushed him forward, a survival inertia deeply rooted in him, a vital pulsation that refused to be extinguished.
Because he had a sentence. Only one, engraved in the depths of his being, not in his fragile memory, but in the very fibers of his soul. The only thing he had never really lost, the only constant landmark in the maelstrom of his existence.
"At the end of the account, there is only me left, or not. "
He did not whisper it as an incantation to reassure himself. Words had never had much power over his brutal reality. He did not say it to give himself a capacity, to make illusions about his vulnerability. He said it... because it was the raw truth, the only immutable law he had learned, the one that was still verified and always. When a lonely tear, burning like acid, sometimes managed to escape, slowing down the salty furrow of his hollowed cheek, he whispered to her, the salty taste on his lips confirming the loneliness of his grief. When a brief flash of joy, a fragile and unexpected spark, crossed his mind, he blew it like a precious secret, aware of its ephemeral nature. When fatigue crushed him, when his legs faltered under the effort, he thought of it, like a stubborn mantra to get up, an anchor in the storm. When doubt assailed him, this insidious little voice that questioned everything, he anchored himself there, like a lifebuoy in an ocean of confusion.
Not because she was beautiful, melodious or inspiring. Beautiful words were often the most misleading, ephemeral mirages in the desert. But because she stood up, solid and unshakable, even when everything else collapsed around him.
Ken was not trying to flee. He had passed this stage, this vain attempt to escape from himself and others. He had already had friends, crossed fortunes on his bumpy path. Fleeting figures that left behind a mixture of good memories and bitter disappointments, like dancing shadows before fainting. They had already helped him, out of kindness, interest or simple chance. Saved, even from desperate situations, fished from the chasms where he thought he was sinking.
But over time, a simple, brutal and irrefutable truth had imposed itself on him, as a painful evidence:
Whatever your entourage, no matter how loving and benevolent they are, whatever your physical or moral strength, no matter how impressive it is, whatever your dream, no matter how big and inspiring it is... you die alone.
Not alone by abandonment, not necessarily. But of a deeper, more intrinsic solitude, a fundamental solitude. Alone because no one, even the closest, could penetrate the complex labyrinths of your thoughts and emotions. No one could really think in your place. No one could feel the throbbing pain, the exuberant joy, the tenacious doubt, exactly as you felt them. No one could feel, in your place. No one could make the crucial decisions, those that shape your life, in your place. No one could choose, in your place.
In the end... even the purest, most devoted love could not cross this ultimate barrier, even if this thought was only one among others. He stopped at the threshold of death, unable to accompany you into the afterlife. Ken had understood that even in the face of death, this sentence would always remain: "In the end, only me remains, or not. "
So he had kept this sentence, not as a cold and defensive wall to protect himself from the world, but as a small cold, but reliable lamp, which projected a faint glow in the darkness of his existence, a stubborn lantern in the night.
"At the end of the account, there is only me left, or not. "
Or not. Maybe nothingness was waiting for him. But even this perspective, this uncertain "or not"... it was still he who thought it, he who envisaged it. He alone.
He continued to walk in this strange world, whose nature completely escaped him. Was it a punishment? A new chance? A simple cosmic chance? He knew nothing about it, and the very idea of finding an answer seemed in vain. No man-drawn roads, no familiar paths, only the extent of the desert that stretched to infinity, under a crushing sky. No trees to offer a little shade or reference, just the undulating sand, dotted with stones with strange and irregular shapes, like the bones of an ancient world. And this sky of a milky white, uniform and without nuances, without the reassuring presence of the visible sun, without the slightest indication of direction, an opaque dome. He did not know if he was wandering in the limbo of hell, a prisoner of a daydream with illogical rules, or a character in a novel whose plot he did not know.
But surprisingly, he was not afraid. A certain weariness in the face of the unknown had dulled this primitive emotion, had extinguished it like a candle in the wind. Because he had already collapsed a thousand times, under the weight of hunger, loneliness, despair. And every time, in one way or another, he had always risen. An instinctive, almost animal resilience kept him alive, an unbreakable internal spring.
Deep down, lurking like an ember under the ash, he was nurturing a dream. A dream that he knew was stupid, absurd in everyone's eyes, probably impossible to realize. Understand everything. Exceed everything. Reshaping the world even beyond everything beyond, perhaps by his will. He knew full well that even the most powerful kings, even the richest wealthy, even the supposed geniuses could not accomplish such an undertaking. Because it was not a reasonable dream, it was a pure fairy tale, a chimera born of his despair, a flower hatched on an arid land.
But he, a homeless man, a bastard forgotten by all, a simple survivor without a name, he continued to believe in it, with irrational obstinacy, a blind faith in the impossible. Not because it was realistic or likely. But because it was his. His refuge, his last crutch, the last fortress of his mind.
And because in the end...
He was the only one left to believe it.