Marc Renum's feet carried him forward with thoughtless rhythm, the evening sidewalk passing beneath him in a blur of cracked concrete and scattered leaves. His hands remained buried in his pockets, fingers curled against the autumn chill, while Ava's narration filled his ears with promises the story itself couldn't quite deliver.
The novel was good—competent, even well-crafted—but the internet had lied. They always did. Still, with 'Archmage Ascension' languishing in its year-long hiatus, what choice did he have? The so-called "most famous web novel in the world" would have to suffice, a pale substitute for the series that had actually understood what fantasy should be.
At the intersection, Marc double-tapped his left earbud. The narration paused mid-sentence. He glanced up at the traffic signal, watching the red hand blink its warning before the walking figure appeared in green. His feet moved before his mind registered the change.
Then came the honking.
Not one horn—several. Sudden. Successive. Desperate.
Marc's head snapped left. The truck filled his vision, a wall of metal and velocity bearing down on him with the inevitability of an avalanche. His body jerked sideways, muscles flooding with adrenaline as he tried to launch himself toward the opposite lane. The truck swerved in the same direction.
The impact erased thought.
His bones didn't break so much as shatter, the truck's momentum converting his body into something soft and yielding. The world spun—sky, pavement, metal, blood—a kaleidoscope of destruction as he tumbled across the asphalt like debris in a hurricane. When the motion finally stopped, everything had become hazy, each sense reporting contradictory information that his brain couldn't reconcile.
The strangest part was the absence of pain.
His body should have been screaming. Every nerve should have been firing in agony. Instead, there was only a distant awareness of wrongness—bones bent at impossible angles, organs compressed and ruptured, blood pooling beneath him in a spreading warmth. The metallic tang filled his mouth and nose, thick and cloying. His breathing came in wet, ragged gasps as blood flooded his throat.
Somewhere beyond the ringing in his ears, voices gathered. Footsteps. The artificial glow of phone screens held high, an audience for his final moments.
Time fractured.
Each second stretched into hours, minutes yawning into eternities. His heart beat in his skull, a thunderous drum growing slower with each pulse, rationing the blood that kept his consciousness tethered to his failing body. The sounds around him remained incomprehensible, a distant ocean roar that his dying brain couldn't parse into meaning.
Marc knew he was dying. The knowledge settled over him with unexpected clarity, a simple fact requiring no emotional response. His body had gone numb. His extremities had already stopped reporting to his brain. What remained was simply the waiting—the long, drawn-out process of his consciousness dissolving back into nothing.
What surprised him was the calm.
Death, it turned out, was terrifyingly peaceful. He'd expected fear, regret, some desperate clinging to existence. Instead, there was only a quiet acceptance of the inevitable. He'd lived alone, worked alone, existed in a self-contained bubble of fiction and routine. No one would remember him. No one would mourn. The world would continue exactly as it had before Marc Renum briefly occupied space within it.
Even the unfinished stories didn't bother him now—all those manga, manhwa, web novels, and anime saved for a retirement that would never come. They seemed absurdly insignificant as his consciousness flickered like a dying candle.
What filled his fading thoughts instead was curiosity.
What came after? Heaven, with its clouds and harps and impossible promises? Hell, with its eternal punishment for mortal sins? Another world, fresh and new, perhaps with beings creative enough to craft stories worth experiencing? Or simply nothing—the complete cessation of existence, consciousness dispersing like smoke in wind?
Eternal nothing sounded lovely, actually. Never having to worry or want or exist again. Just peace, infinite and absolute. But if there was something else, some continuation beyond this broken body on this blood-stained street, he hoped—
The thought fragmented.
His consciousness came apart like wet paper, awareness dissolving into component pieces that no longer formed a coherent whole. He felt hands lifting him, voices speaking words that had lost all meaning. Then darkness seeped in from the edges, and death claimed him in its silent, final embrace.
---
Silence.
Darkness.
Not the darkness of closed eyes or unlit rooms, but the absolute void of non-existence. No thoughts. No sensations. No time. Just awareness—a point of consciousness floating in nothing, untethered from body or form or purpose.
Then, slowly, impossibly, Marc's awareness began to coalesce.
Not as thoughts—he couldn't form those yet. But as memory. His previous life returned in fragments, uploaded piece by piece into whatever he had become. The process felt glacial, each memory requiring an eternity to manifest and settle.
His grandfather's weathered hands teaching him to read. The smell of old books in their cramped apartment. School desks and fluorescent lights and endless, meaningless lectures. Work cubicles and computer screens and the quiet desperation of routine. His grandfather's funeral, standing alone in the rain beside a casket while strangers offered empty condolences.
And fiction. Mountains of it. Countless stories consumed in his isolation, a library of other worlds and other lives archived in his mind. They came slower than the real memories, as if his consciousness had to sort through them, deciding what to keep and what to discard.
Between the memories, his awareness faded. Not into nothing—not anymore—but into a different state. Sometimes he existed. Sometimes he didn't. The boundary between the two became meaningless.
As memories accumulated, Marc became aware of something else: he had a body.
He couldn't control it. Couldn't move or speak or open eyes he wasn't sure he possessed. But it was there—arms and legs in positions that felt wrong, a compact form folded into some kind of container. The container shifted occasionally, accompanied by rhythmic sounds that vibrated through liquid.
The body was small. His legs bent at sharp angles, knees nearly touching a chest that didn't rise or fall with breath. Because he wasn't breathing. The realization should have caused panic, but thoughts still wouldn't form properly. He could only observe, cataloging sensations without understanding them.
Time became irrelevant. Days, weeks, months—impossible to distinguish. The memories continued their slow upload. His body grew stronger, more developed. The container grew more cramped. His awareness flickered between existence and void, a rhythm that became almost comfortable.
Then, finally, the memories stopped coming.
And one day—though calling it a day meant nothing in his timeless existence—everything changed.
The container compressed around him. Not painful, but insistent, waves of pressure that started at his legs and moved upward. The sensation intensified, squeezing him like a hand closing around prey. His head, which had been up, was now down. The pressure focused there, intense and overwhelming.
Then he was moving.
Sliding through impossible tightness, compressed from all sides, pushed by forces he couldn't resist. His legs emerged first into shocking coldness. Then his body. Then hands—massive, warm, impossibly gentle—caught him and lifted him free.
Pain lanced through his stomach as something cut and pulled. Then something soft moved across his face, clearing away slime and membrane, and suddenly—
Air.
Cold and sharp and utterly foreign, it rushed into lungs that had never drawn breath, expanding his chest in a painful, beautiful gasp that forced sound from his throat. The sound came unbidden, his body's automatic response to existence.
Voices surrounded him.
Three of them, all feminine, all speaking a language that sounded like music composed in an alien key. The first voice came from above—heavy and energetic despite its age, belonging to the massive hands that held him. It spoke with authority and relief.
The second voice came from nearby, younger and enthusiastic, tinged with worry that softened its brightness. It asked questions in rapid succession.
The third voice came from below, tired and beautiful, a melodic cadence that wrapped around him despite its exhaustion. His mother's voice. He knew it instinctively, the same way he knew the hands holding him weren't hers.
The language made no logical sense—alien phonemes and grammatical structures unlike anything he'd encountered on Earth. But he could hear it with perfect clarity, each word distinct despite his incomprehension.
Because his hearing had changed.
Not drastically—he wasn't suddenly superhuman. But the improvement was undeniable. He could distinguish the slight rustle of fabric as the three women moved. The creak of wooden floorboards under shifting weight. The flutter of a curtain in a breeze he couldn't feel.
His sense of smell had sharpened too. The three women each carried distinct scents—the older one smelled of herbs and soap, the younger of sweat and excitement, his mother of blood and milk and exhaustion. He could smell himself too, and somehow knew his scent was fundamentally different from theirs in ways he couldn't articulate.
Beyond the people, other scents filled the room: wood in varying states of age, iron from tools or fastenings, something pleasant sitting on an elevated surface. He could distinguish the floor planks from furniture from walls, each type of wood reporting its unique composition to his enhanced nose.
The information overwhelmed his infant brain. He tried to form thoughts, to process what was happening, but the effort felt like lifting impossible weight. His consciousness could stretch toward thought but not quite achieve it, like hands grasping for something just out of reach.
An impulse rose within him: open your eyes.
He tried. His eyelids trembled but remained closed, too heavy for his weak muscles to lift. His entire body felt simultaneously overstimulated and exhausted, every sense reporting new information while his brain struggled to create the neural pathways needed to process it all.
But one understanding crystallized with perfect clarity:
Humans didn't die. They were reborn.
The knowledge settled into him, a foundational truth joining his accumulated memories. Death wasn't an ending but a transition, consciousness moving from one vessel to another in an eternal cycle.
As the realization completed itself, exhaustion crashed over him like a wave. His infant brain, overwhelmed by awareness it wasn't meant to handle, began shutting down non-essential functions. His enhanced senses dimmed. The voices faded to distant murmurs.
Just before consciousness dissolved into protective sleep, his brain managed to grasp fragments of the alien language, committing sounds to memory.
Then darkness claimed him again, gentle this time, pulling him down into the dreamless sleep of the newborn.