"..-. . .- .-. / .-- .- ... / . - . .-. -. .- .-.. / -... ..- - / --- -. . / -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. . / -.-. --- . -..- .. ... - / .-- .. - .... / .. -"
"Only by facing your burdens head-on do you realize that the weight that dragged you throughout your life was only your own imagination."
What would you do if the only fear you could feel was stripped of every extension of itself, where light could not be savored by dark?
Until the essence of life fled in small drips of blood, in truth, you could only live in the moment when time itself truly stopped. The mountains were unshaken, the seas fragrant, the sky dark under the endless cold that is the vast expanse we call Existence.
It was dark. No, it had always been dark here.
It was just that if you never followed closely, you would never grow accustomed to its rhythm. There was no blue moon, only a red eclipse hanging in the sky. It had a peculiar yet terrifying appearance, like a hollow creature howling in visceral pain. From its eyes, two waterfalls of crimson blood ebbed and flowed. This was the moonlight.
The Greeks used to refer to eclipses as "Abandonment," emphasizing divine displeasure. Something was out of place or did not appear, meaning catastrophe would ensue. This was a sign for the ancients.
"My body felt paralyzed. No amount of physical motion could be exerted, even with force. Was it fear?"
"My hands felt cold and numb, my face pale as ice, yet I could not fully understand what my body was signaling to me. I felt my pupils dilating, enlarging, the beating of my heart interspersed throughout my body, the environment was serene, one could almost hear uncomfortable noises such as one's own pulse and blood coursing through the body."
After several days, my body began to ache. Dark lumps were growing beneath my abdomen. From them, a strange.. something sprouted.
"As I lay there, I could only observe the world and contemplate. It had a rhythm. It was not like Earth. Everything here seemed to serve its own purpose, it was a like a carefully crafted design. Something you could almost intuitively understand with even an innate sense of pattern recognition, except the attention span demanded was far more extensive. I could not move anywhere, so I had been quietly observing things."
"In the southern sky, from within the depths of space which was pitch black, an Eye seemed to appear within my vision. Its size was akin to the moon. There was nothing peculiar around it, just empty space, and it seemed to stare at the world. Every five minutes or so, it blinked, and each blink carried a change, or rather, death itself. Each movement was reflected in its vast pupil, but it did not notice me. I was weak and still."
–.. . .- - …. / – .. -- . / -.. .- ... .... . ... / .- ... / . -.-- . / -... .-.. .. -. -.- …
"It was this rhythm I caught. Every five minutes, without fail, something changed."
"If it was near, I could observe it. Even if it was outside my range of observation, I felt it. The aura of death permeated. That realization petrified me."
It was the oldest emotion in history: fear, especially the fear of the unknown.
The Eye was terrifying. It was grand, majestic, yet its entire existence appeared to serve one purpose: to intimidate and impose order.
But this Eye was different. It radiated a malevolent aura. Each time something died, it revealed an almost mocking amusement. Its depth grew darker, like a black pool that swallowed you the moment your gaze lingered too long.
It had no muscles to smile with, yet its amusement was visible. From its expression, one could imagine a dark, eerie grin. It did not pity the world. It seemed to loathe it. Rather than recognizing insignificance, it disregarded what made life a potential to be actualized, too far below itself.
"For what felt like six days, I was incapable of moving. It was more so my body reacting physically to something intangible. When the amygdala in the brain receives sensory input, it starts to react in designated patterns. However, this seemed instinctual. A famous biologist used to say that the human body merely adapted to the environment and grew according to its requirements."
"In those six days, I witnessed 1,728 intervals of five minutes, and each time the air seemed to turn heavier."
"Each blink and each gaze mocked the futility of life. It carved a void into the concept of value and meaning. Travelers searching for food or shelter died miserably. Their decaying corpses were devoured by others, who too met the same fate."
"My body grew malnourished. I questioned whether I was hallucinating."
"My body was weak, my senses dulled."
Fear numbs the senses. It creates paranoia. You hear sounds that are not there, your mouth dries, your vision sharpens but tunnels on specific movements until you are certain they are harmless. Your blood circulates, intensifying your sense of touch.
Fear had always been tied to death, but fear itself was worse. Fear is the feeling of hopelessness. Often, we fear what happens before death more so than after.
"I remembered a line from Earth:"
"Fear arises from attachment. Once we let go, there is nothing to fear."
"What was I attached to? Perhaps my former life. But am I really dead? Can I consider it my former life? What happened? I have gaps in my memories. It's that feeling. The one where you taste the familiarity of something but just can't recall it."
Was this world, at first glance, any different from Earth aside from the unfamiliarities? On Earth, those who spoke against fear were often the ones who spread it around. Fear was hypocrisy. It was learned, nurtured, conditioned toward specific ideals and people.
But here, fear was raw. It was annihilation.
Fear ruled history. It drove kings to slaughter kin, emperors to wage wars, and tyrants to cloak themselves in lies. Fear created torture, exclusion, trauma. It twisted civilization into obedience.
It changed people, reshaped the body, and molded survival. In a world consumed by fear, there was no rest. Even without hope, humans still clawed at the illusion of it. Survival was the body's final defiance for self preservation, but the body was impermanent; without the heart, the body is merely a web of intricate connections.
And yet, at its root, fear was always something to fear itself. When there is a collective people, not only the mind, but the body forgets that sensation because there is perhaps a guaranteed security.
Desperation, however, was fear disguised—a fear of rejection, of abandonment. When one truly reaches a state of desperation, they become irrational, perhaps revealing sides of themselves not regularly displayed toward others. Fear brought forth this side, the ones everyone hides against each other.
"When you don't face your fear alone, will you ever overcome it? What if you face this fear in accordance with others' beliefs? Then it merely becomes a prolongment which abstains from truly facing the truth?"
"When I was a child, I heard of a certain story that always seemed to leave adults in silence when they heard the name. It has circled my heart ever since. It goes as follows:"
There once was a nameless man who lived deep in the mountains. Pale, frail, and sick from birth, he was scorned as a failed successor of his clan and thus lived alone with his wife, on the month of November she endured seven days of agonizing labor. Each night, the moon turned pale blue, and by day the horizon burned crimson.
On the final day, the husband entered the room, only to see his wife wavering between life and death. He grasped her fading hand, felt its warmth, and wept. She opened her weary eyes, eclipses dim yet hopeful. The child, wrapped in blood-stained robes, was unveiled.
Dead.
This was a pain which no father could bear, losing the love of your life and the child you were supposed to raise together.
Heartbroken, the man seemed to slowly lose his sanity. He turned his head away, unable to stare any further.
As the sky grew gloomy and rain began to wash down the earth, he walked outside, limping, appearing to be devoid of any life, and stared at the heavens above in indifference.
"Oh, why have you forsaken me, God? In soul, in heart, in mind, I have served obediently. To what avail? My wife lies cold, and my heart grows colder. Why allow this suffering? What crime have we committed? Will you punish me for the hatred now carving into my heart?"
As if in answer, an imposing presence descended from the heavens. From the gloomy skies, a ray of light pierced through, accompanied by a red-veiled woman, her sleeves like angelic wings. She smiled as she reached for him. He, broken, reached back in ecstasy and delusion. Their hands overlapped, but her touch passed through him like a ghost.
Then came the cold.
His body, already struck with ecstasy, could not feel the hand that was penetrating his left chest, aiming for his heart. She gazed at him for a bit; from a distance, it was picturesque, like a portrait of an angel and a human from opposite angles.
She ascended while he descended. Blood spewed into a sickly hue in the air and left a pavement covered in a diluted red. In his left eye lingered a strange look. It was not fear or disappointment. It was something called jouissance, a French term for an overwhelming, often paradoxical state of intense pleasure that can coexist with pain, or rather use pain as specific conditions, pushing beyond ordinary satisfaction and sometimes leading to self‑destructive or ecstatic experiences.
This state was something that was hard to induce too, even through excessive psychological manipulation, because it could cause a self‑destructive state in his case. The man was so intently wishing for an alternate fate where his delusions manifested, and the pain he felt seemed to turn into ecstasy.
"The nature of the woman was interesting. No one really understood her role. Some viewed it as symbolism for divine intervention, hinting that the man saw something he should not have, or that the woman represented warmth and love, which was his wife. He could not accept reality and thus appeared to enter that state willingly, or he suffered mental trauma which had accumulated for a while, and this was his breaking point."
"But what they do not tell you, what even the readers of stories tend to subconsciously ignore while pitying the man, is that they refuse to view the portrait in its entirety. A fool gazes at a single star during a starry night, not noticing the beauty of the entire cosmos. This is intentional short-sightedness. When one truly visualizes, can they establish the intricate relationships between the different concepts in their mind and grasp the truth, and in such, they think of one word: a cause."
"A cause requires a goal. Humans exist for causes. Civilization itself was born of them. Some attainable, some impossible, all binding. But a cause does not need to be fulfilled; it is to be justified in accordance with one's values."
"This cause accounted for all conscious experience of the living. To simply breathe is to willingly want to continue living. Everything we do is interconnected. Whenever there is will, there is cause. Whenever will is absent, a cause still exists, something the human wants to cling to."
"When one is lost in life, you so desperately call for the world to give you a cause. Humans die for causes which are rarely theirs, dying for meaningless conflicts and others' ambitions, thinking, 'This is my cause.'"
"But no, the cause is impersonal. It does not care for you. It is you that must care for your cause, because it is the human heart that gives a cause meaning. One cannot ask the world to provide a cause. The world is vast and consists of others who would override your own feelings to match their criteria for meaning. Your own heart is there for you when the hearts of others do not care for you. It is one's own beautiful uniqueness." This was his genuine emotions, something a youthful boy would preach off regarding their personal understanding of the world, but does there really exist someone who does not live for a cause? If that is the case, then he is not ordinary and has transcended regular human experience.
"It has been nine days since I arrived here. Three days since my last coherent thought."
"Today, I finally felt my cognition reaching its limit. The five-minute interval I was counting started to become inaccurate. The intention behind it was to see if the intervals were fixed or not. Fatigued, I realized I had no choice but to act. I also had many thoughts drifting in my mind."
"How can I act without moving? My position is located on what seems to be elevated ground. No, no… I cannot despair. I must not allow negative thoughts to seep in, or they will bury me deeper into this grave."
The black lumps receded.
"These lumps appear only when emotions are disturbed. Despair and fear feed them. Forced positive thoughts will only leave cracks for them to sprout again. I need movement. If I could just stand, I could observe the terrain. Damn it! What to do! What to do!"
"Wait!"
"Fear arises from attachment. Once we let go, there is nothing to fear."
"I had a thought, something risky, yet subsequently I felt an odd sensation in my heart. Was it thrill?"
I tilted my head upwards, and my eyes met the "Eye." It was so massive that you could not notice whether it was staring intently at you specifically. However, since I was on much higher ground, it felt like its gaze was penetrating right through me. I felt nauseous suddenly.
"The beating of my heart interspersed throughout my body. The longer I stared at it, the surroundings felt like they were gradually dissipating."
This was the Troxler effect, a real optical illusion where staring fixatedly at a point causes peripheral details to fade.
However, this seemed to have a supernatural nature. The Troxler effect could subsequently be paired with time dilation, hinting that staring at the Eye somehow enabled it to warp reality around you.
"At this point, no matter if I wanted to look away, I could not."
If one turns their back on fear, then it will never be overcome; it has to be genuine.
"What I recalled was a specific number. I had been counting for so long. My internal clock somehow intuitively knew when five minutes were about to pass. My senses seemed to distort my track of time, and the intent gaze which was staring fixedly at me was gradually gaining more control over my psyche."
"I knew time dilation was occurring because my consciousness played a role. The boundary between myself and the world seemed to collapse. This was dissociation."
"Subsequently, when I was observing earlier, I noticed that the bird flying fell only after it entered a specific radius, meaning that the self appeared to inhibit odd senses of time without being aware of it."
"Like falling directly at me right after imploding, meaning that time seemed to slow down from its perspective and causing it to fly at inconsistent rates. Once it came back to its senses, it intuitively crashed toward my direction. I'm not sure why it did that specifically."
"But its implosion? This meant one thing. Reaching the end of the five minute mark resulted in death!!"