Year 333 Post-Collision – Fourteen Years Before the Meeting
The boy who would not give his real name learned to die properly when he was six months old.
Not die-die. The Leviathan wouldn't allow that. But die in the way that mattered—the stopping of breath, the panic of lungs filling, the moment when your brain understands that continuation is not guaranteed and you either claw for it or let go.
She dropped him in the abyss thirty-seven times that month.
He clawed back thirty-seven times.
On the thirty-eighth, she let him sink longer. Just to see.
Six Months Post-Rebirth
The thing about being a baby with an adult consciousness was that it fucking sucked.
Sunny—because he was NOT giving up his real name, not here, not in a world where he could feel that names had weight—spent his first months in a special kind of hell that none of his trashy isekai anime had prepared him for.
Sure, they showed the "reborn as a baby" part. They always skipped over it in a montage or a funny chibi segment where the protagonist thought "wow being a baby is boring lol" and then time-skipped to age five when they could walk and talk and start grinding skills.
None of them showed you what it was like to have twenty years of memories and consciousness crammed into a brain that didn't have the neural pathways to process them yet. None of them showed you what it was like to be aware while your body betrayed you at every turn—couldn't walk, couldn't talk, couldn't even control when you pissed yourself. None of them prepared you for the sheer boredom mixed with existential horror of being trapped in an infant body while a primordial ocean goddess decided how she wanted to raise you.
The Leviathan did not believe in cribs.
She believed in depth.
The space she kept him in wasn't quite underwater and wasn't quite air. It was her—some manifested pocket dimension that existed in the trench of her presence, where reality bent around her will like water flowing around a stone. The pressure here would have liquefied a normal human instantly. Even now, six months in, Sunny's tiny body was constantly on the edge of collapse.
His bones hurt. Not baby-teething hurt. Existential hurt. The kind of hurt that came from having your skeletal structure slowly, agonizingly compressed and reformed to withstand forces that should not exist.
[AETERNUM ARCHIVE: ACTIVE]
[ENTRY: Abyssal Density (Fragment) – Rank F-]
[Current Manifestation: Bone Compression Resistance +0.8%]
[Continuity Debt: 0.34%]
The Archive had been talking to him since day one. Not in words—his brain wasn't developed enough for that yet—but in feelings, in knowing. He understood, instinctively, that something in him was recording what the Leviathan did to him. Every time she wrapped him in pressure that should have crushed him, every time she pulled back just enough for him to survive, the Archive learned.
It was the shittiest power system he could have imagined.
In the anime, the protagonist always got something flashy. A cheat skill. A growth multiplier. A system that gave them clear notifications and immediate results. "Congratulations! You've learned [Divine Slash]! Rank S! You can now cut through mountains!"
His Archive?
[Congratulations! You survived not being crushed today!]
[Abyssal Density (Fragment) improved: F- → F-]
[Still F-, but like, slightly LESS F-]
[You're welcome, dipshit]
He was pretty sure the Archive wasn't supposed to have personality, but the sarcastic tone in those notifications felt real. Maybe it was just his own self-loathing bleeding through. That tracked. Even in a new world, even with a primordial goddess as a guardian, Sunny was still fundamentally himself: anxious, self-deprecating, convinced he was fucking everything up.
The Leviathan didn't seem to mind.
She was... strange with him. He'd expected a lot of things from a cosmic horror entity that could drown civilizations. He'd expected cruelty, maybe. Indifference, definitely. Casual violence as she tested whether he was worth keeping.
He got all of that.
But he also got... attention.
She watched him. Constantly. He could feel her awareness like a weight, like gravity, like standing under deep water and knowing that the water was thinking about you. When he cried—and he cried a lot, because he was a baby and babies cried and there was no dignity in it—she would condense herself around him. Not gently. Not like a mother in any human sense. But present. Wrapping him in pressure that somehow felt like... security?
He was pretty sure he was developing Stockholm syndrome for an eldritch ocean goddess.
That probably wasn't healthy.
[ARCHIVE NOTIFICATION]
[Emotional Imprint Detected: "Safety In Pressure"]
[This is either character development or brain damage]
[Possibly both]
[Continuity Debt: 0.35%]
The First Lesson
The Leviathan manifested physically for the first time when he was four months old.
Sunny had been... existing. That's what most of his time consisted of. Floating in her dimensional pocket, his tiny body slowly adapting to the impossible pressure, his mind racing through memories of his past life to keep from going insane with boredom.
He'd discovered he could access his memories with perfect clarity now. The Archive apparently catalogued everything.
And Rajah Williams—Sunny—whoever the fuck he used to be, had consumed an absurd amount of media.
[MEDIA CATALOG ACCESSED]
[TOTAL INDEXED CONTENT: 10,247+ Hours]
[CATEGORIES:]
[- Anime/Manga: 4,200 hours]
[- Video Games (Played): 2,100 hours]
[- Video Games (Owned But Never Touched): 267 titles]
[- Video Essays: 1,800 hours]
[- Movies/TV: 1,400 hours]
[- Music (Listened): 600 hours]
[- Music (Created By User): 47 hours of self-hatred]
[- Documentaries (Watched While High): 347 hours]
[- Random Wikipedia Binges: Uncountable]
It was all there. Every lazy Sunday he'd spent binging anime instead of working on his music. Every 3 AM deep dive into some YouTube video essay about Alexander the Great's logistics strategy or the political marriages of Roman emperors. Every documentary about Leonardo da Vinci he'd watched while high, half-absorbing facts about sfumato and mirror writing. Every movie he'd put on in the background while scrolling his phone. Every game in his Steam library he'd bought on sale and never played. All 33 games on GOG he'd promised himself he'd "get to eventually."
He'd watched a 4-hour video essay on the artistic techniques of Renaissance painters and retained maybe 30% of it. He'd binged Hamilton twice and could probably recall most of the lyrics but definitely not the historical accuracy debates. He'd watched documentaries on AI technology, neural networks, and the future of automation while eating cereal at 2 PM on a Tuesday. He'd played hundreds of hours of strategy games, RPGs, roguelikes, and then never finished most of them.
Rajah Williams had been a consumer. A procrastinator. A kid who filled his brain with infinite content because it was easier than making something that mattered. He knew a lot of shit.
He also didn't really know any of it deeply.
The Archive didn't care.
[CONCEPTUAL DATABASE: FRAGMENTED BUT ACCESSIBLE]
[HISTORICAL FIGURES: 247 partial profiles]
[MILITARY TACTICS: 89 surface-level strategies]
[ARTISTIC TECHNIQUES: 156 half-remembered methods]
[TECHNOLOGICAL CONCEPTS: 340 Wikipedia-tier understandings]
[GAME MECHANICS: 1,247 system frameworks]
[MOVIE PLOTS: 890 (Attention Span: 34%)]
[MUSICAL THEORY: F- Rank (User Refused To Learn Properly)]
[RAP LYRICS (USER-GENERATED): Cringe Tier But Indexed]
[SYNTHESIS POTENTIAL: Unknown]
[WARNING: Most Concepts Are Fictional, Incomplete, Or Misremembered]
[ESTIMATED MANIFESTATION RANK IF ATTEMPTED: F- to F-]
[But Hey, You've Got OPTIONS Now]
It was like having the world's shittiest, most scattered superpower. He had access to thousands of hours of content, but most of it was surface level. He knew Alexander the Great did something impressive with logistics and conquered a fuckton of territory, but he couldn't recall the specific details of his supply lines. He knew Roman emperors did political marriages and had complex succession dramas, but he'd definitely zoned out during parts of that video essay. He knew Leonardo da Vinci was a genius polymath who designed flying machines and studied anatomy, but his memory of how those designs worked was... fuzzy.
And yet.
The Archive treated all of it as data. Incomplete data. F- rank garbage data. But data nonetheless.
If he ever got strong enough to manifest any of this shit, he could theoretically try to create a sword based on some game he'd played for twenty minutes before refunding it. It would be the worst sword ever made. It probably wouldn't cut butter. But it would exist.
That was something.
Maybe.
He'd been mentally sorting through his catalog—specifically reviewing a video essay about medieval siege tactics he'd half-watched while eating Hot Cheetos—when the pressure around him suddenly intensified.
Not painfully. Deliberately.
The water-that-wasn't-water pulled back, creating a pocket of space, and in that space, she appeared.
The Leviathan in physical form was... not what he expected.
She wasn't some Godzilla-sized sea serpent. She wasn't a kraken with tentacles that blotted out the sun. She was—
Human-shaped.
Mostly.
If you didn't look too close at the way her edges flickered, like reality couldn't quite commit to keeping her solid. If you didn't notice the way her eyes were less "eyes" and more "windows into something that went down forever." If you ignored the feeling that her presence was somehow heavier than her physical form, like ninety-nine percent of her was somewhere else and this body was just the tip of an iceberg that extended into dimensions human brains couldn't process.
She looked like a woman in her late twenties. Pale skin that had an almost blue-gray tint to it, like someone who'd drowned and been pulled back. Long black hair that moved like it was underwater even though they weren't. She wore something that might have been a dress or might have been the ocean itself temporarily agreeing to hold a shape.
And she was looking at him.
Sunny, brave reincarnated protagonist that he was, immediately pissed himself.
The Leviathan's lips quirked. It might have been a smile. It might have been her deciding whether to eat him.
"Small thing," she said, and her voice was like the sound of water under immense pressure finding a crack to escape through. Not loud. Inevitable. "You stole from me."
Oh fuck. Oh fuck fuck fuck. Was she mad? She was going to kill him. She was going to un-claim him and let him dissolve and this time there wouldn't even be a sidewalk and a cracked phone, just—
"Good," the Leviathan said.
Sunny's infant brain stuttered.
"Theft means hunger. Hunger means will. Will means you might survive what comes next." She reached down—her hand passing through the space between them like distance was a polite suggestion—and touched his chest where her sigil had burned itself in.
[ALERT: DIRECT CONTACT WITH CLAIM SOURCE]
[AETERNUM ARCHIVE RESONATING]
[ENTRY: Abyssal Density (Fragment) – UPDATING]
Pain. White-hot, bone-deep, soul-scraping pain. Not because she was hurting him. Because she was teaching him, and the lesson was too big for his baby body to hold.
He felt it—really felt it for the first time. The weight of her existence. The law she embodied. Pressure. Depth. The concept of space that bore down instead of spreading out. The idea of density, of mass, of presence so concentrated that reality had to move around it or break.
This was what he'd stolen a fragment of. This was what the Archive had recorded at F- rank.
This was what he needed to understand if he wanted that F- to ever become anything higher.
"Listen, small thing," the Leviathan said, and Sunny realized with horror that he was listening. His infant body had stopped crying, stopped squirming. Some part of him that wasn't entirely baby-brain had locked onto her voice like it was the only thing keeping him from flying apart. "Your Archive is theft. But theft without understanding is just collection. You have stolen the fragment of my law. Now learn what it means."
She pulled her hand back.
The pressure slammed into him like a physical blow.
Sunny couldn't breathe. His lungs seized. His heart forgot its rhythm. His bones—his fucking baby bones—started to creak under the weight of her presence.
He was going to die. Again. Barely six months into his second life and he was—
[ENTRY ACTIVATING: Abyssal Density (Fragment)]
[F- Rank Manifestation: Attempting Structural Reinforcement]
[SUCCESS RATE: 12%]
[This Is Going To Hurt]
The fragment of her law that he'd stolen, that the Archive had recorded, ignited inside him. It was like swallowing glass. Like his bones were trying to become denser, harder, heavier, all at once without any of the gradual adaptation that should have happened.
But it worked.
Barely.
His ribs didn't crack. His spine didn't snap. His heart kept beating—stuttering, failing, restarting—but beating.
He survived twelve seconds under direct exposure to her presence before she pulled back.
Twelve seconds.
He'd survived twelve seconds of something that should have killed him instantly.
The Leviathan watched him gasp and shake and cry, and when she spoke again, her voice held something that might have been... approval?
"Good. Again."
The Thirty-Eighth Drowning
By six months old, Sunny had died—not-died—thirty-seven times.
The Leviathan's training method was simple: expose him to her presence until he broke, then pull back before he stayed broken. Let the Archive record. Let his body adapt. Repeat.
It was the most brutal fucking tutorial he could have imagined.
Every time she did it, the Archive learned a little more. F- became F, became F+. The fragment of her law that he'd stolen became slightly less fragmented. His bones stopped creaking under pressure. His lungs learned to pull breath from spaces where breathing shouldn't be possible. His heart developed a rhythm that could keep going even when existence itself was trying to stop it.
[AETERNUM ARCHIVE: PROGRESS REPORT]
[ENTRY: Abyssal Density (Fragment) – Rank F+]
[Bone Compression Resistance: 8%]
[Pressure Adaptation: 4%]
[Cardiovascular Stability Under Duress: 6%]
[Translation: You Can Now Survive 15 Seconds Instead Of 12]
[Congratulations You're Still Pathetic]
[Continuity Debt: 1.2%]
The thirty-eighth time was different.
She dropped him into the actual abyss.
Not the pocket dimension where she usually kept him. Not the training space where reality was bent but still somewhat comprehensible. She took his six-month-old body and dropped him into the real ocean trench that she called home, where the pressure was measured in "how quickly can we compress this submarine into a soda can" and the depth was measured in "at what point does light give up."
Sunny sank.
The weight was... indescribable. It wasn't like being underwater. It was like being inside weight itself, like pressure had stopped being a force and became an environment. His body—still so small, still so fragile despite months of brutal adaptation—started to shut down immediately.
[ALERT: CRITICAL PRESSURE THRESHOLD EXCEEDED]
[ENTRY: Abyssal Density (Fragment) – INSUFFICIENT]
[ESTIMATED SURVIVAL TIME: 8 Seconds]
[RECOMMENDATION: Stop Sinking You Fucking Idiot]
Sunny tried to swim. His baby arms flailed uselessly. There was no up, no down. Just heavy.
Six seconds.
His vision was going dark. Not the dark of night. The dark of nothing, of a place so deep that even the concept of light had been crushed into non-existence.
Four seconds.
His heart was stopping. Not dramatically. Just... giving up. Like it had finally accepted that some things weren't survivable.
Two seconds.
In his fragmenting consciousness, Rajah-who-was-Sunny-who-was-no-one, thought: Not again. Not like this. Not disappeared.
[ARCHIVE RESPONSE: Then Don't]
And something in him—the part that had stolen from her in the first place, the part that was too stubborn to die quietly twice—reached.
Not for her. She was letting him sink on purpose, watching from somewhere in the vast dark.
He reached for the Archive itself.
For the fragment of law that he'd stolen, that was still F+ rank, that was still barely enough to keep him alive under normal pressure. He reached for it and demanded more.
[ERROR: ENTRY RANK INSUFFICIENT FOR CURRENT ENVIRONMENT]
[ATTEMPTING FORCED MANIFESTATION ANYWAY]
[WARNING: CONTINUITY DEBT WILL INCREASE SIGNIFICANTLY]
[WARNING: THIS MIGHT JUST KILL YOU FASTER]
[PROCEEDING]
The fragment of Abyssal Density exploded inside him.
Not cleanly. Not like a skill activating in an anime with cool visual effects. It tore through his tiny body like he'd tried to channel a fire hose through a straw. His bones didn't just compress—they fractured trying to become dense enough to match the law he was forcing through them. His muscles tore. His blood vessels burst.
But his heart kept beating.
And he stopped sinking.
For exactly three seconds, Sunny existed at a depth that should have crushed him into paste, and his body held together through pure, stolen, badly-copied physics.
Then the Leviathan's presence wrapped around him and pulled him back to the surface of her pocket dimension.
He materialized in the training space, bleeding from places babies shouldn't bleed from, his body a mess of internal damage and fractured bones.
He was also alive.
The Leviathan looked at him with those abyss eyes, and for the first time, she smiled.
"You did not let go," she said.
Sunny coughed up something red and tried to cry, but his lungs were too damaged.
"Good," the Leviathan said, and her hand pressed against his chest again, and this time instead of pain, he felt—
—repair. Forced, brutal, agonizing repair. His bones knitting back together, denser than before. His muscles stitching themselves closed, tougher than before. His blood vessels reconstructing, stronger than before.
The pain was worse than the injury.
Sunny's mind, desperate for anything to distract from the agony of having his skeleton reconstructed while he was conscious, dove into the Archive.
He wasn't trying to access anything specific. He was just fleeing into memory, into the catalog of his wasted first life, anything to get away from the feeling of his femur splintering and reforming and splintering and reforming until it achieved the density the Leviathan's law demanded.
The Archive responded by throwing everything at him at once.
He saw—remembered—experienced:
[MEMORY: Age 16 – 3 AM – Video Essay Playing]
"—Alexander's logistical innovations were what truly enabled his conquests. The Macedonian army could cover 20 miles a day because he reduced baggage trains, streamlined supply lines, and—"
Rajah on his bed, laptop on his chest, half-asleep, eating stale chips. Barely paying attention. But the information went in. Got filed away. Logistics. Supply chains. Moving armies. The concept of infrastructure as weapon.
[CONCEPTUAL FRAGMENT ARCHIVED: "Logistical Efficiency (Alexander)" – Rank F-]
[CURRENT UTILITY: None]
[POTENTIAL SYNTHESIS: Unknown]
[MEMORY: Age 18 – Late Afternoon – Documentary Playing]
"—Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks contain over 7,000 pages of observations, sketches, and inventions. His genius lay not in completing works, but in the act of observation itself. He saw the world as a series of interconnected systems—"
Rajah high as fuck, staring at sketches of flying machines, his mind wandering. Thinking: I should draw something. I should make something. Never making anything. But the idea stuck. Observation. Systems thinking. Seeing connections.
[CONCEPTUAL FRAGMENT ARCHIVED: "Systemic Observation (da Vinci)" – Rank F-]
[CURRENT UTILITY: None]
[POTENTIAL SYNTHESIS: Unknown]
[MEMORY: Age 19 – Evening – Hamilton Soundtrack Playing]
"I am not throwing away my shot! I am not throwing away my shot! Hey yo, I'm just like my country, I'm young, scrappy and hungry—"
Rajah rapping along badly in his bedroom, feeling the rhythm, feeling the hunger in the words. Thinking about legacy. About being remembered. About refusing to waste the chance you're given.
[CONCEPTUAL FRAGMENT ARCHIVED: "Refusal To Waste Opportunity (Hamilton/Burr)" – Rank F-]
[EMOTIONAL RESONANCE: High]
[CURRENT UTILITY: Motivational Only]
[MEMORY: Age 17 – 2 AM – Video Essay About Roman Politics]
"—the key to understanding Roman imperial succession is recognizing that legitimacy was performed. Emperors didn't just inherit power, they claimed it through ritual, marriage, military support, and public narrative—"
Rajah taking notes he'd never review. But the idea landed. Power as claim. Authority as performance. Legitimacy as something you declare until others believe it.
[CONCEPTUAL FRAGMENT ARCHIVED: "Performed Sovereignty (Roman)" – Rank F-]
[CURRENT UTILITY: None]
[POTENTIAL SYNTHESIS: Unknown]
[NOTE: Might Be Relevant Given Your Current Situation]
[MEMORY: Age 20 – Midnight – AI Documentary While Eating Leftover Pizza]
"—neural networks learn through iteration and failure. Each failed attempt refines the model. The network doesn't 'understand' what it's learning, but through repetition, it develops patterns that work—"
Rajah barely awake, vaguely interested in the graphics showing neural pathways. Thinking it looked like magic. Like a brain teaching itself. Like—
[CONCEPTUAL FRAGMENT ARCHIVED: "Iterative Learning System (Neural Network)" – Rank F-]
[CURRENT UTILITY: None]
[WAIT]
[CROSS-REFERENCING WITH: Aeternum Archive Structure]
[SIMILARITY DETECTED: 89%]
[NOTE: Your Power MIGHT Work Like This]
[NOTE: You Learn By Surviving Repeatedly]
[NOTE: That's Literally What Neural Networks Do]
[NOTE: Huh]
The memories kept flooding through him—hundreds of half-absorbed documentaries, thousands of Wikipedia articles he'd skimmed, video essays he'd half-watched, games he'd barely played. All of it fragmented. All of it incomplete. All of it there.
His bones finished reforming.
The pain ebbed to a manageable agony.
Sunny gasped and opened his eyes and found the Leviathan watching him with something like curiosity.
"Your mind wandered far," she observed. "While your body broke. That is... useful. Pain is easier when you have places to flee."
Sunny couldn't respond. His vocal cords were still baby-tier useless.
But in his head, in the Archive, something clicked.
All that media he'd consumed in his first life. All those half-learned facts and surface-level understandings and fragmentary concepts.
They were all ranked F- or F. Absolute garbage tier. If he tried to manifest a "Leonardo da Vinci flying machine" right now, he'd probably create a pile of sticks that immediately fell apart. If he tried to use "Alexander the Great logistics," he'd... what, organize his baby toys more efficiently?
But.
But.
The Archive didn't just record things from this world. It also catalogued his memories. And his memories were a database of concepts—incomplete, poorly understood, barely functional concepts.
If he could survive long enough...
If he could find ways to test these concepts against reality, let them fail, let the Archive learn from those failures...
If he could do what neural networks did—iterate, refine, fail forward...
Maybe his trash-tier knowledge could become something real.
[AETERNUM ARCHIVE: CRITICAL UPDATE]
[ENTRY: Abyssal Density (Fragment) – Rank E-]
[Forced Evolution Through Survival Event]
[New Capabilities Unlocked:]
[- Bone Compression Resistance: 15%]
[- Pressure Adaptation: 12%]
[- Forced Density Manifestation: 3 Seconds Maximum]
[SYNTHESIS POTENTIAL DISCOVERED]
[Cross-Archive Synthesis: Locked (Insufficient Rank)]
[Memory Manifestation: Locked (Insufficient Rank)]
[Estimated Unlock Requirements: E+ Minimum, Multiple Entries Required]
[Translation: You Can't Do Cool Shit Yet]
[But Eventually You Might Be Able To]
[Continuity Debt: 4.8%]
[Note: You Survived Because She Let You]
[Note: Next Time She Might Not]
[Note: There Will Definitely Be A Next Time]
The Leviathan settled back, her form flickering between states, and watched her claimed child process this.
"You have more in that Archive than stolen law," she said slowly, like she was reading something written in him. "You have... memories. From before. From a world that is not this world."
Oh fuck. Could she see his past life? Could she—
"I do not care what you were," the Leviathan said. "I care what you are. You are mine. You are claimed. The rest is... context." She tilted her head. "But context can be useful. If you have knowledge from elsewhere, use it. Steal it like you stole from me. Make it real enough to matter."
She leaned forward, and her eyes were bottomless.
"Survive first. Learn to exist under weight without breaking. But after—when you can walk, when you can speak, when you can act—show me what a small thing with two lives' worth of memory can become."
"Again tomorrow," she said. "But tonight—rest, small thing. You have earned knowing you will wake."
Sunny floated there in the space between drownings, his baby body exhausted, his adult mind reeling, his Archive quietly cataloguing everything.
And deep in his memories, in the catalog of half-watched documentaries and barely-played games and Wikipedia binges and video essays he'd consumed while high, he started thinking.
He had an Archive that could record and refine concepts from this world.
But he also had 10,000+ hours of other concepts. Fictional ones. Historical ones. Half-understood ones. F- rank garbage ones.
Swords that wouldn't cut. Tactics that wouldn't work. Techniques he didn't fully understand. Technologies he barely remembered. Art methods he'd never practiced. Military strategies he'd only heard summarized.
All worthless.
All useless.
All potential.
If he could survive long enough to test them...
If he could fail enough times to refine them...
[MEDIA CATALOG ACCESSED]
[SEARCHING: Applicable Concepts For "Survive Being Crushed"]
[RESULT: 847 References]
[TOP MATCHES:]
[- Game Mechanic: "Damage Reduction Stacking" (Dark Souls, Elden Ring, etc.)]
[- Historical: "Roman Testudo Formation" (Shield Wall Defense)]
[- Artistic: "Compression In Composition" (da Vinci, Caravaggio)]
[- Technological: "Structural Reinforcement Theory" (Engineering Docs)]
[- Fictional: "Defensive Stance Skills" (300+ RPGs)]
[ESTIMATED MANIFESTATION RANK: F- to F-]
[ESTIMATED UTILITY: Complete Garbage]
[ESTIMATED SURVIVAL RATE IF ATTEMPTED: 60%]
[PROCEED ANYWAY? Y/N]
Sunny thought about his past life. About being Rajah Williams who wanted to be famous and died over a phone full of dreams. About being Sunny the mediocre rapper with anxiety and low self-worth and a Steam library full of games he never finished.
About being neither of those people now. About being claimed by something vast. About having a second chance that was somehow worse and better than anything he'd imagined.
About having a catalog of trash-tier knowledge that might—might—become something real if he survived long enough to force it.
He thought: I already died once. And I spent that whole life consuming instead of creating.
Maybe this time I can make something.
Even if it's garbage.
[Y]
The Leviathan watched her small thing start to scheme and felt something that might have been pride or might have been hunger.
Time would tell which one it was.
Time would tell what he became.
But for now, she wrapped him in the pressure of her presence—gentle, by her standards—and let him rest.
Tomorrow, she would drown him again.
And he would claw back.
Again.
With 10,000 hours of half-remembered bullshit and the desperate hope that quantity might eventually become quality.
[END CHAPTER 2]
[CONTINUITY DEBT: 4.8%]
[ARCHIVE ENTRIES (This World): 1]
[ARCHIVE ENTRIES (Previous Life): 10,247+ Hours Of Garbage]
[SYNTHESIS POTENTIAL: Locked But Promising]
[AGE: 6 Months]
[STATUS: Pathetic But Scheming]
[NEXT DROWNING: Tomorrow]
[STEAM LIBRARY: Still 267 Unplayed Games]
[You'll Never Finish Them Now]