The first sensation I experienced was not pain. Pain was a sensation felt as a result of stimulation and damage to nerves. In those initial moments, my nerves had not yet formed for me to want to feel pain.
The first sensation was pressure.
I felt like a human placed under a press machine that was slowly, bit by bit, applying pressure equal to the weight of a planet onto his body.
It felt like an ocean struggling to fit into a thimble. The crushing and suffocating weight of a sudden and absolute limitation. For an eternity—a unit of time I usually ignored—I was a consciousness that spanned light-years, a thought present everywhere simultaneously.
Now I was being squeezed and with tremendous blows, hammered into a vessel that did not even reach two meters in height. I felt the infinite dimensions of my existence slam shut like steel trapdoors, imprisoning me in a single point in space.
It is too tight! My mind screamed. This was the instinctive reflection of a god unconsciously pushing against the fleshy walls of his prison. This cage is too small.
Do not push, my logic responded, cold and precise. Pushing breaks the law of probability. Submit to the vessel.
I forced myself to submit. I accepted the ignominy of "having edges"; I accepted the humiliation of having a spatial location, and I allowed the cosmos to dictate where my existence ended and the rest of the world began.
Then, biology began.
Gravity crashed down on me like a physical blow, a heavy, invisible hand pressing my shoulders down. It was a ruthless, downward pull that seemed insulting to a being accustomed to floating in the void.
My lungs, wet and new, swelled with a sharp, painful gasp, swallowing air that tasted of sulfur, ancient mold, and human fear. My heart, that raw, fleshy pump no bigger than a fist, hammered against my chest with a rhythm as if a war drum were beating inside my skull.
It was deafening. It was relentless. How did mortals think with this constant biological clamor inside them? It was as if someone wanted to sit inside a running engine and compose a symphony.
I opened my eyes.
The visual data was blurry, low-resolution, and painfully narrow. I tried to look behind me and realized I could not. My field of vision was a pathetic cone of light in a world of darkness. I was forced to physically turn my head, straining neck muscles that were stiff and cold.
It's disgusting, I thought to myself, wiping the rheum of birth from my eyes with a blink.
I am blind to 180 degrees of my surroundings. I am vulnerable from behind. This is not a body; it is a coffin with windows.
I blinked again. Tears flowed from cheeks that, a moment ago, had lacked them. The tears were a reflex; my new eyes burned from the acrid smoke filling the room. I wiped them away with a hand that looked alien—five pale, fleshy fingers and blue veins pulsing just beneath the skin's surface.
I focused. The blurriness transformed into clear shapes.
I was standing in the center of a circle drawn with chalk. The lines glowed with a faint, crimson light—a containment barrier designed to trap an infernal entity. I could see the metaphysical structure of that spell; it was sloppy, full of holes and leaks.
To me, that barrier looked like a fence made of rotten spiderwebs. I could pass through it without even noticing. But the intention behind it was cute. It was like an ant drawing a line in the sand to stop a tsunami.
Around the circle stood twelve figures. They were clad in crimson robes that had seen better days; velvets were worn at the elbows and stained at the hems with the grey mud of the basement.
They were busy chanting incantations—or at least they had been until moments ago. Now, the song had died in their throats, extinguished by a sudden and suffocating silence.
The room was a basement. Concrete walls leaking dampness, water stains blossoming like dark flowers on the ceiling, and a naked bulb fighting a losing battle against the shadows cast by black, flickering candles. It smelled of wet earth and wrong decisions.
But I did not look at the humans first. I felt a heat behind me, a radiation that made the fine hairs on my neck stand on end. I turned to look at the rift behind me.
The fabric of space was still torn; a jagged, vertical wound in the air leading to the Abyss. I could feel the chaotic entropy radiating from it, a wind smelling of burnt ozone and sulfur. And I could sense a creature halfway through the door, just when I had shoved it aside to steal its entry vector.
It was a demon—a monster of cooling magma, sharp bone spikes, and hatred. Currently, it was clinging to the other side of the dimensional tear. Its massive, clawed hands gripped the edges of reality, peeking inside from the closing rift.
The demon's yellow, reptilian eyes met my human eyes.
The demon saw flesh. It saw pale, naked skin. It saw wet, dark hair plastered to a skull. It saw a young human male, weak and soft.
But then it looked deeper. It looked into the pupils.
It did not see a soul. It saw my true self, the Creator Deity. It saw the infinite, crushing weight of my consciousness wearing that skin suit.
The demon froze. The primal instinct of the Abyss—a survival mechanism polished over millennia of eating weaker souls and fleeing from stronger ones—screamed one word that resonated in the monster's primitive brain: PREDATOR.
The creature let out a sound no throat should be capable of producing; a high-pitched howl of absolute existential terror. It neither attacked nor roared. It scrambled backward, crawling back into the darkness of its own hell, stumbling over its own massive tail and digging claws into the obsidian ground to put as much distance as possible between itself and me, who was standing in the basement.
Good boy, I thought as I watched the monster's retreat. Run back into the fire. It is safer there.
The rift closed with a soft, final sound. The tear in reality stitched itself up, leaving behind only the smell of ozone and the heavy silence of the room.
Silence descended upon the basement. Heavy, thick, and suffocating. It was of that genre of silence that reigns before an execution ceremony.
I turned back toward the cultists. I looked at them. They looked at me.
I waited for an attack, for confusion. I checked the environment, my mind calculating faster than any supercomputer.
The probability of local reality collapse is close to zero. Stable.
My current physical status is a standard human. My muscle density is very high, but my reflexes are not calibrated.
My current Divine Authority is sealed. Locked behind the Probability Barrier. My information is genuinely limited. I am no longer omniscient nor omnipotent.
I was naked, shivering slightly from the damp cold of the basement. If one of these fanatics decided to pull a gun and shoot me, the bullet would pierce my skin. I would bleed. I might even die.
Dying, five minutes after descent, would be a humiliating end to my vacation, a cosmic joke that would echo for eternity.
So, I needed to prove my dominance. Immediately.