I was here before anyone decided time was a good idea.
No sky. No ground. No direction to dramatically stare into. Just pressure everywhere, all at once, like the universe was hugging me with both arms and absolutely no boundaries.
If you are wondering what that feels like, imagine being wrapped in a heavy blanket.
Now imagine the blanket is made of nothing.
Now imagine the nothing is judging you.
That was my life.
And yes, I talked to it.
Do not look at me like that. There was literally nobody else.
"Hello?" I tried once, pushing the idea of a voice into the emptiness like tossing a pebble into a lake.
Nothing came back. Not even an echo.
"Rude," I told it.
The void did what it does best. It did nothing. Which, for a void, is technically its job. Still. Rude.
I would like to say I was calm and wise and ancient about it.
I was not.
I was bored. I was stubborn. I was aware, which was already unfair, because being aware in an empty universe is like being the only person awake in a house with no clocks. You cannot even measure how long you have been annoyed.
I tried counting once. One. Two. Three.
The numbers turned sour in my mind and I spat them out like they had texture.
"Fine," I said. "No counting. No clocks. No problem. I am sure this will not have consequences."
I was, shockingly, wrong.
Then I felt it.
A tug. A pull. A tiny insistence in the emptiness, like a thread snagging on a sleeve.
It was not warmth. Warmth would have felt like a promise. This felt like raw potential, like someone dumped all the ingredients of reality on a counter and walked away.
It slid through everything. Through me, through nothing, through the concept of through.
Naturally, I reached for it.
Because it was the first thing that was not me.
Because it moved, and movement meant I was not alone in the most miserable way possible.
Because I wanted it.
I tried to gather it the way you cup your hands around smoke.
It slipped out.
Not gently, either. It escaped like it was offended I even tried. Like, excuse you, I am chaos, do not touch me.
I stared at it. Again, no eyes, but you know what I mean: the feeling of staring with your whole being.
"Really?" I said.
The void did not answer.
So I tried again.
Same result.
It wriggled. It scattered. It acted personally insulted by the concept of being held.
That was the moment I learned my first real emotion.
Spite.
"Okay," I told it, very politely, like politeness would stop me from committing metaphysical crimes. "We are doing this the hard way."
I focused.
And that was my first violence.
Not a punch. Not a blade. Just attention sharpened into a hook and sunk into the formless until it had to acknowledge me.
I needed a word for what I was doing. Later people would use words with ceremonies and sects and incense and unnecessary outfits. I did not have any of that. I had boredom and teeth.
So I called it cultivation.
Not because I was growing flowers.
Because I was forcing the universe to stop slipping through my fingers.
Step one was containment.
I set my awareness like a boundary, pressure against pressure, and the raw potential hit that boundary and slid along it, searching for a gap.
It found plenty.
I did not have a body yet, not properly. I was more like a knot of thought. So it leaked through me like water through a broken basket.
Annoying.
So I made the basket less broken.
I tried imagining a shape. A circle, because circles feel like they should work. The energy treated my circle with the respect it deserved, which was none, and escaped anyway.
"That is fair," I muttered. "I also do not respect my circle."
I tried a tighter idea. A spiral.
The energy slid along it, slowed just a little, and for half a heartbeat that did not exist, it actually stayed near me.
I froze in place, terrified of scaring it off.
Then it slipped away anyway.
"Spiral is a maybe," I said. "We will workshop it."
I kept going.
I made grooves in myself the only way I could. Repetition. Every time the energy brushed past my awareness, I pressed inward, guiding it along the same imagined path. It was like carving channels into stone using nothing but a fingernail and pure refusal.
Slow.
Humiliating.
Also the only thing I had ever been good at, which says a lot about my options.
Eventually, the spiral stopped being imagination and started being habit.
The energy still slipped. Still scattered. Still acted like it did not owe me cooperation.
But now, when it tried to flee, it followed the grooves I had worn. It did not vanish instantly. It lingered long enough for me to do the second part.
Compression.
This was the part where I stopped being a confused speck and started being a problem.
I gathered the energy in my spiral channel and pushed inward from all sides. Not with hands, but with pressure. My pressure against its pressure.
It resisted. It wriggled. It tried to fray at the edges like thread pulled too hard.
I tightened anyway.
"Stop that," I told it. "You are being dramatic."
It did not stop.
So I learned rhythm.
Not literal breathing. I did not have lungs. But I found a cycle I could repeat until it became real.
Pull in.
Hold.
Squeeze.
Release.
Again.
The first attempts were a mess. I pulled too fast and the energy scattered. I held too long and it slipped through cracks I did not know I had. I squeezed too hard and it snapped apart into harsher fragments that stung my awareness like sparks.
That hurt.
Not physical pain, because I still did not have nerves. It was more like my focus got scraped raw. Like sandpaper across a thought.
I recoiled and the void pressed in, smug in its silence.
"Oh," I said, offended. "So you can hurt me. Good to know. I will be taking that personally."
I adjusted.
I pulled slower, letting the energy settle against my grooves instead of slamming into them.
I held just long enough for it to stop thrashing and start drifting in a circle, like a storm that had forgotten it could move on.
Then I squeezed, carefully, the way you squeeze water out of cloth, except the cloth was my own awareness and the water was the closest thing to reality.
The wrong parts came out first.
I did not know they were wrong at the time. I just knew some of the energy felt heavy. Sour. Sticky. It clung to my channels and made everything sluggish.
The first time I tried to compress with that sourness still mixed in, the whole cycle became mud. The pressure inside me thickened until it felt like I was drowning in something that did not exist.
I panicked.
I do not like admitting that. It makes me sound young.
I was young, technically. I had only existed for a duration that could not be measured because time was still busy not existing.
I wanted to fling everything away. To go back to being a speck. To stop trying.
And then I realized something.
If I stopped, I would dissolve.
Not immediately. Not dramatically. Just slowly, the way fog thins until you cannot tell where it went.
No.
Absolutely not.
So I did the third part.
Purification.
I learned to let the sour parts drift outward during the release phase. I loosened my pressure in specific spots, little vents in my spiral, and the sticky heaviness slid out, as if relieved to escape me.
They weren't lungs. They were my relief valves, the only places I allowed the bad out.
It felt like breathing out something rotten.
Better.
Then I pulled again, but this time I paid attention to the texture of what came in.
Some of it was light and clean, like a clear current.
Some of it was sharp, thin enough to cut.
Some of it was heavy and stubborn, like it wanted to sit in my channels and refuse to move.
I started sorting.
Not perfectly. I did not have a teacher. I did not even have a word for teacher.
But I had instincts and I had pettiness.
If it felt clean, I kept it.
If it felt rancid, I bled it out.
If it felt sharp, I handled it carefully and used it to tighten my grooves. The thin, cutting strain carved my channels deeper, and yes, it hurt, but it also made me better at holding everything else.
"You are useful," I told the sharp strain, grudgingly. "I hate that."
The void pressed in, heavy and silent, like it was listening.
"Do not get excited," I told it. "This is not for you."
Nothing answered.
Still professional about that.
Cycle after cycle, the spiral became a system.
My awareness stopped being a loose cloud and started having edges. The pressure around me stopped being the whole universe and started feeling like something touching my skin.
Which meant I had skin.
A boundary. A self.
That realization did not come with fanfare. It came with the quiet shock of noticing you have been clenching your jaw for ages and finally letting it loosen.
"Oh," I whispered, and for the first time it felt like there was someone to whisper.
Me.
The energy I kept began to collect at my center.
At first it was just a warm spot in the middle of my spiral. Not warmth like comfort. Warmth like friction. Like something being forged.
I fed it every cycle.
Pull in.
Hold.
Squeeze.
Release the bad.
Keep the good.
Feed the center.
Over and over, the center grew denser. It stopped behaving like a loose swirl and started behaving like a thing that wanted to stay itself.
A core.
Not a heart. Hearts are sentimental. This was structure.
This was me saying, I will not scatter.
When it finally stabilized, the core did something I did not expect.
It hummed.
Not sound. Vibration. A tension through my whole being like a bowstring pulled tight.
It made me feel heavy in the best way. Anchored. Real.
I was so pleased with myself I almost invented applause.
I settled for talking.
"Okay," I told the void, smug. "So I can do that."
The void said nothing.
"Are you jealous?" I asked.
Silence.
"That is a yes," I decided. "I can tell by the way you are being quiet."
The truth was, the quiet had changed.
Before, it was blank. Now it had an edge. Like something out there had noticed my core and was paying attention.
It was subtle. A tightening. A shift in the pressure, the way a room changes when somebody turns their head.
A question without language.
Who are you?
I felt it like a stare.
My first instinct was to shrink.
Ridiculous. There was nowhere to shrink to.
So I did the opposite.
I centered around my core and let the hum steady, letting my presence fill the space I occupied like I had always deserved it.
"Hi," I said into the void, because I am apparently that kind of person. "Yes, it is me. I am also surprised."
The pressure tightened again, testing.
It pushed at my boundary like fingers searching for weakness. Like it wanted to know if my new self could be peeled apart.
I held.
I held hard enough that the hum in my core sharpened.
"Do not do that," I warned it, even though warning a universe was arguably the most arrogant thing I had done so far. "I just made this."
The void did not stop.
Of course it did not.
So I pushed back, just a little. Not an attack. A statement.
I am here.
The emptiness recoiled.
Not fear.
Surprise.
That tiny recoil sent a thrill through me so sharp I almost laughed.
Oh.
So the universe can notice.
Good.
Because I had been doing all this in the dark with no witnesses and it was starting to feel unfair.
The pressure shifted again, and this time it did not feel like random emptiness. It felt like intent beginning to cohere.
Like the void was gathering itself the way I had gathered the energy.
Like it was learning, too.
The emptiness pressed heavier, as if taking a breath.
I held my core steady and waited, because whatever this was, it was new.
For the first time since I existed, the nothing around me felt like it was about to do something other than be nothing.
The universe, at last, was starting.
And I was already here, arms metaphorically crossed, ready to argue with it.
The pressure built.
Not around me. Through me.
The void folded in on itself, layer after layer, tightening until it stopped feeling infinite and started feeling cramped.
Constrained.
I recognized the pattern with sudden, unpleasant clarity.
It was copying me.
Not the technique, not the patience, not the part where you learn by failing until failure gets bored and leaves.
Just the desperate shape of it. The idea that if I could become something, then it could too.
Jealousy has a pressure all its own.
"Really?" I said. "You are going to do this now?"
The void did not answer.
It just squeezed.
It squeezed wrong.
It had no grooves. No vents. No practiced rhythm. It tried to force emptiness into a core the way you force water into a fist and call it holding.
Tension piled up. Folded. Caught on itself. The whole nothing shuddered with the strain of being asked to become something it did not understand.
For a breath that still did not exist, everything went perfectly still.
Then the void broke.
Detonation is the closest word, but it was not fire and it was not sound. It was a decision so violent it turned into law.
Nothing tore open.
Potential spilled outward in waves, and the pressure that had smothered everything snapped into motion like a chain whipping free.
My core flared. The hum sharpened. I held myself together by instinct and spite as the newborn universe tried to fling me apart.
And in the middle of that blast, I felt it.
A new kind of energy, flickering into existence the way a spark becomes a flame.
It was finer than what I had been wrestling. Cleaner. More willing to hold a shape. It poured through the cracks the detonation had made and settled into the newly forming rules like it belonged there.
It did not feel like me.
Not my hum. Not my stubborn weight.
It felt like something the universe made to live with itself.
A smaller breath.
A younger pulse.
As if reality, in the middle of panicking, had produced a child and handed it the problem.
Particles of spirit. Threads of structure. The beginning of something that could be gathered, guided, taught.
The moment it touched my awareness, I understood it without having a word for it.
This is what comes after nothing.
This is what fills the world when the world finally exists.
The blast kept expanding, and as it did, the emptiness stopped being one emptiness.
Some of it sank, heavy and starving, dragging rough residue with it like teeth pulling meat from bone. It clung. It devoured. It wanted.
Some of it rose, bright and orderly, snapping into lines so sharp they felt like judgement. It cut. It aligned. It decided.
Between them, a thin place formed, stretched taut, a corridor where the rules ground against each other and time finally learned how to move.
A smaller world blinked into being somewhere in the middle, loud and fragile and alive, like a thought that did not realize it could die.
That younger energy flowed into all of it. Into borders. Into gaps. Into the places where souls would someday learn to pull and hold and squeeze and release.
It soaked into the framework of reality like ink into paper.
And the universe, jealous and furious and newly real, settled around its own creation as if to say, fine. If you get to exist, then so do I.
I drifted in the aftermath, core humming, awareness raw, watching the first rules cool into place.
Somewhere far away, something hungry took its first breath.
Somewhere else, something righteous drew its first line.
And I, inconveniently early, floated between beginnings and consequences, feeling the younger energy seep into existence, as if the universe were bleeding spirit into its own veins.
"Okay," I told the newborn cosmos, because apparently I cannot stop talking.
"Now we have something to work with."
The universe did not answer.
Still rude.
But it pulsed, faintly, with that new energy.
And for the first time, the nothing around me felt like it had become a place.
A place that would eventually have names.
A place that would eventually have wands and wards and rules people pretended they invented.
A place that would eventually have problems.
Lucky for it, I was already here.
Ready to argue with it.