Within the endless black void, the soul of a mortal man returned once again—a rare but not impossible event.
『Sato's POV』
Cold. Not the kind that bites, but the kind that simply… isn't. The kind of cold that reminds you; warmth is just a story someone told once.
I stirred. Or thought I did. I had eyes—apparently. A body, though it barely counted. Like watching heat ripple off asphalt—visible, but not solid. I was there, and I wasn't.
This wasn't the same void I remembered. That one was a lobby. This? A blank slate. No coordinates. No direction. No presence. Just abstraction wearing the mask of nothing.
No warmth. No noise. Not even silence. Just… absence. So much so that my mind—stubborn as ever—tried to rationalize it. Cold. Fine. We'll call it that.
I floated. Observed. Reasoned. Complained—quietly.
Tried to sleep. Forgot sleep doesn't exist here. No cycles. No concepts. Not even boredom. Just something like it.
'So this is it, then,' I thought, mildly annoyed. 'Stuck again. At least last time I had Morgan Freeman.'
I waited. I think. Waiting implies something might arrive. Still, I played along.
I waited.
And waited.
Eventually, I did what any rational, mildly unhinged man does—I made a game of it.
"Four plus four is eight."
I leaned into math. Logic. The last vestige of humanity I could cling to. Numbers don't lie, they don't pretend. They're clean, brutal, and honest—something the world rarely was. Equations didn't scream, didn't mourn, didn't betray. They just were. So I fed on that clarity.
One became two. Two became four. Four spiraled into primes and fractals and proofs without end. I built labyrinths in my mind—numerical cathedrals of symmetry and chaos. I imagined algorithms complex enough to pass eternity.
I created problems with no solutions just to see how long I could stare at them before I blinked. Gave names to sequences that didn't exist. I turned Fibonacci into Fibonacci Prime just because I could. Time was irrelevant; it had no authority here. Only logic did. I even simulated paradoxes, trying to trap myself in loops that I knew I could break. Because breaking them reminded me I was still here. Still me.
It helped. Turned nothing into puzzles. Problems to solve. A reason to keep parsing input and output like I still had a function.
I solved them all. Then I solved them backwards, then upside down. I rewrote calculus for fun. Invented theorems just to disprove them. Gave entropy a name and tried to find patterns in the patternless.
And still… it wasn't enough.
'A train travels from station A to station B…'
Classic problem. I broke it apart. Dressed it up in new numbers. Rebuilt it.
If I could play with equations, maybe I could trick my mind into thinking I still mattered. Still existed.
But after the hundred-billionth permutation of algebra, even I started to crack.
'Square root of 906.01 is 30.1. 912.04 is 30.2…'
A breath I couldn't take. A sigh I couldn't release.
'Gods, I need a game. A real one. Just something with stakes.'
But beneath that desire… something else stirred. A whisper. A fear.
That I'd been right all along.
That everything really was just a series of patterns. That no matter how much we dressed up life with choices and color and dreams, it all boiled down to predetermined outcomes and predetermined endings.
And what if I wasn't just stuck here now? What if I'd always been stuck—only pretending the pieces I moved ever made a difference?
I wanted more than clever puzzles and survival. I wanted freedom. I wanted joy. I wanted someone to play with who understood. Someone who could shake the board—not just play along.
Ding!
[Conditions have been met.]
'Wait, what?'
[Starting sequence for the Grand Game.]
[Please press Start.]
A flicker. A screen. Navy blue. Text, bright and mocking.
[START] [DECLINE]
I squinted—figuratively. Was this real? Did it matter?
'Well... bored out of my theoretical skull. Let's roll the dice.'
The interface shimmered like glass. Holographic. Impossibly tactile.
I reached. Touched. Thought better of it—then didn't.
'No second-guessing in limbo.'
Click.
The screen vanished. Reality shifted. The void groaned, not in sound but sensation. The rules were changing. I could feel it.
Off in the distance—if you could even call it that, given the lack of anything resembling coordinates—a flicker caught my nonexistent eye. A soft, silent sphere of white light, just there, daring to exist in defiance of all this nothing.
And then it blew up.
Not a whimper, not a warning. Just boom—pure, unfiltered entropy unleashed. The void didn't stand a chance. One second it was empty; the next, it was drunk on light. This wasn't just spectacle—it was declaration. The first move of a new game. I didn't need a narrator to tell me: this was the beginning. The beginning.
As that point of light rushed toward me, it twisted itself into a wild, ever-shifting display. Colors I don't have names for danced and collided, tearing the silence apart. Energy surged—no, roared—and for a second, I was nothing more than a leaf in a primordial storm as space and time elbowed their way into existence.
Nebulae, black holes, plasma rivers, burning stars—symphonies of chaos stitched together into order by the invisible hands of physics. If creation was a canvas, then this was an artist too impatient to wait for paint to dry.
And I? I just floated through it all, equal parts observer and ghost. The heat eased back, just enough for atoms to flirt and molecules to tango. The universe had started its own game of chemistry.
Then came the glow. Faint, red, ancient—it painted everything with a kind of nostalgic warmth, like the last light of a setting sun that had never risen before. Then it faded, and silence returned. Not the cold kind, but the waiting kind. Pregnant with potential.
Time slipped its leash. Eons passed—not that it mattered. I saw the clouds gather, collapse, ignite. Stars were born, burned bright, and died with the kind of flair I've always admired—no subtlety, just unapologetic finality.
Explosions. Elements. Dust. All the raw code for life, scattered by the hands of dying giants.
Then came the galaxies—spiraling, colliding, organizing chaos like programmers debugging the laws of existence. Worlds emerged. One in particular, small and rocky, caught my attention.
And on that world… life stirred.
I watched it all. From singularity to sentience. From nothing to knowing. An audience of one to the grandest cinematic ever produced.
And me?
Still here.
Still watching.
But now… interested.
Ding!
[Please Choose a Character]
[Nanamin]
[The King of Games]
[Radio Demon]
[Zeus]
[The Uchiha Survivor]
[Twilight]
[God of Play]
[Brains]
[Sparrow]
[The Smartest Man in the Universe]
I grinned—finally.
'Now this is more like it.'