"I see. Maybe at the end of everything, there's only this. Just perpetual darkness."
Her will slightly faltered.
"Maybe reincarnation isn't real. Maybe there's no judgment, no Yama, no hell. Uuurgh. I'd even take eternal damnation over this silence…."
Kivas, unshackled from a mortal body, felt no fatigue. Her current state seemed to engineered itself hard to preserve her cognitive function—an unholy gift, maybe? Just to ensure she remained conscious, tortured, alone.
As more years slipped by, Kivas began to lose hope.
"Maybe this is hell after all. An eternity of solitude to cleanse my sins, one agonizing moment at a time…"
1,000 years had passed.
Somehow, she still held onto her sanity.
Was it sheer human determination? Or was Kivas simply an aberration, an anomaly of willpower?
She kept counting. Always counting. And whenever she made a mistake, she corrected himself.
Not like there was anything to do.
She felt like this passage of time, its reality in its numeric sense—was the only thing that had been keeping her rooted to the very core of her existence.
The act was beyond stressful, sure, but what could she do when there was nothing but a mind that was forced to keep the gear churning?
Adrift in endless time, Kivas turned her thoughts back to Earth with melancholy. Her clock was still ticking subconsciously.
"Maybe by now, there aren't any more weapons of mass destruction being lobbed around like a chaotic game of table tennis. No turns, no rules—just chaos.
...Or maybe humanity's already gone. Wiped itself out. If they survived, though, I can't even imagine what their culture or technology might look like."
Even in this shallow state of existence, Kivas found faint amusement in imagining the possibilities.
It was a fragile lifeline, but it kept her mind alive.
10,000 years had passed.
"If I remember correctly, Antares would've gone supernova by now. They said it'd even be visible from Earth during the day."
Her memory hadn't faded, strangely. Not even after millennia.
Was this unnatural clarity persisted because her mind was somehow preserved? Or was this all a simulation, a broken program spinning endlessly in some cosmic processor?
"I guess I read too many science blogs back then," she thought with an imaginary chuckle.
But the thought struck a nasty chord, feeding her existential dread.
Still, she endured. She had no choice. Hope and despair ebbed and flowed like tides, and Kivas clung to the faint belief that something—anything—might eventually change.
100,000 years had passed.
Kivas no longer had the willpower to keep her consciousness actively engaged. It remained as sleepless as ever, but she chose to retreat into silence—mentally and spiritually.
With such an unfathomable amount of time passing, even the constellations began to shift slightly, though they were still somewhat recognizable from this expanse of darkness.
Maybe comprehension happens regardless of the will, after all.
The handle of the Big Dipper had relaxed a little.
1,000,000,000 years had passed.
The Sun grew 10% more luminous, causing Earth's oceans to evaporate.
Organic life was now unlikely to endure.
4,000,000,000 years had passed.
The Milky Way collided with its neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, forming a new galactic entity: Milkomeda.
10,000,000,000 years had passed.
The Sun swelled to 250 times its former size, almost certainly consuming Mercury, Venus, and Earth in its fiery expanse.
If humanity had reached the era of interstellar exploration, perhaps some of them had survived, scattered across the vast, ever-expanding universe.
1,000,000,000,000 years had passed.
It was possible that "The Big Crunch" had begun. The universe, once accelerating in expansion, might now be collapsing in on itself.
Galactic clusters converged. Stars collided, their explosive deaths illuminating the dark void.
Black holes merged, forming larger and larger singularities, until eventually, all that remained was a single, incomprehensibly massive black hole, consuming everything—even itself.
1,000,000,000,000,000 years had passed.
But perhaps no Big Crunch occurred. Perhaps the universe continued expanding indefinitely.
In this scenario, the universe entered a new era. Nucleons—protons and neutrons—decayed, leaving only black holes in an endless, barren expanse.
If a new universe had not already begun, this one settled into its final resting state of energy.
Uninhabited.
Uninhabitable.
Perpetual, limitless darkness.
Through all of this, Kivas' subconscious mind had adapted itself to keep counting.
And counting.
And counting.
And counting.
By now, her soul was nothing but an empty shell. Her consciousness remained awake, but her mind had long since succumbed to the most excruciating kind of death imaginable—a death so abstract that even human knowledge could barely comprehend it.
Time spiraled into an incomprehensible infinity. At some point, even her subconscious stopped caring about the passage of time.
But then, all of a sudden.
Time began to reverse.