Time since the asteroid hit Earth: ~120 million years (subjective to Aryan's awareness)
Aryan Ved drifted through the slow breath of the newborn cosmos.
The particles had formed. Gravity had pulled. Energy had sparked.
Across the dark canvas of this still-young universe, the first hydrogen clouds began collapsing. Pressure mounted. Fusion ignited. And then...
The first star was born — a soft glow in an infinite black sea.
Aryan, still embedded in the fabric of the laws — a silent formula etched into reality — sensed its birth like a heartbeat.
> "It has begun," he thought. "Light has returned."
More stars followed. Nebulae bloomed like eternal flowers. Galaxies took shape in slow spirals.
But then... something shifted.
He noticed it in the farthest quadrant of the expanding universe — a region where gravitational anomalies spun too violently. Dark matter wasn't behaving as predicted. Black holes were forming faster than mass allowed.
> "That's... not right," Aryan whispered through the quantum weave.
He concentrated.
The constants were off — just slightly. A decimal here, a ratio there.
> "I calibrated everything. How did the curvature of spacetime destabilize?"
Then it struck him.
> "In choosing stable energy... I slowed time so much in the early universe that fluctuations in quantum foam didn't cancel each other out. They expanded instead — uncontrollably."
> "This wasn't a miscalculation. It was a consequence."
He hovered within the anomaly.
Stars there died as fast as they were born. Galaxies collided too early. Planets never formed. It was a cosmic dead zone.
> "This is the universe's first scar," Aryan admitted.
Now came his choice:
Fix the imbalance — correct the constants, stabilize that region — but doing so would **restart** the entire timeline in that quadrant. Billions of years would vanish. Any chance of early life in that sector would be erased.
Or...
Let it continue. Allow this chaos to remain — as a reminder. A natural flaw. A pocket where **creation failed**.
He pondered for decades.
Then decided:
> "No universe should be perfect," he whispered. "If I erase every flaw, then this becomes a simulation — not creation."
> "Let this region remain broken. It will serve as the great silence. A reminder of consequences. A warning to future life."
He encoded the flaw into the records of spacetime — gave it a quantum signature. If any advanced species ever reached it, they'd see the traces of imbalance... and maybe learn from it.
And then he returned to the expansion — letting stars form, galaxies spin, and silence grow.
> "I am still embedded in the fabric — but soon, I will need to awaken again. Life is coming."
A chill echoed through the dark.
Creation was never clean.
It was a risk.
And Aryan Ved had just taken his first fallible step.
**— End of Chapter 5**