Reincarnator's Odyssey: Second Life of An Apocalyptic Survivor

What was death?

Was it pain – a final scream echoing into silence?

Was it the pearly gates of heaven or the roaring furnaces of hell?

A state of refined suffering, or absolute peace?

Did divine beings wait in some luminous darkness, their faces carved from starlight and eternal judgment?

Jack could answer every one of these questions with a single, devastating word:

Nothingness.

This utter void wasn't just his state; it was the totality of his existence, his only reality.

It wasn't merely empty space or profound darkness; it was the absences of space itself,

the negation of the very concepts of dark or light.

'Seeing' implied light, form, and distance – concepts annihilated here.

There was no 'here,' no 'there,' only…

null.

Imagine sealing your eyes in the deepest cave at the very end of the universe, then severing the optic nerves.

There would be no phantom light dancing behind closed lids, no pressure of eyelids, no lingering sense that 'eyes' or 'seeing' had ever been possible.

Sound?

This wasn't mere silence – silence is the absence of noise within a world.

This was the absence of the concept of sound itself.

No echo of his final, venomous curse lingered; no memory of a heartbeat could be recalled.

Movement?

Utterly impossible.

He wasn't frozen in ice-cold rigidity; he existed in a state devoid of the very notions of 'frozen' or 'fluid.'

There was no body to twitch, no nerve to send a signal.

'Suspended' implied a position relative to something else – 'above' or 'below' – but direction was a forgotten lie here.

The image of an astronaut adrift in space felt tragically inadequate, even kind.

Space possessed stars, unfathomable distances, the terrible beauty of galaxies curving through the void.

This… this was the primordial canvas before the first atom sparked into existence.

It was the potential for drift, for existence itself, utterly unmade.

And yet, within this perfect, consuming nullity, one thing burned with terrifying persistence.

An image.

Carved not by light, but by the raw, bleeding chisel of agonizing memory: His father's face.

Not a face touched by love or kindness, but the cold visage of the cultist.

Eyes perpetually empty of warmth, brimming instead with that distant, fanatical hunger.

The mouth that had preached damnation as salvation.

The first architect of his entire cursed life.

This face hung in the void – not a vision granted, but a scar seared onto his consciousness.

It was the only thing that persisted, the core of his 'nothing,' the final, inescapable truth of Jack.

He found he didn't care about the void's infinite vastness, its chilling perfection, or its absolute indifference.

All that mattered, all that truly existed in this non-place, was that face.

And from its hollow eyes echoed a silent, crushing weight of a single, unanswerable question:

Why?

Parents often play a cruel game with their children:

Who do you love more, your mother or your father?

For Jack, the question would have been twisted into something darker:

Who do you hate more?

His answer would have come without hesitation, carved into his very bones – his father.

The apocalypse, despite being humanity's gravest catastrophe, had granted Jack his only reprieve:

freedom from his parents.

From the moment the world began to unravel, he hadn't spared a second searching for them.

He didn't care about their fate;

he actively prayed they'd been torn apart by the infected,

their fanatic blood soaking the cursed earth.

For thirty years, he breathed air untainted by their presence, believing them gone.

Then came the reunion – not in sunlight, but in the candlelit horror of his own sacrifice.

Bound and helpless, he saw his father standing over him, not to embrace a lost son, but to plunge the ritual knife.

The man who'd never shown him love, who'd used him as a tool for deranged ceremonies, was now offering him to the void.

Hatred became the only constant in Jack's existence, a black sun burning cold in the nothingness that followed death.

Why?

The silent scream tore through him.

Why couldn't you have just rotted in some forgotten grave?

Why crawl back only to take this final, brutal thing from me?

Worse than the loss of life was the method – the ritualistic pain delivered by the architect of all his suffering.

The memory seared itself into the void: the glint of wetness beneath the edge of the monstrous goat mask, the tears tracing his father's hidden face.

Crying.

The hypocrisy was unbearable.

What right did that monster have to tears after a lifetime of cold neglect and exploitation?

If Jack could have moved, if he could have summoned even a fraction of his old strength for one glorious second, he wouldn't have merely killed him.

He would have peeled that weeping face from his skull,

fingernails digging, tendons snapping, flesh ripping free in a wet sheet –

forcing him to see the ruin he'd wrought.

But here, in this absolute null where direction was a lie and sensation was a forgotten dream, he was powerless.

A ghost haunting only the prison of his own consciousness.

So he surrendered to the hatred.

He fed it every scar, every night of terrified loneliness, every moment of betrayal.

He drowned in its acid depths, cursing his father, the hollow womb that birthed him,

the world that spawned them, and every atom of existence that had ever caused him pain.

In the endless, frigid dark of non-existence, this all-consuming fury was the only fire left to him.

Jack cursed into the void.

For how long? He couldn't tell. Time had dissolved.

Had it been hours? Days? Months? Years? Centuries?

The concept itself was meaningless here.

Gradually, even his ability to think eroded.

At first, his thoughts had raged – clear, venomous streams of hatred directed at his father, his mother, the world.

But now, they tangled and frayed, a chaotic, dissipating mess.

Holding onto any coherent idea became a struggle against an encroaching fog.

When had he last formed a curse against them? A year ago? Two? Ten? He stared into the unending darkness, a prisoner within his own crumbling mind.

Desperation, a final flicker of sentience, sparked.

One. Two… Three… He began to count internally, a frail lifeline thrown to his drowning consciousness.

Was it ten years he'd counted? Twenty? Thirty?

The numbers blurred, lost their sequence, their meaning.

Eventually, the effort itself faded.

He simply… existed.

Unmoving.

Unthinking.

A statue of awareness adrift in nullity.

Basic questions surfaced like bubbles from a deep, cold lake, only to pop unanswered:

What was his name?

Where was he?

How had he come here?

What was this place?

How long?

A thousand years? Two thousand? Three thousand?

The bubbles stopped rising.

Silence, deeper than the absence of sound, settled over his mind.

There was nothing left. Just the void, and the scar of his father's face, now bleached of meaning.

And then—

Eons later, or perhaps only an instant – time remained a shattered concept – he saw something.

Not with eyes, for he had none, but with the raw core of his being.

A light.

Infinitesimally small, impossibly distant, a single, defiant pinprick in the perfect, all-consuming null.

It shouldn't have been perceptible, yet it was.

Slowly, agonizingly slowly, like the first movement after continental ice ages, the light drew nearer.

It stirred something within the frozen depths of his awareness –

not hope, not joy, but a profound, nameless need, the instinct of a creature buried alive sensing vibration above.

He fixed the entirety of his residual will upon it,

clinging to that distant, fragile glow with the desperation of a man dying of thirst offered a single drop of moisture after millennia in a desert.

After a subjective eternity – thousands upon thousands of years measured only by the light's glacial approach – it finally resolved.

Shape.

The realization struck him with the force of a physical blow.

The light wasn't just a point; it resembled something.

But what?

He groped through the atrophied ruins of his memory, clawing at shadows of forgotten forms.

Animals? Objects? Stars? Nothing surfaced.

For centuries more, he did nothing but stare, pouring every shred of his fractured concentration into deciphering the enigmatic luminescence.

He willed recognition with the totality of his being.

And then, as it drew near enough for its form to become undeniable, revelation crashed over him.

The light wasn't merely shaped like something familiar.

It was something familiar, yet rendered on a scale that defied comprehension.

The light was a turtle. Not an earthly creature, but a cosmic turtle,

its colossal, ancient form etched in purest light against the backdrop of eternal nothingness.

Its slow, deliberate movement through the void spoke of epochs beyond counting, a silent leviathan navigating the primordial dark.

But this was no ordinary creature.

Where a shell should have rested upon its ancient back, it bore something infinitely grander:

an entire planet.

Not a dead orb of rock, but a living world, vibrant and breathing against the starless backdrop.

The sight stirred something deep within the crumbling core of Jack's being – a faint, forgotten resonance, an emotion too long buried to name.

As the cosmic turtle drew nearer, the sheer magnitude of Jack's initial misperception became horrifyingly clear.

It wasn't merely large; it was vast. Unimaginably vast.

Beside its primordial bulk, Jack felt less than an atom – a fleeting thought against eternity.

Atom? The concept flickered weakly.

The colossal turtle's head shifted with the slowness of continental drift.

Eyes, dark as the void itself yet profoundly different, fixed upon him.

Where the void was null, these eyes held depth.

Within their obsidian expanse, tiny, glimmering lights swirle –

not mere sparks, but entire galaxies drifting in the fathomless darkness of its gaze.

The sight struck him again, that strange, unidentifiable feeling intensifying.

Then, without movement of beak or jaw, the turtle spoke.

Sound, or the pure concept of sound, vibrated through the non-space.

Jack heard, but the meaning was alien, lost in the void between realities.

It spoke again.

The resonance deepened, the pressure of communication immense.

Still, understanding eluded him.

The great being seemed to study him more intently, its galactic gaze piercing the remnants of his fractured consciousness.

Instead of speaking a third time,

it exhaled.

A gust of unseen force, powerful, washed over him.

Within the swirling galaxies of the turtle's eyes, Jack saw himself reflected.

His form, if it could be called that, was a ragged silhouette of the same endless darkness that surrounded them.

But now, deep, jagged cracks ran through it – a web of fractures like shattered glass moments from disintegration.

As the turtle's primordial breath touched these fissures, he broke.

Slowly, inevitably, piece by agonizing piece, his dark silhouette disintegrated.

Fragments dissolved, melting back into the indifferent void from which they came.

Until nothing remained.

Nothing but a single, small, perfectly smooth black sphere – the irreducible essence of what had been Jack.

And in that moment of pure, condensed being, he understood.

The turtle's voice resonated again, no longer alien.

It was the sound of mountains forming and stars dying, a paradox of the intimately known and the eternally unknowable, wrapped in pure vibration.

"You understand me now, lost child."

He tried to speak, to form a question, a cry – but there was no mouth, no form, only the sphere of his awareness.

Yet, the turtle perceived him.

"To find a corrupted soul adrift in the void is not uncommon,"

the leviathan intoned, its galactic eyes holding the tiny black sphere.

"But to find one that has, against all entropy, retained its sanity? That… is rare."

The great being studied the sphere, its gaze weighing epochs and the fragile light of a single, stubborn mind.

The turtle's words echoed in the void, concepts as vast and alien as its form.

"You are neither a Walker nor a Lawbreaker, or they would have noticed you by now."

The terms – Walker, Lawbreaker– meant nothing to the compressed awareness within the black sphere.

They were labels from a reality he couldn't grasp.

"And yet," the leviathan continued, its galactic eyes swirling,

"you are connected to a Lawbreaker in some way."

Connection?

The idea was as intangible as the void itself.

Understanding was beyond him.

He possessed no context, no memory to anchor these colossal concepts.

Yet, one primal certainty surged through his condensed essence:

He could not bear to be left alone again.

The mere thought of the cosmic turtle vanishing,

abandoning him once more to the infinite, crushing nullity,

ignited a terror so profound it defied articulation – a silent scream against the prospect of eternal isolation.

The great being observed him, its gaze weighing the frantic pulse of his fear against the backdrop of eternity.

Silence stretched, thick with unspoken comprehension.

Finally, the turtle spoke again, its voice resonating with ancient certainty.

"It seems you are holding onto your last breath."

As it uttered these words, a subtle wave of pure energy rippled outward from its colossal form, dissipating into the surrounding emptiness like a stone dropped into a still, cosmic pond.

The turtle then gave a slow, deliberate nod, the movement shifting galaxies within its eyes.

"Consider yourself fortunate, lost child. One of them… is in my path.

I will take you there."

A pause, heavy with finality.

"After that… you are on your own."

Before the sphere of Jack's awareness could form a response – a plea, a question, anything – it felt itself drawn forward.

An unseen force, gentle yet irresistible, pulled him towards the turtle's immense head, a speck of darkness moving towards a mountain range sculpted from starlight and time.

As they began to move, the colossal planet on the turtle's back looming like a new horizon, the being cast one final, inscrutable glance at the tiny black sphere clinging to its presence.

Its final words resonated, not just in the void, but within the core of Jack's being, a pronouncement laden with destiny and dread:

"Let us go meet the Watcher."