Darkness.
Not the soft dark of closed eyes or a starless night sky—no. This was a darkness that consumed. A void that stretched endlessly, without boundary, without time, without warmth or welcome.
It was the space between universes. The wound between realities.
The dimensional gap.
A place that should not exist, but did.
A place formed not by natural laws, but by the fracturing of them—a chasm left behind when worlds clashed, diverged, collapsed, or broke.
And within this gaping, black expanse, something unnatural stirred.
The stillness was broken by tears in space—dozens, hundreds, perhaps more—shimmering like broken glass suspended mid-air. These were not ordinary fractures. These were rifts of reality.
They hovered, twitched, and bled light—windows into other worlds.
One rift showed a land of blazing swords and flying cultivators.Another pulsed with cold neon lights and metallic towers that stretched past clouds.A third opened to a desolate, sunless realm where winged beasts soared through storms of ash.
And there were more.
Countless more.
Each rift offered a glimpse—a second's flash—into some different plane of existence. Some were grand and majestic, others cruel and chaotic. Some showed peaceful pastures under twin moons; others showed battlefields, cities in ruin, or infinite libraries suspended in golden time.
The dimensional gap was not a place of order. It was where all order broke down.
Floating in this chaos was a soul.
A faintly glowing form. Wispy. Undefined. It had no body, no flesh, no voice.
Just the imprint of a human life.
The soul of a young man, recently separated from the world he once knew.
His name had once been Ethan Spencer.
Nineteen years old.New Yorker.Cynic.Sharp-tongued.Tang San Hater Ah Yin Obsessed
He had died moments ago—too quickly to scream, too suddenly to understand. His final thoughts had been of fucking Ah Yin , the irony of which was now lost in the endless black.
Now, he drifted.
His soul floated through the dimensional gap like a speck of dust in a shattered glass bottle.
The rifts around him pulsed, some drawing close before drifting away again. Each one offered a chance to fall—into a story, a world, a fate. But his soul did not yet stir. It did not move of its own accord. It had no consciousness, no control.
Yet something unseen—some force hidden deep within this chaotic sea of ruptured dimensions—seemed to pull gently at the thread of his essence.
The gap was not just a prison or a graveyard.
It was also a pathway.
A gate.
And Ethan's soul, though unconscious, had been noticed.
As more rifts opened and closed, strange shapes and echoes passed through the gap—shattered remnants of laws, fragments of fate, broken memories not tied to any one world. A giant sword with no master. A whisper of prayer in a dead language. A book that could not be read. A crown of ice that melted into mist.
All drifted. All vanished. All ignored the soul.
But something did not ignore him.
One rift, flickering blue and gold, began to slowly widen.
It revealed a peaceful forest bathed in twilight, where spirit energy shimmered in the air like pollen. Where the trees whispered with memory. And where a life was beginning—a tiny heartbeat deep within the womb of a woman cloaked in ancient sorrow.
And toward that rift, the soul of Ethan Spencer began to drift.
Drawn.
Carried.
Chosen.