I hate the color red. It’s the color that’s brought by war, the color that invades the sky after long hours of toil, the color of the spilled blood of my parents, and worst of all, the last color I ever witnessed in my life.

I was born as the only child of a couple struggling to get by in the slums of a huge city that congregated all of the world’s filth, the phrase “if you can walk, you can work,” was both the lullaby of my kind as well as the mantra the slavers used as they served out a rigorous course of abuse. By the time I was ten years old my body was riddled with scars and lacerations, even more than the average slum rat, so much so that it would be harder to find a place on my body that wasn’t bruised or torn most days. I seemed to have the unconscious need to help others, all the while knowing the sentiment wasn’t one easily shared by those under these circumstance.

If I look back on my past its hard to say that I don’t have regrets, I was near indiscriminate in who I helped and that caused almost as many people to be hurt as the amount that I’d helped.

Towards the advent of my fifteenth birthday is when i started to lose my vision, it began with just my left eye over the course of several months the right began to follow it, getting hazier and hazier by the day. Maybe that’s why I became so indiscriminate in my actions, I knew that toiling was in itself not enough to leave my memory, and a blind child in the slums is basically a corpse with a pulse. So I worked harder, harder than when before I would carry over 50 Kilos of whoevenknowswhat in boxes that smelled like death and decay, now i continued until my bones started to ache and my fingers tore.

Now that I think about it, I’m glad there’s no one to mourn my dea…my death. That’s right, I’m dead, a poor lamenting ghost, a worthless wraith, but how did I pass?

No, wait, I can recall, my racing heart, the insane ramping up of my blood’s tempo. One second, an instant,seems to take years to pass, like molasses making its way through the artic, time slowly lurches forward. The rhythmic sound of boots hitting concrete creeps closer. One step. My heart goes wild. My breathing tenses. I wasn’t prepared for this. Bloodlust. My senses went into overdrive. I couldn’t see anyone on the lone side street, but my senses recognized the danger.

I tried scanning over the area with my half-dead eyes, but all that I could make out was that to my right was a concrete wall and that the bright red color of it, like scarlet paint heavy, viscous, only served to heighten my sense of cautio- The familiar sound of a blade slicing through air caused me to take a small leap forward, narrowly stopping me from meeting an untimely end by way of slit jugular. My heart leapt from my chest.

Even with my sight near gone I could tell that the assailant was a thin man, like a singular sheet of paper, like the edge of a blade, too lithe, too sharp.The only features of his that I could see were those graced by the moonlight, shining silver condolences between us, just his eyes could be made out, a dull glow of wine colored pupils glittered with insanity. Is this where I die? In his right hand a knife was gripped with such strength that the fingers that grasped the hilt of the blade were blue, and looked as if they would be torn apart at any moment.

The man gathered strength into his feet and lunged at me, blade glinting an ominous light. I couldn’t run. A cold sweat made its way down my spine, like an army of spiders crawling on my back, I could do nothing but stand there in fear, the slightest movement could spell instant death and even my cold shivers must be repressed so as not to take even one more step towards the sinking abyss. He was a demon, a creature existing solely to reap life. The gleaming edge of his weapon was again aimed at my throat. I ran toward him. Not to embrace death’s frosty calling, but to defy it, to call out for any vestige of luck that could be granted. This wasn’t a fight. It was a prayer. A sacrifice. A whole hearted dedication to survival.

As we approached each other I sharply dropped towards the chilled asphalt, the baleful blade whistled curses as it cut a shallow mark above my eye. I tried to steal the knife but was greeted by a swift kick to the gut sending me half a meter back. The air in my lungs flew out violently. Blood creeped over my left eye, covering it in thick sheets of warmth. Death makes his way over to me, in a slow, gloating manner. I forced myself up and ran to him. No skill or thoughts backed my actions, I was motivated by fear. I had to fight or I’d die. Those eyes,like Vodka flooding a glass, called for me. Hysteria was his modus operandi and I was engulfed by it. My fist made a wide arc towards his face, and he graciously accepted the punch, to him it was nothing, not even cause enough to flinch. As he received a punch from me, I was graced with a present too, his knife, digging itself into my side, blood leaked from the wound at an uneven pace. Fast. Slow. The scarlet life spilled freely from my body.

He reveled in my pain, not letting the chance to twist in the blade fly by unattempted. I let out a howl of pain. He was intoxicated with my agony, and continued to push the blade far enough in so that the cold steel of the hilt kissed my festering wound. My consciousness sank. I could hardly keep my eyes open. Warmth seeped out of my body.

Suddenly his body went limp. As if a demon had been expelled from his body. There was no strength in his arms to keep the knife twisting inside me. In a single slow, tortured motion I rip the blade from my body. His eyes regained their lost luster and evil will, but now without weapon he was less of a threat. Even in my shaky arms, a knife is still a weapon.

He didn’t fear me, or rather he felt no need to. Who was I to this man, this Killer, this monster? He was bathed in a moonlight so thick it seemed to be have its own force of gravity. There was no movement, aside from the continuing pitter patter of my blood hitting the oh-too-cold ground, his presence alone was enough to engulf me in the abyss of death but my will to live hadn’t relented.

The next minute was a blur, it was a brawl, a carnal clash where a flesh and blood human barely survived as he encountered the monster. A classic tale. A definite ending. Only a human can kill a monster. It became hard to tell whose blood was recklessly scattered along the ground, his or mine.

My shaky legs hollered that they wanted to quit, but my will forced them to hobble on. My hearing was shot. All I could taste was the ever present flavor of iron. One Step. One instant. Thats all it took. As the ambulance, as scarlet as my ever flowing blood ran me over and my life ended.

The world was empty, a whitewash void filled with blank, sterile darkness like the inside of a catacomb. The darkness reduced my strength, sapped it from me, integrated me, a synchronization, a baptism within darkness.

“What is this feeling,” the words wouldn’t leave my lips but still rang out clearly, as if painted by my conscious cravings. I wondered, searched, craved, wondered, and attempted to recall in all of my desperation what it was that brought me to my current situation.

“Was I abandoned?” I prodded at my mind insistent on sorting my way through the shaky memories that so clouded my thoughts, I could do nothing. It took all of his concentration to merely stir the darkness, the primordial chaos that so surrounded me, but even that was paramount to a fly’s kiss on a mountain, an insubstantial nothingness.

Amongst murky recollections and haze covered ideas not yet ripe enough to be considered thoughts, fragments of memories like so many ice shards were clearly visible, from them I learned about myself. I learned of my appearance, or at least what I looked like before whatever freak incident had left me drifting aimlessly within chaotic neutrality, I was a meager man, not a circle too thin or a head too short, yet with a face too plain to be recognized if one were to pass by me. “Who am I?” I let the words find place outside my lips. I asked knowing fully of my past self, my trials, tribulations, and the futility of it all. I knew that I fell in between and under standards, not smart enough, not handsome enough, a nameless grunt, a cog in the machine that even when missing goes unnoticed. Never the elephant in the room, or rather, I’d have killed for that attention.

In the void there was nothing, or rather, everything existed in the void but in that fullness of existence the occupants lacked what would make them singular. Could one call it poisonous? The atmosphere of overwhelming absolutism, truth, righteousness, personality, all of these become simply words, they lose their value in this reality. What did that mean of I, so small in the world, was I destined to be converted, dissolved, truncated into this otherwordly mix.

I felt weight, in this inconsequential antediluvian mix this mortal soul felt mass, yet it was not my own, in the end i was hardly able to keep my own consciousness from mixing into the aether, rather, i had already begun to be submerged and melded within the nothingness, how could i resist being pulled into the crowd now when my entire life had simply been a stream of flows by which i’d be flung into then tossed out, around, and through. This weight was what i was forced to rationalize as another stream of consciousness, another person. It wasn’t hard for me to come to this conclusion, the darkness told me, even as it eroded my very being it spoiled me with knowledge, i knew what this other “person” because of this knowledge. It was the being that humans revered as “God.”

“I suppose you already know what happened, but I’ll inform you anyway, because of an accident on my part you’ve died. You should know that I did interfere for a moment, but fate had other plans for you. Most times when people die they are subject to be consumed by the void, to be mixed into it and from there become pure and recycled back into the matrix of fate. You would call this cycle reincarnation. There are some cases though where a soul has a strong level of innate purity, this usually happens when one changes the lives of countless other people for the better. You happen are one of those people.”

This… god wasn’t very long winded and definitely shied away from being considered curt, but he had a sort of utter indifference to his being that was so far beyond human comprehension that he became seemingly blatant in how he nearly outright refused the courtesies that humans impose upon themselves.

I knew that this “god” had never opened his mouth, yet the words that he spoke were crisp, clear, and directed at me, this in itself could be considered a miracle, it allowed me to find myself in the muck, just these few words from “god” were enough for me to become myself.

“So what happens to me?” I spoke without reverence, why would I waste my time standing on ceremony, especially considering that this “god” didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

“You will be reincarnated keeping all of your memories of your human life as well as being granted a special power that will assist you in the life to come. It has been decided that you shall be reborn in a world outside of my control, it is a place known as Verdani Yongnian.”

In the blink of an eye the presence of god disappeared and my soul began racing through the darkness on its own.