Year ??? B.C.

Archmagus Sahir Banilor Urvor scowled as he worked on the massive magic circle etched on the floor of the large underground cavern he was in. The cavern was filled with pure darkness save for the sole orb of light that floated behind the old man's hunched form.

“Damn those bastards at the Arcanium! How dare they mock my life's work!” Sahir whispered harshly to himself. “I will show them. I will show them that I was right! And they will regret humiliating me!”

The speed with which he etched the hard stone floor increased as the enchanted hammer and chisel in his hands moved faster than a mana-powered drill, sending fragments of rocks in every direction.

The complex magic circle had a diameter that spanned more than a kilometer, and inside the large circle were countless more circles, all of which were etched with arcane runes. If the darkness of the cavern was banished, one would see the complex array of circles within circles within circles etched with millions of runes, each one calculated with a complicated formula that Sahir had derived to reveal the truths of the universe.

The biggest and most complex magic circle that humanity has ever created was almost finished, and it was done by a single man over the course of his entire life.

When Sahir reached the center of the magic circle, the only place still devoid of arcane runes, he took a deep breath. His hands that held the enchanted hammer and chisel shook, not from the fatigue, but from the nervousness. He spent more than eight decades creating this magic circle, and if he failed, the only thing waiting for him was the jeers and sneers of his fellow Archmagi. The humiliation would be devastating.

The magic circle was huge and contained millions of runes, and if even a single one of them was etched improperly, the spell would fail, and Sahir no longer had the time to check his magic circle that occupied an area of hundreds of thousands of square meters to look for mistakes. Even with life-prolonging spells, his body was already failing, and if his spell failed, he would die in humiliation as the Archmagus that failed to complete his life's work because he got old.

Sahir clenched his fists. It wouldn't matter if he failed, because if his magic circle didn't function, the backlash would be enough to kill him anyway. He'd still be a dead man.

“Enough delays,” Sahir said resolutely. “It's time to finish this.”

Sahir etched the last missing rune on the center of the magic circle. The moment his chisel finished the rune, he felt the air around him change. No, not the air, Sahir thought. The very space itself.

The sensation triggered the old man's excitement. It was a sign that his magic circle was complete.

Sahir rushed to retrieve the small pouch on his hip. He turned it upside down and opened it, spilling thousands of the rarest mana crystals that shouldn't have fitted inside the small cloth pouch. Sahir watched in awe as the mana crystals shined in the darkness of the cavern like the stars on a clear night, and without any conscious effort on his part, the magic circle started absorbing the mana crystals.

Slowly, the runes and lines etched on the hard stone floor lit up until the entire cavern was illuminated with blue light.

“It's working!” Sahir shouted with manic eyes. “It's working! The Kaleidoscope of Truth is working!”

The air hummed with power as Sahir imposed his will on the magic circle, controlling the spell using his decades of experience studying magic. His face dripped with sweat as he exerted the effort necessary to control the Grand Magic, but his efforts were rewarded when the sharp noise of shattering glass thundered through the air and a small hole in space appeared in front of the old man.

Before Sahir could rejoice at the success of his Grand Magic, the hole sucked him in.

●●●

When Sahir opened his eyes, he found himself flying through a vast space filled with squirming tendrils. Everywhere he looked, the tendrils filled the ground and the skies endlessly and stretched infinitely into the horizon. The tendrils came in so many different colors that Sahir's eyes hurt, but when he focused more closely, he realized that the tendrils were thread.

Everywhere he looked, thick tendrils of thread slowly moved and squirmed, making the ground and the sky look like they were alive. Sahir could also see thousands of threads snapping like they were cut with a pair of scissors. Some intertwined and knotted themselves with threads of a different color, but most simply fell and got absorbed by the squirming ground.

Where am I? Sahir muttered to himself. Or he tried to, but he realized that he couldn't speak. When he looked down at himself, he realized he didn't have a body at all. He was simply an orb of white light. What happened to me?!

Seeing his current state shook Sahir, but his attention was pulled away from his body when he realized that the reason he was flying through the air was because of the string attached to his soul. It looked just like the countless other threads that made up the entire place, but instead of the vibrantly-colored type of thread, Sahir's was a tattered dark gray, almost black.

And it was pulling him somewhere.

Sahir panicked. His Grand Magic, the Kaleidoscope of Truth, was supposed to show him the truths that governed the universe they lived in and its reality, but so far, the only thing he saw was this landscape filled with nothing but thread. And now, a tattered-looking thread attached to him was pulling him somewhere.

As the thread pulled the panicking Sahir, the landscape began to change. The ground slowly declined with a gentle slope while the sky rose higher like an upside-down cliff until the space where the ground and the sky used to be turned into empty, dark space.

Sahir looked behind him, where the land of thread was slowly receding until he was simply floating in the middle of empty space.

Just before Sahir despaired that he will be lost in the darkness of space for eternity, there was a pinprick of light in the distance. It was where the thread was pulling him to.

With hope blossoming inside him again, Sahir waited patiently until he was pulled into the pinprick of light, just like how he was sucked into the hole that his spell had created earlier.

What met him on the other side baffled him.

It was a small room. The walls were painted white and the window on the wall allowed sunlight to illuminate the room with natural light. A large bed occupied half of the space of the small room, and the other half were cluttered with a cabinet, a desk, and piles of messy clothes, some clean and some that looked like a cat had used them as a bed, what with all the fur clinging to them.

And seated in front of the desk was a young man, staring at Sahir with a relaxed smile, the other end of the thread grasped in his hand.

“Well hello there, old man,” the young man greeted.

“You… you…” Sahir began, not realizing he could speak again, but that was the least of his worries, because the moment he passed through the pinprick of light, he had learned the truth he had been looking for his entire life. “Y-You… w-we are simply characters of a story…”

“That is right,” the young man replied with the same relaxed smile. “You, along with everyone living in your world. I created all of you.”

“To entertain other people…” Sahir whispered with despair. “Our lives mean nothing to you. We are simply there to entertain.”

The young man laughed. “You are mistaken there, Durko. Or wait, was it Sahir? Bah, it's not important. I just got your name from a random name generator, anyway. What I want to say is, you're wrong.”

“You're lying!” Sahir cried with a trembling voice.

“I'm not, I promise. You wanted to seek the truth, right? I made you to be like that, after all. So I'll give you the truth. I love your world. I love the people there, the mountains, the seas, the so-called gods. Everything.”

The despair that Sahir had been feeling for the past few seconds paused as a sliver of hope blossomed in him once again. “Y-You do?”

“Of course!” the young man said, before raising his finger to point at him. “Well, maybe except for you. You're just someone I created for laughs. It took me less than a minute to think of a character for this chapter. And that's you.”

Sahir stared at the young man. If he still had a body, he would have been a trembling mess after learning the insane truth. But instead, he found his voice to ask his last question. “Then why did you bring me here?”

“I wanted to tell you something,” the young man said with a serious expression. Then his mouth morphed into a large grin. “Happy April Fool's.”

The last thing Sahir saw was the young man getting a pair of scissors and cutting his thread before he ceased to exist.