Beep...Beep...Beep…

On earth, within a room where the walls were coloured white and without stain like the clouds in the sky, an old man with white hair lay down on a bed. Beside him was a similarly aged woman who, contrary to the open eyes and rising and lowering chest of the man, had her eyes closed and a chest that neither rose or fell.

“I'll see you on the other side soon, my wife…”

The old man gripped the woman's slightly cold hands before turning his head to give her one last look. Although to others the woman would seem plain and ragged, to the old man, she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The smile she showed when she was happy or the pouting face she revealed when she was angry, everything about her the old man saw as an irreplaceable gem.

“I wonder what death will be like…? Do I go towards a light or maybe I'll simply disappear?”

As the old man talked to himself he slowly closed his eyes and from the corner of his eyes a small ball of water slid down his cheek. There was a tinge of regret that welled up from within his heart. It was the feeling of a life long goal, which one spent all their breathing years on, never being accomplished. And to the old man, this meant the failure to understand the Universe.

“All my life was spent trying to understand the Universe, yet why does it feel like I haven't even scratched the surface of understanding it? What is the Universe? Why do we exist? Was there anything that existed before the Universe? Because if there is something then there will also be nothing, just like where there is light there is also darkness…”

To others this old man would seem to have gone insane. How could a mere mortal understand something so divine? Yet this old man still pursued this goal.

“Where there is something, there is nothing, but how could something come from nothing…?”

Suddenly, a flash of nearly transparent light appeared in the air above the old man’s body which then spread open like a net, enveloping the old man. Strand after strand, the mysterious light entered the old man’s body. To this event, the old man was completely oblivious. Instead, what he felt was some sort of revelation of the Universe. Unknownst to him was that each strand of light that entered his body contained the principles and energy of the Universe.

As the strands of light entered the old man’s body, his mind became calm like the seas under the quiet sky. All that remained in his mind were the principles of the Universe.

“Where there is something, there is nothing. This is how the Universe came into existence. The Universe is simply an existence of nothingness…”

The old man pressed his eyebrows together followed by a faint smile.

“Haha… To think that I’d finally scratch the surface of understanding the Universe on my deathbed. A pity it is only this much, but… at last I’ve accomplished my life’s goal,” the old man said with a voice filled with emotion.

Slowly, the old man relaxed himself and let his body go into a deep slumber as he patiently waited for nature to take its course. His consciousness faded away by the ticking of the clock. At this point the light that initially enveloped him slowly descended onto him before finally condensing and entering the middle area of his chest.

Whoosh!

A rush of mysterious energy suddenly entered the old man.

“What? Is this what death is supposed to feel like?”

The mysterious energy caused the old man to immediately open his eyes and stare at his body. But what he saw astonished him. Within his sight he saw two identical bodies. One was definite, yet the other body was almost totally transparent. Quickly checking himself, he raised his hand only to be surprised yet again. The hand that moved was not of the body which was solid and defined, but of the transparent body.

“This… What is this?”

Before the old man fully understood what was going on, the transparent body began moving upwards from the other body until the transparent body was at a distance of about a metre from the other body. In front of the old man he could clearly see the body of an identical old man laid on the bed and to his side was the woman the old man’s heart could never forget, as if he was a completely different person looking at his own body. But as the old man looked at the woman, the transparent body started to rise once more. At first the rise was unnoticeable, but after a few seconds the surroundings turned into a blur as his body passed through the walls and into the sky, just like a ghost. To this, the old man stayed abnormally calm as if he had witnessed this countless of times, but in actuality, he was already too shocked to register any emotion on his face.

The body rose faster until it reached the very ends of the sky. This time the surroundings was no longer a blur but a scene of numerous coloured lights that weaved around the old man. As the old man travelled through this, a searing pain started emanating throughout his transparent body, originating from the middle of his chest.

“Gyaa!”

A horrifying scream escaped the mouth of the old man followed by involuntary writhing. Immense pressure came down onto the old man’s body with a weight comparable to that of a large mountain. Along with the pain bursts of violent heat and a coldness that seemed to be able to freeze the seas spread throughout his body, creating a feeling of needles stabbing every single cell.

Crack… crack… crack…

The old man felt his body tearing apart. Lines of uneven bright white lines ran up and down his body like lightning. Where every white line was located, the old man’s body started separating until finally his body was split apart into several tens of pieces.

Crack!

Each piece emitted a faint light, making it almost invisible, and slowly reformed into small spheres from its original irregular shape. As every piece turned spherical, the spheres started gathering together until a perfect circle was formed. After, the spheres paused for a short while it then started vibrating violently, crashing into one another. Looking at it, every time several spheres crashed into each other, only a single bigger sphere would remain…

bang… bang… bang…

The spheres were actually fusing together!

At this point the old man no longer let out a sound. If someone were to have seen what happened to the old man’s body, they would undoubtedly think that he had died an extremely painful death that would be utterly incomparable to being trampled by a thousand or even a million horses! Yet the old man had still not died. However, although he had not died, he already had half his body within his grave. The reason for remaining ever so silent was due to the fact that the pain he was feeling had already reached the point where he didn’t even have the power to let out a squeak nevermind a scream.

When the spheres stopped vibrating, what was originally a transparent body was now a single and almost invisible white sphere the size of a watermelon which eventually started condensing to the size of a fist.

The surroundings continued to be brightened with numerous colours, but in the distance, a faint image could be seen wavering. As the sphere moved closer, the image split into countless projections containing moving images of unknown people and places which started gathering around the sphere. These projections flickered slightly and would then be swallowed by the sphere. But no matter how many projections there were, the sphere swallowed each and every one of them unceasingly.

As time went on, the amount of projections that the sphere swallowed entered the hundreds, closely approaching the thousands and when the sphere had swallowed its thousandth projection, another sphere was revealed in the distance. This sphere had a radiant golden white colour to it compared to the sort of invisible white colour the opposing sphere had. The two spheres got closer and at the same time sped up, reaching speeds that could cover tens of kilometres within a second.

Boom!

When the spheres made contact, a reverberating sound travelled far and wide, and the old man who was already on the verge of dying, blacked out. The colour rich surroundings was no longer. All that remained was a vast void that was filled with darkness…

-END-

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