(Trigger Warning: Visceral Descriptions)
There was no door in the literal sense, no threshold, and not even a perceptible moment of transition. It was like being in the middle of a loud, crowded room when suddenly, without warning, the entire universe is switched off. The whiteness stole everything. It wasn't an ordinary white like that of paper or snow; it was an "absolute," aggressive white that erased dimensions and directions. No up, no down, no right, no left. Just a brilliant void stretching into infinity, swallowing light, sound, and time.
I looked ahead... or tried to. I saw my extended hand. At first, it seemed normal—the pale tanned skin, the fine lines on the palm, the neatly trimmed nails. But then... the "erasure" began. My fingertips began to fade. They weren't melting, they weren't burning, and they didn't turn to dust. They simply ceased to exist. Reality was coldly erasing me, as if I were a typo on a cosmic page, and God's eraser was passing over me now. The fingers vanished. Then the palm. Then the wrist. The void crawled up my arm, devouring skin, flesh, and bone without pain, without a sound. I tried to scream. I opened my mouth to release a primal shriek of terror, but the sound died before it was born. Because I no longer had a throat. I no longer had lungs to pump air. I no longer had a mouth. My chest faded. My legs faded. And finally... my eyes faded.
"Ray" disappeared. There was no longer a body. No longer blood flowing, no heart beating, no nerves transmitting signals. What remained of me was something entirely abstract. I became an "Idea." A naked point of consciousness, suspended in this eternal white void, floating aimlessly, weightless, and identity-less. Had I died? Was this the afterlife? Or was I trapped in the gap between existence and non-existence? I tried to think, but thinking without a brain was a strange and painful process. Thoughts were not words in my head; they were "concepts" that flashed and flickered. Fear. Loneliness. Loss. A long time passed. Perhaps seconds, perhaps centuries. In this place, time is not a straight line, but a single, frozen point.
Then... truth sprouted in my consciousness suddenly, sharp and cold as a surgical blade. A single sentence that no one spoke, but was imprinted into my being: (Before you fight the gods... you must learn how to "exist".)
Suddenly, sight returned. Or rather, "visual perception" returned. I wasn't looking through physical eyes; I was seeing through direct consciousness. I looked down. There, in the middle of this pure white nothingness, was "The Heap." A sight that made my soul (if it still existed) tremble with disgust and terror.
A heap of bones. White, dry, old, and cold. Thrown carelessly on top of one another like the remains of a giant monster's meal that it didn't like and spat out. I saw the skull rolling away, mouth agape with a disjointed jaw, black and empty eye sockets staring into the void. I saw the rib cage shattered, ribs scattered like broken wooden sticks. Long femurs, intricate small vertebrae, delicate finger bones... all mixed in absolute chaos. This is me? This miserable calcareous heap is what remains of "Ray"? Is this the foundation upon which I will build my glory?
(Gather your fragments.) The command came as a forced inspiration. There was no instruction manual. There was no teacher. I had to build myself by myself. From zero.
I tried to approach the heap. But... how do you move when you have no limbs? How do you grab a bone when you have no hands? I had to discover a new way to interact with matter. "Will." Here, Will is the hand, the muscle, and the lever. I focused every atom of my concentration on the "right femur." It was the largest and heaviest. (Move...) I commanded it with my mind. Nothing happened. The bone remained still, dead, defying me with its rigidity. (Move, you damn thing! Rise!) I screamed with my consciousness, pushing with all my mental energy as if I were trying to move a mountain. The bone trembled. It shook slightly in its place, making a faint grating sound against the bones beneath it. Then... very slowly and painfully... it floated. It rose into the white void, swaying and rotating slowly. It was "heavy." Not a physical weight, but a mental one. I felt as if I were carrying the weight of the world with my mind. Imaginary sweat began to pour off me.
I directed it toward the "pelvis." The pelvis was lying upside down. I straightened it with difficulty. Now... the engineering challenge. I had to insert the spherical "femoral head" into the "acetabulum" of the pelvis. I brought them close together. There was no soft cartilage to facilitate movement. There was no synovial fluid to absorb the shock. It was dry bone against dry bone. "CRRRRRK!" The sound. My God, the sound. The sound of dry bone grinding against each other echoed in the core of my soul like the sound of giant nails slowly scraping a blackboard, magnified a thousand times. The sound of raw, abstract "Death." My consciousness shuddered at the hideousness of the sound. I lost focus for a moment. The bone slipped. The femur fell and struck the heap again, scattering the small finger bones everywhere.
"Damn it..." I screamed with my thought, my voice echoing in the void without a sound. "Damn this! Damn this test!" I felt despair. The frustration that drives one to madness. But I had no choice. There was no exit except through this body. I tried again. I picked up the femur once more. I stabilized the pelvis. This time, I was more careful. More precise. "Click." The bone settled in its place. It didn't fall. I felt a strange wave of satisfaction... mixed with disgust. I had assembled the first piece of my prison.
And the saga began. How much time passed? An hour? A day? A year? A century? In the white void, time is just a sick joke. The only currency traded here is "Pain" and "Patience." I was playing "Lego" from hell, and the pieces were my remains. I started with the spine. Thirty-three vertebrae. Each one had a different shape, a specific place, and a precise angle of curvature. If I misplaced a single vertebra, the entire structure would collapse, or I would live paralyzed forever. I stacked the vertebrae on top of each other... one by one. The broad lumbar at the bottom... the thoracic in the middle... the delicate cervical at the top. Between each vertebra, I had to imagine the cartilaginous "disc" and create it from nothing so the bones wouldn't rub. The spine collapsed three times. The first time, I screamed in anger. The second time, I cried in despair (without tears). The third time... I was silent. And I learned the cold patience of the dead.
I assembled the rib cage. Curved ribs that would protect a heart that didn't exist yet. I assembled the arms... the legs... the complex knee joints... the many wrist bones that looked like pebbles. And finally... the skull. I crowned the structure with it. The lower jaw snapped into place. The skeleton stood before me. Tall, white, silent, and terrifying. It floated in the void like a statue of death. I thought I was finished. I thought the hard part had passed. How naive I was.
Suddenly... "the threads" appeared. From nothingness, an intricate, delicate, and sticky network of translucent threads began to appear around me, glowing with a faint blue electric light. They writhed in the void like glowing worms or electric snakes searching for prey. The nerves. The central and peripheral nervous system. I realized the task immediately, and I felt true terror for the first time. I had to insert the thin, lethal "spinal cord" into the narrow spinal canal I had built. And I had to pass every delicate nerve through its designated bony holes in the skull and limbs.
I approached the end of the main nerve (the spinal cord) with my consciousness. I forgot... in the heat of concentration and exhaustion, I forgot that I was now "pure consciousness," and that the nerve was "raw matter of pain." It is the wire that transmits agony. And now it was naked, exposed, and sensitive to the point of madness. I touched it with my thought to pull it.
!!!!!!!!!!
The universe unraveled. It wasn't pain. The word "pain" is a pathetic and insulting understatement for what happened. It was "annihilation." I felt as if I had swallowed a neutron star and it exploded within my being. As if millions of needles dipped in boiling acid and liquid electricity were driven into the center of my perception in a thousandth of a second. I didn't scream... because screaming requires a voice, and this pain was greater than sound. I tasted iron in my imaginary mouth. I smelled burning flesh. I saw the white turn to a deep crimson. My entire being shook violently. The skeleton I had built with such great difficulty convulsed, and its bones scattered again into the void, flying in every direction.
I was back to zero. The spine was shattered. The ribs were broken. I wanted to vomit, but I had no stomach. I wanted to lose consciousness, but I had no brain to shut down. I was forced to be "conscious" of the agony in all its details. I was a prison for myself.
"Once more..." I whispered to myself after a long time of trembling. My internal voice was weak, shaking, and full of fear. I looked at those beautiful, lethal blue threads with terror. "This time... do not touch them directly... only guide them... be both the surgeon and the patient... treat them like a nuclear bomb."
I began working again. I rebuilt the skeleton faster this time, but my mental hand was trembling. Then came the nerves. I held the end of the spinal cord with extreme caution, without "touching" it with my consciousness, but surrounding it with a halo of will. I inserted it into the first vertebra. "Pass in peace." The second vertebra. The third. It was a process as delicate as brain surgery. Any mistake, any slight friction between the naked nerve and the rough bone, meant a shock that made me wish for oblivion and not find it. I was threading wires into the walls. The nerves of the arm... the brachial plexus... the thick sciatic nerve... the delicate cranial nerves emerging from the skull. Every nerve was a ticking time bomb. Every second was an eon of tension.
And eons passed. The skeleton stood before me finally. It was no longer just bones. It was a white cage, permeated by a faint and beautiful blue light from the intricate neural network that branched inside it like an inverted tree of lightning. It pulsed, waiting for the signal. Waiting for the flesh. It looked terrifying in its stillness. It looked pitifully fragile. It looked like a trap... and I was the mouse that had to enter it.