For a brief instant, Khalum felt nothing.
The violent collapse of Earth, the screams of the crowd, the sky splitting apart above the city — all of it disappeared in a blinding surge of white light that swallowed the world whole. One moment he had been standing on a street trembling beneath the weight of a dying planet, and the next his entire existence had been suspended in an endless silence that seemed to stretch beyond space itself.
There was no ground beneath his feet.
No air in his lungs.
No sound.
His mind struggled to grasp what had happened, but the moment refused to last long enough for comprehension to catch up.
Then gravity returned.
Khalum's body struck the ground with a dull impact, the sudden weight of his own mass snapping his senses back into place. The sensation of solid earth beneath him felt almost shocking after the strange emptiness that had surrounded him seconds earlier.
Air rushed into his lungs as he inhaled sharply.
He remained motionless for a few seconds, his body still processing the abrupt return of sensation. The scent of grass filled the air around him, carried by a soft wind that brushed against his skin.
Slowly, Khalum opened his eyes.
The first thing he noticed was the sky.
It was not the sky he remembered from Earth.
The color seemed deeper somehow, stretching across an endless dome of pale blue that felt both wider and clearer than the atmosphere he had known his entire life. Thin clouds drifted lazily across the horizon, their shadows sliding silently across the land far below.
For a moment he simply stared upward, his thoughts struggling to catch up with the simple reality before him.
Then he pushed himself up.
The grass beneath his hands bent softly under his weight as he rose to his feet. Each blade was long and dense, brushing against his boots as the wind moved gently through the field.
The world around him expanded the moment he stood fully upright.
An immense plain stretched across the landscape in every direction, a vast ocean of green that rolled outward until it disappeared into the distant horizon. Hills rose slowly in the distance, and far beyond them, massive mountains pierced the skyline like ancient sentinels guarding the edges of the world.
For a brief moment, the landscape appeared strangely peaceful.
Then Khalum noticed the people.
They were everywhere.
Human figures covered the plain in every direction, scattered across the tall grass like survivors washed ashore after a catastrophic storm. Some were still lying on the ground exactly as he had been moments earlier, blinking in confusion as they slowly regained consciousness.
Others had already stood up.
Many were turning in slow circles, their faces filled with disbelief as they tried to understand where they were.
The silence that hung over the field lasted only a few seconds.
Then someone shouted.
"Where the hell are we?!"
The voice shattered the fragile calm like a stone breaking glass.
Almost immediately, dozens of other voices rose across the plain.
"What just happened?!"
"Wasn't the planet—"
"We were dying!"
The crowd erupted into chaos.
People began shouting over one another, their voices rising in overlapping waves of confusion and panic. Some stumbled through the tall grass searching for familiar faces, calling out names that vanished into the vastness of the plain.
A young man nearby grabbed the shoulders of a stranger.
"Did you see it too? The sky… it was breaking!"
"I don't know!" the other replied, his voice trembling. "I thought we were dead!"
Several people nearby were crying openly, their emotions spilling over now that the immediate shock had begun to fade. Others stood frozen in place, staring blankly at the horizon as if their minds had simply refused to process what had happened.
Khalum remained still.
His dark grey eyes moved slowly across the scene as he observed the growing chaos around him. Panic spread quickly when thousands of people shared the same confusion, and right now the entire field seemed filled with survivors desperately searching for answers.
But no one had any.
The realization settled quietly in his mind.
Earth was gone.
He had watched the sky tear apart with his own eyes while the strange system declared the elimination of the entire planet. The destruction had been too vast, too absolute, to mistake for anything else.
Yet somehow…
he was still alive.
Khalum shifted his gaze toward the horizon again.
The landscape showed no signs of civilization. There were no roads, no buildings, no power lines cutting across the plains. Only endless grasslands stretched beneath the open sky, interrupted occasionally by distant hills that rolled gently toward the towering mountains far away.
The scale of the place was overwhelming.
Even with thousands of people scattered across the plain, the land still felt enormous enough to swallow them all without effort.
A sudden movement nearby caught his attention.
A woman standing several meters away was staring at the air in front of her with a confused frown. She waved her hand slowly through empty space, as if trying to brush something invisible aside.
"Do you see that?" she asked the man beside her.
"See what?"
"These little… lights."
The man squinted into the air.
"What lights?"
She waved her hand again, frustration creeping into her voice.
"They're floating everywhere. Like dust or something."
Khalum followed her gaze.
Only then did he notice them.
Tiny particles drifted lazily through the air, almost invisible unless someone looked closely. They shimmered faintly when the sunlight touched them, moving slowly with the wind as if they were weightless fragments of light scattered across the atmosphere.
Several other people nearby began noticing them as well.
"What are those things?"
"Is this some kind of hallucination?"
"I swear they weren't here a second ago."
The strange particles floated silently around them, completely unaffected by the rising panic among the crowd.
Khalum watched them for a moment before shifting his attention back toward the sky.
Something had changed.
At first it was subtle enough that most people failed to notice.
The clouds high above the plain seemed to bend slightly, their shapes stretching as if the sky itself had begun to ripple. A faint distortion spread outward across the blue expanse, barely visible yet impossible to ignore once the eye focused on it.
Someone pointed upward.
"Look!"
Hundreds of heads turned toward the sky at once.
The distortion grew stronger.