Ace sat in the back row of the lecture hall, his chin resting in the palm of his hand, half-listening to the droning voice of the professor. The projector hummed, casting blurry diagrams on the wall about something he'd already forgotten. Around him, pens scratched paper, keyboards clicked, and students nodded along—or pretended to.
He exhaled slowly.
Is this it? he thought. Wake up. Classes. Cafeteria food. Small talk. Deadlines. Repeat.
He wasn't depressed. Just... tired. Not in the way sleep could fix. It was something deeper—like he was living on autopilot in a world built for someone else.
His eyes drifted to the window. The sky outside was painfully ordinary.
"Existence is a strange thing," he murmured to himself, barely audible. "We chase meaning like it owes us something."
The professor paused. "Ace, something to share?"
Ace blinked, snapped out of his thoughts. "No, sir. Just thinking."
A few chuckles scattered across the room.
"You do that too much," the professor muttered and continued.
Ace leaned back, arms crossed, gaze returning to the ceiling. He closed his eyes for just a moment.
And the world vanished.
Warm light.
He opened his eyes and sat upright—no desk, no hall, no sound of human life. Just light. Everything around him glowed in soft, pulsing gold—the ground, the air, the endless sky above. There was no sun, yet the whole world was illuminated like a golden dawn trapped in time.
Ace stood up slowly, squinting. He ran a hand through his hair and glanced down at his own body—still dressed in his university clothes. Still the same. But nothing else was.
"…Okay," he said to himself, trying to steady his thoughts. "So either I've died, or I've passed out so hard I started hallucinating."
His voice echoed faintly into the horizon.
No response. No sound. No wind.
Just golden silence.
Ace rubbed his temples. "Alright, calm down. Think logically. If this is a dream, it's way too vivid. If I'm dead... well, there's no paperwork. That's promising."
He started walking.
The ground felt soft beneath his shoes, like stepping on a field made of memory and light. He didn't know where he was going—there was nothing in sight—but the path seemed to gently pull him forward, like the world itself was leading him somewhere.
After what felt like both seconds and hours, something appeared in the distance.
A tree.
Tall, majestic, utterly alien yet beautiful. Its bark shimmered with silver veins, and its leaves moved like liquid gold. Hanging from a branch just within reach was a single fruit—round, glowing faintly, pulsing like it had a heartbeat.
Ace stopped in front of it, cautious but curious.
"Of course," he said softly. "Mysterious magical tree. Obviously."
He looked around. Still no one. No instruction. No signs. Just the tree and the fruit.
His hand hovered beneath the branch.
"…You know, I should probably hesitate more. Ask questions. Consider the consequences," he muttered. Then he smiled. "But I'm too tired to care."
He plucked the fruit. It was warm in his hand—light, but heavy with something he couldn't name.
"Bottoms up."
The taste was impossible to describe. Not sweet. Not bitter. Just... complete.
And then—
The ground trembled.
The sky shattered.
Light turned into sound, and sound turned into fire. Everything exploded outward in a rush of wind and chaos. Ace fell to his knees, clutching his head as a flood of visions, voices, and memories not his own surged through him like a storm.
Pain. Beauty. Power. A thousand lives, a thousand worlds. Screams and whispers and something ancient calling his name.
"Ace…"
Then silence again.
Total, consuming silence.
Ace opened his eyes.
He was lying on cold, cracked earth beneath a blood-red sky. The scent of ash filled the air. In the distance, towering mountains rose like jagged teeth from the ground.
Everything was wrong.
Everything was real.
And something inside him had changed.