Martin’s main and sub soul quickly exchanged information, the former having limited it’s operations during the latter’s experimentation specifically for this purpose. After reviewing the sub-soul's experiences for any signs of soul corruption and ensuring the memories were perfectly equalised, the main soul re-established the link between the two.

The main reason this had gone so fast was because, after decoding how to see souls, the main soul had been able to observe the sub-soul's progress throughout the entire process. Its movements during the later parts of the process, whose speed surpassed that of most vehicles, also helped to practice both viewing objects at speed and viewing souls in general, especially considering he could rely purely on the visual sense that came from his membrane.

Nevertheless, now that he was whole again, Martin could proceed. Debating on whether placing his sub-soul back inside himself would be safe even whilst breathing –and deciding that since none of the processes that occurred during breathing should affect it, so allowing it back in would most likely be safe- he began to breathe in with his main soul.

‘Actually, with how advanced the process was, I should look into it more. I understand ‘closing my eyes’ just shutting off my senses and feeling for my skin finding my outer edge, but the sequence of events for breathing is too specific, as if the soul was designed to do it.

However, the fact it gathers the pieces of concepts closer to the centre of myself makes me feel like it’s an ability to do with long-term accumulation of something. Unless there’s something at my centre that I can’t feel -which I doubt because I checked using my sub-soul earlier, and still can’t feel anything now- it would take far too it to become anything useful.

The fact I have to use as many of the pieces of concepts as possible to be able to move would also slow me down significantly in building whatever it might be.

I’d still try with a smaller amount, but I don’t know how safe extremely high concentrations of thought in the same place might be to my consciousness. I suppose it’s something I should only try once I have a physical body that wouldn’t be affected by it.’

With that, he decided to hesitate no longer; Martin increased the rate he was breathing in and began to move.

He set his course to a habitable planet he’d managed to find – not through carefully analysing the atmosphere, orbit, proximity to a star, etc. of every planet he could see (although he could have done so for a few with some difficulty, it would have been too difficult to analyse billions of planets at once)- but because he’d found a planet relatively ‘close’ that had a giant tree growing on it, taking up a not insignificant part of its surface.

‘How big would that have to be? Much bigger than the laws of physics would allow, at the very least. It only proves that I’m really no longer in my own world, and the physical matter I know and love just isn’t here anymore.’ Martin finished with a dramatic sigh.

‘But seriously, the fact the laws of physics are different to an unknown extent here makes a lot of things much more difficult than they’d normally be. For one, unless it’s reasonably close, it’s difficult to guess the exact size or speed of things’

Martin had noticed this earlier, when he’d been trying to construct a mental projection of the world that he saw. It was something he wasn’t confident on even with his newfound abilities because of the extreme scale of the cosmos, but with his new experience in dealing with the infinite expanse of his soul, he’d become more confident.

Instead of being able to make a map like he wanted, however, he was faced with a cosmos full of uncertain sizes, illogical orbits and bizarre speeds; planets seemed like stars, various astral bodies followed strange patterns as they travelled, and most planets and stars seemed to be travelling at impossible speeds, making visible progress in their orbits and day/night cycles.

This would already be strange if he in his pre-death state, but currently, he estimated that he experienced time a minimum of 100 times slower than he used to, considering all the improvements he’d gone through. And that minimum was a generous one.

Therefore, Martin had begun to suspect that, if the particles of concepts truly were the fundamental building blocks of this world, then things like spacetime would be dictated by the presence of a certain concept. In simpler terms, time would go faster when more of the time concept was present, gravity would be influenced by things like space, and light would be brighter the more of the light concept was present.

It was only a theory, but it seemed likelier the more he thoughts about it. Nevertheless, it brought more questions than answers.

‘How would matter capable of representing a concept come into existence? How much more difficult would it be to survive somewhere that wasn’t simply the vacuum of space? If I’m in a zone where time flows slower... will the planet I’m heading towards still even be habitable by the time I get to it?’

This question and many more raged through his mind as he sped towards his destination, when he suddenly came across an oddity that only brought even more questions in.

Ahead of him was something best described as a strand of particles loosely floating together. They weren’t exactly linked in any noticeable way other than all carrying the concept of ‘light’, and the strand was not only short but also already falling apart at the edges, but it acted differently to anything Martin had seen so far. Usually, the particles he saw would either ignore each other completely or, at most, bounce off each other on contact.

‘Was that the beginning of what physical matter might be like in this world?

Regardless of what it was, one thing’s for certain: all this is only becoming more interesting’

Mentally taking note to watch out for more ‘strands’ of concepts, and pre-emptively trying to adapt his vision to be able to see using them for when he encountered one before it dissolved into nothingness, Martin continued his journey.

Time passed, and a few noteworthy things had happened.

First, Martin had tried changing his shape to optimise his travel speed and found that, funnily enough, a front-facing disk provided the best results, since it had the highest surface area to absorb the concepts at the front, and the back of the shape didn’t particularly matter as the ability to eject the concepts back out of himself was more important, but since a flatter back meant more surface area on the sides, it became so.

‘A world without air resistance is really strange,’ he’d thought as he’d bent his soul as close to a disk as he could without worrying about stretching himself too thin... literally.

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Second, he’d come across more strands of concepts interwoven together, although the frequency he’d encountered them hadn’t notably increased. Unfortunately, none of them survived long enough for him to reach them, despite his ever-increasing speed, but he’d come extremely close on several occasions.

If he were actively trying, he would’ve likely captured a few, but for now, he wasn’t interested.

Third, though nowhere close to actually understanding any of the foundational laws of this world, Martin had worked out that he hadn’t been wrong about things seeming much bigger than they should be; unless he had wildly misinterpreted his own size, everything in this world was bigger. Much bigger than they had been back in his own world, but he still couldn’t tell exactly.

Last, as mentioned earlier, he’d been constantly increasing his speed. Since it was mostly dependent on how fast he could expel particles from his soul, he’d directed almost all his attention to training his fine and coarse control of his soul as well as breathing, which he was slowly becoming able to control. Despite only getting faster with each passing moment and the rate he was getting faster also increasing, Martin could tell he was still far from running into a bottleneck when it came to speed.

Though he had done so much, in reality, he was far less active than he’d previously been. Dedicating himself entirely to his journey, he’d entered a trance-like state where he hadn’t been experimenting nearly as much as previously.

The fact he’d done so much despite his concentration was only testament to his full ability.

Nevertheless, he continued on.

More time passed. Martin wasn’t sure how much exactly. That was despite the fact a part of him, in the very back of his mind, was constantly counting seconds, minutes, hours.

He’d tried to match the passage of time to something that should be set, like the rotations of the planet he was heading towards. However, the closer he’d gotten, the faster it had begun to spin.

He assumed his theory about time being faster in areas with more of the concept of ‘time’ having time progress faster had been right, and there had been an increase in the levels of the concept, but it wasn’t nearly to the level he’d expected.

Outside time aside, to Martin, he’d spent roughly a total of three hours travelling. Three hours experienced over a hundred times slower, that is.

Something that interested him aside from the irregularities in apparent, experienced, and actual time, was that the strands of concepts had increased in amount, size and stability after a certain point. The change had been gradual and subtle, but the fact he was now travelling at what Martin swore was now far beyond the domain of lightspeed meant he experienced that change much faster.

Due to this, he’d inevitably ended up absorbing some of the strands of concepts into his soul. Curiously enough, he’d noticed they stopped dissolving the moment they were taken into his soul. With nothing better to do with them, since he felt breaking them apart back into their constituent pieces to be used as fuel was wasteful, Martin had then experimented with them, eventually finding he could join two strands of the same concept into one as long as he simply brought them close enough together.

But that was only the beginning.

Finding himself with not much else to do than steadily increase his speed and practice with his mind, soul, and the foundational force that linked him to reality –which sounded far scarier than it actually was- Martin had done just that.

He’d expanded the physical area that his mind was linked to to over a kilometre, made far more impressive by the fact the difficulty would octuple every time he doubled the size of the domain, which he’d done almost 7 times, it was still expanding further at a gradually decreasing rate.

At the same time, he’d willed himself to breathe in hard enough that it would overlap with the entire area his mind covered. This had been done slowly to prevent any overexertion, but with no signs of discomfort at any stage, Martin had felt confident enough to continue.

At some point, he’d felt the passive pull of the concepts towards him triggered by his breathing to such an extent he became able to somewhat control it, now slightly able to manipulate the particles of thought within his domain.

Unfortunately, his level of control was rudimentary, and, whilst gradually improving, could neither be performed separately from breathing nor could it be used on any more complicated tasks, like manipulating individual particles of thought or even strands of them.

With these abilities, Martin had accumulated progressively larger sizes and varieties of strands within himself. He now had light, heat, cold, void, cosmic, energy, and radiation –somehow separate from light- strands, as well as some representing emotions, and shorter ones representing a variety of things you’d expect to find in space in tiny amounts. For most of the latter, he’d only found a single short strand.

After this, something strange had happened. When he allowed the strands to float to the centre of his soul, he felt as if something opened, and they disappeared entirely, seemingly into nothingness. Martin wasn’t sure how ‘void’ could disappear, but he had to accept that it had simply happened.

Since it was a natural process of his soul –unless someone else was opening holes into his soul that led to an unknown space separate from both the physical, as far as concepts went, and soul plane- he'd let it happen, then continued to ‘feed’ new strands into... himself(?) in the same way.

Naturally, he’d been apprehensive about it, but he was unwilling to go against natural events within his soul, especially when he considered what breathing did for most living beings, and that he’d never found a source for any of the energy that he’d been using without reserve.

To some relief and some disappointment, Martin felt no changes when this occurred. Whether it was truly the case, if the changes had been too subtle to notice, or if something had changed in parts of himself he couldn’t feel yet, he had no way to know, but the result was the same. For the first time since his death, he’d done something that he saw no purpose in.

Either way, doing what his soul –essentially his body- told him to couldn’t have been a bad thing, and since it didn’t impact martin negatively, he’d continued doing it.

Now, he was nearing his destination.

The closer he’d gotten to the planet, the more it had grown. Now, it took up enough of his vision that someone without his strangely high visual prowess would just around have mistaken it for a star in the sky.

But Martin knew he was still far. In reality, the planet was large –far larger than he could have predicted. He still couldn’t tell how much exactly, but large. Larger than most solar systems, at least. It still baffled him slightly, but he had no choice but to accept it for now.

‘At least there’s no shortage of things to learn,’ Martin smiled.

He tried to observe the planet closer, but unfortunately, he couldn’t see well through the atmosphere. Martin assumed this was because the matter there was far denser than anything he’d encounter in space, so it was blocking much of the individual particles of concepts, which most of his sight relied on.

Because of this, he could only make out blurry details.

For one, he could still see the giant tree because it stretched beyond the atmosphere and into space. The scale of the planet only made this more impressive.

Other than that, he could spot vast plains, endless forests, boundless oceans, mountains stretching into the heavens, some reaching the same heights as the giant tree, deserts, tundras, islands, and more, all spread almost randomly throughout the globe.

Why everything bore so much resemblance to Earth despite the building blocks and laws of this universe being different was a question Martin wanted answered as soon as possible, but the fact that the environment was so familiar to him was a welcome fact.

With that thought, he was only minutes away from his destination. Soon, he’d finally be able to... well, he at least assumed there’d be some way to find a body; despite liking his development as a soul, there was always more that having a body could grant him.

He hadn’t forgotten about his need for companionship, either. He wasn’t suddenly hoping for there to be sentient life on the first planet he’d found with life in general, but he’d be happy with any sort of animal that was around. If not those, then insects. If insects hadn’t evolved... he supposed the trees would have to do.

Whatever it entailed, Martin was looking forward to his new life.

The beginning of it all was just around the corner.