Dan hummed along to the music in his head as he always did when he completed his nigh mindless tasks.

‘This job wasn’t worth the four years in college.’ Dan groused mentally as he inspected the blood vials in the refrigerated freight car. ‘Almost all of my inspections are redundant! These blood samples would be fine without little old me checking on them!’

Though Dan was usually unhappy to do his self-proclaimed underpaid job, he was always extra grouchy when his long hours caused him to miss family events.

‘This is why socialism is better than this soul sucking society that we live in! The worker always has a better grasp of the requirements of labor than the elite! Honestly, all the elite accom-’

Dan was interrupted from his political assessments that always made family Thanksgiving dinner much more fun when his entire self was shifted largely to the right.

“Whu-” With his final words gracefully stated, Dan was promptly crushed to death in a spectacular train derailment that would make national news and would be talked about in various railway circles for years.

---

“Debbie!” Dan screamed as he awoke, but to his bewilderment, nothing came out of his mouth.

Even more confusing, he couldn’t remember why he said that in the first place.

But as Dan looked around, that concern was blasted out of his mind.

“-----!” A soul in front of him was mouthing desperately while nothing escaped his face, another to his side took the form of a little girl and was wailing and crying.

Dan looked around wildly at the blue translucent forms that surrounded him in that place, a smallish ‘room’ that was nothing but a platform of white light in a swirling void. A crowd was drawn to a ‘stage’ that was at the center, but there where many around him slowly freaking out, getting their bearings, and then being naturally drawn the commotion at the center.

Dan was naturally an introverted person, and only vocalized his observations when he felt they were note worthy. This also naturally led him to observe more often, in hopes he would actually get something to say and be useful in a conversation.

‘Okay, I died. That’s clear, I’d already be watching a show that can ‘punk’ people so thoroughly.’ It also led to him talking to himself more often, it’s important to vocalize your thoughts, even if you don’t think they are worth voicing.

‘What’s with everyone’s reaction? How can I figure out where I am? If I’m in hell, I need to know what’s in store for me, at the very least…’ And self-esteem issues, poor guy.

In addition the desperate reaction that himself and everyone else gave, Dan noted that souls kept coming from ‘somewhere’ that was neither the light below him or the swirling void around him. Then he noted that most all of the people around him were a solid translucent ‘blue’ that wasn’t actually the color blue, but just felt like it, and other people had hints of ‘red’ and sometimes colorless cracks.

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‘What the hell?’ Dan puzzled to himself. ‘Or rather, what’s the hell?’ He chuckled, somewhat desperately.

He thought and he thought, but as the platform became more and more crowded, Dan couldn’t think of a single belief system that had any kind of afterlife like this.

‘Hah, what have I been, isekaied?’ That’s when it clicked, not that Dan knew what random ass fantasy world that he had probably read about somewhere he was in, but that Dan ‘felt’ all of this.

That the light below him wasn’t actually light, but the personification of what Dan felt as ‘order’ and the swirling eddies of darkness that was the void around them was ‘chaos’. ‘Blue’ was stability, ‘red’ instability, and the cracks he didn’t want to think about.

Under this new awakening, he observed the reaction the new souls were giving, feeling that they were experiencing confusion from whatever process they came hear, he ‘felt’ that they were just reacting by clinging to whatever they felt was important in their last life.

‘Figures.’ Dan laughed grimly. Debra was his wife.

‘Still,’ He thought idly, ‘I wonder what world I’m in?’

That idleness was shattered in an instant as a pillar of light materialized a blind goddess behind him.

He didn’t even need to turn around to focus his senses, he and everyone else here ‘saw’ her form perfectly, even going so far to know her intentions.

He bolted, instantly. There was no thought when facing against that, and he would rather face non-existence than what it would do to him. It would be less disturbing if the most hated man in the world took that stage.

Dan plunged into the chaos just as soon as it started the massacre. The intense ‘light’ swept over all the occupants of what Dan now realized to be the spiritual realm. The people within the realm of order realized quickly that ‘becoming one with order’ was in no way as benign as it was made to sound, then they realized oblivion as their very essence was cruelly and ruthlessly torn from their souls.

Dan watched from the safety of the chaos as the current Supreme deity of order in Murim finished the process of tearing asunder the Akashic cycle and husking souls to turn into her unfeeling angels, agents of order.

“What are you?”

Dan was unaware as the qi of chaos itself asked a question. Dan would have answered, but the qi quickly began melting Dan into a primordial soup without any time for Dan to even register the question.

Most of Dan was lost instantly, all but the essence, all that made Dan Dan. The very same quality that was stripped away from the victims of Order.

They had lost all cohesiveness from the insanity that had befallen them, but Dan had entered the chaos willingly, and while the chaos did not play favorites, it did not pity either.

“Human?”

And that was that, the chaos had been satisfied, and what was ordered was now natural chaos.

But that wasn’t it, Dan had no autonomy, no method of thinking or feeling, even existing in itself, but still was. His actions, his tendencies, his fear, and his anger still existed.

In the chaos, a proto-demon would never form to by themselves, there would always need to be an event in the chaos to trigger a real awakening. Such an event would need to be triggered by powerful forces.

Powerful forces, such as a deity.

The ‘soup’ that was the remnants of a thousand souls, essence enough to drown a soul eater, swirled around the part of Dan that remained.

His thoughts were alone from the disaster.

His emotions were only reinforced, becoming resistant to outside influences.

His memories were too distinct to integrate.

His identity even more so.

But his knowledge, the obsessive tendencies he retained in his life from constantly looking for new information led to him obtaining all that came to him.

Medicine, politics, games, behavior, science, the fantasy that Dan would learn was all too real, everything, the information well over a thousand people from countless worlds flowed, not into him, but as a vortex around the essence of Dan.

It coalesced, gaining a qi all of its own and enabling Dan to exert force unto the world, now irrevocably changed. Having formed naturally in the abyss, chaos itself plunged its newest creation into the world Murim, to cause chaos as it pleases.