"The continuity of our own reality is of course deeply related to how we think, feel, and act. But its that same continuity that makes it so hard to see just how much we change." - Unknown Author

Time was a rather strange thing, Mark hadn't put much thought into it prior to his... death? He still wasn't quite sure since he was most definitely conscious, but regardless he realized that time was very much so a matter of context and perception.

Right now there wasn't really a 'Him' he couldn't see anything, feel any stimulus or sense of touch, practically pure existence. Thinking was the only thing to do so he did quite a lot of it, he could guess that maybe he was just a soul right now, Or something similar at least. he was barely acquainted with the concept due to his lack of a formal education either way.

And sometimes there were those little gaps in thought, moments where he would stop thinking. Like his consciousness just blended into the nothingness that was his existence. He knew that it would terrify him, the fact that just stopping his thoughts could make it feel as though he simply didn't exist. But he wasn't even able to feel that fear, the dread and anxiety that he distinctly knew should be there were missing.

'its getting harder to think'

The memories within him were only a limited fuel after all, once he had thought of every little idea in his mind, every scenario plan dream or thought he ever had, He would just end up repeating himself.

The lapses in consciousness started up again when he repeated himself. Each time his consciousness shut off things became even harder, did he struggle for a while? Did his mind scream out into the void? Did it matter?

No none of it did the struggle was irrelevant in the same way that time was irrelevant here. Ultimately he was only left with one thing to do and that was just to be, to exist.

'I Am Mark'

'I Am mark'

'I Am m'

'I Am'

'I Am'

'I Am'

'i am'

i-

And then like a machine coming to life Marks soul surged. Like it was hooked back into its battery after slowly dying out for who knows how long and slowly he could start to feel again, first a twitch in his eye, then a movement of his fingers.

Before long he was finally able to open his eyes again and he saw the stars in the sky above, sparking and illuminating the world in a soft radiance. Minutes passed he hadn't moved and he hadn't closed his eyes once, He was alive and the shock of it all was overwhelmingly intense.

He could have burst into tears, but he just couldn't process it or make sense of it at all. Almost unconsciously he raised his right arm and slapped himself across the face hard, The sting was able to bring him out of his shock at least enough to function.

He pushed himself off the ground and was finally able to see his surroundings. Well it was suffice to say that if everything hadn't been dried up by the sweltering heat it would have looked like a scene out of a horror movie. There was dried blood and even torn off pieces of flesh surrounding the sandy area, a reminder as to what had happened to him, a concrete fact that said 'this wasn't just a bad dream.

And while mark was certainly disturbed and questioning how he was still living and breathing he could not afford to stand around at his own crime scene. He was already starting to feel the chilling cold penetrating into his body sucking his new found life out of him, the fact that the mutants hadn't left his clothes in tact wasn't helping either.

while he started jogging towards the city area which he could see fairly well due to the massive conglomeration of light it was giving off, he started to take account of his body. The few obvious things were that the arm and leg that had been practically chomped off of him were perfectly fine now without the slightest scar. However he could notice a few other more specific details, there was no pain in his left arm from the time he tore a muscle trying to move a particularly heavy piece of scrap, the slight blur in his eyesight that had started developing ever since he was a child was gone, and even though he was already fit before he could tell that his stamina was higher than before just from running this distance.

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It wasn't like his body was now above the level of an ordinary human, that would have been much more obvious. No it seemed to be like a machine that had all of its parts replaced for fresh ones, Mark shivered slightly at the thought and it's own dark implications.

'Is this even still my original body? Or was it all eaten by those mutants and then reconstructed by something like those test tube babies?" A bit gross to think about it but no point in looking at a gift like it's a time bomb.. until it starts ticking of course.

anxiety and dread aside he had made it to the outskirts of the city, the security checkpoints didn't start until you got into the "real city" anyways so it wasn't hard to get to his little home. It was a small shack made of metal, he had made it himself after he got tired of living out on the streets and getting robbed every other week while he was asleep. It wasn't actually that difficult to make either he just had to borrow some old power tools from one of the people he had sold scrap too for a long time.

Mark had a reputation for at least being a decently alright person, as much as his place in life would allow. Regardless after he had gotten the tools it just took collecting or buying the appropriately sized pieces of metal and bolting them together. It was a horrible job aesthetically but it was insulated enough and the rain didn't pour in unless a really heavy storm swept through the area.

Once he got inside he checked to see if he had been robbed while he was away and thankfully no one was stupid enough to try. Not everyone was lucky enough to find a working gun in the wasteland like Mark had, or rich enough to actually afford one. So Mark had made it very well known once he got one, of course a few people had tried to steal it and then off him to prevent retaliation, but well there was a reason he also borrowed shovels frequently.

He didn't really blame the people, well maybe a bit for the stupidity and annoyance, but not for the desperation behind their actions. It was natural to want something to protect yourself with, just as it was natural for Mark to respond with force to deter those same people.

Once he knew everything he had was in place he laid down on his old mattress and started going over exactly what had happened without the threat of death clouding his judgement.

Starting off from the beginning that ball was definitely giving off radiation of some kind or maybe something else entirely. That was the only reason the mutants would have been able to sense it, they were keenly aware of sources of radiation since they were able to feed off of them to grow stronger, or more accurately to mutate themselves more which could go either way for their progression.

Whatever the energy it gave off was it explained the warm touch it had and potentially its lack of corrosion compared to most things in the waste land. If it was just that things would have made a little sense but the ball being able to transform into a liquid metal once in contact with his blood was near impossible. He knew of things like nano technology and all that but from his limited but still viable understanding they usually came in extremely containers and couldn't simply transform states of matter at will.

At this point it mas more of a specific medical robotics technology, only used on the people wealthy enough to afford it. It was able to slow down the aging of cells and even reconstruct them, being able to double or even quadruple life spans with variety of other features. Of course that was only applicable to ordinary people and not those cultivators but still.

Something like that ball, assuming it was even possible with current technology should have probably cost literal trillions of credits. Which meant one of two things either A, a secret government program just spent a shit load of money on a new prospective technology decades ahead of current public research and then just lost it in a random wasteland. Or B, it was an alien artifact of some kind and that was.. fairly plausible actually.

As humanity had been in the stars for a long time by now, we had colonized over 20 different solar systems and were working on even more. We hadn't gotten everything perfect yet, we had ways of faster than light communication but not travel so while all the different worlds under humanity's jurisdiction could communicate and coordinate, it was like being on separated islands in the ocean. And through these expansion we had found alien life, not the living sentient kind yet at least but alien creatures and ruins from past civilization's.

Mark didn't know the details outside of the very basics, complex information was hard to come by in the outskirts and dedicating time to learning little bits of information that weren't specifically useful to your own survival just didn't really make sense. Unless you were like Mark who wanted a way out of the squalor and had done his best to self educate himself into basic literacy and math skills in the hopes of buying a way into formal education some day.

That was easier said than done though, Marks planet wasn't the most fortunate kind. There had been a civil war just decades ago caused by an extremist group wanting to defect by the greater human civilization as a whole. The entire thing led to a nasty conflict bombings were frequent and left around 10 percent of the surface area barren, and that was usually around the population centers due to their importance. Overall it caused a distinct class divide between the rich and the poor further exacerbated by the fact that most of the poor lost their homes in the war. It wasn't specifically the governments fault but it still made it harder to move up in life none the less compared to other worlds of humanity.

Either way he had an alien artifact merged into his body that somehow reconstructed him from practically being dead.

Time to take a nap.