You stare blankly at the blue box filling your vision. You blink at it. After a moment, you shrug it closed. Another box fills your vision, and you wave that off, too.
But you don't see what you expected to see, a whole world that had just been there. Instead, you see nothing.
It's not darkness. It has no colour and is neither black, nor white, nor grey. It's the absence of existence, a void that makes you deeply uncomfortable.
You attempt to turn away from it, but you quickly discover that the nothing is everything, everywhere. It's around you. It's in you. In a way, it even is you.
You grope around blindly, looking for... do you even know? Yourself, maybe. But all that's there is the abyss which has eaten up the world that you knew, and which is now gazing at you like it's still hungry.
You start to feel uncomfortable. Little by little, the void nibbles at you, as if ants were crawling under your skin, and you try to scratch the itch but you can't, and from a discomfort it grows painful, agonizing even, and more and you feel like you're drowning and dissolving and being eaten alive, all at once, like your soul is shrivelling up and falling apart and lost at sea and you want to gasp for air, but as you reflexively reach for the connection to your body to fill your lungs with air, you realize it's gone, it doesn't exist, you don't exist and now you really panic.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
You thrash around wildly, your senses groping the void for something, anything to hold on to, a life raft in this strange place of un-ness, a hint of existence to reassure you that you're still you, that you still are, that you are not just the nothing that surrounds you, but you don't find anything and you feel like you're falling, spinning, plummeting through the void, and up is down and left is right and you're flailing like a ragdoll being put through a meat grinder, or maybe you're standing perfectly still and the hurricane is just in your head and you want to scream, but your voice is just more nothing that leaves you and you wish you could press your eyes shut but even though you do with all your might, the abyss still gazes into you, hungering, and you just need something to hold on to, to stop the spinning, to--
There. You found it. You've opened the System, opened every menu, notification and screen that's available to you and they surround you like a protective shell, keeping out the void like neon "DO NOT ENTER" signs. You're coccooned in System messages.
You don't start reading immediately. For a while, you just stare at the seamless wall of white text on blue, which is so comforting just because it's not nothing, it's definitely not nothing.
Take your time.
You have eternity, now.