On the fringes of a dense forest, where sunlight barely seeped through the tangled canopy of trees, the air was heavy with the smell of rot,The ancient trees rose in twisted shapes, their branches intertwining to form a complex network that choked the forest floor in heavy shadows,Only the distant rustle of leaves or the cry of one of its inhabitants pierced the oppressive silence.

A man's corpse lay on one of the towering trees, pinned to the trunk by a sword thrust through the middle of his chest and embedded deeply into the bark of the tree. The body seemed to have merged with the forest itself, emanating a bitter stench of decayed feces and rancid butter.

The skin of his chest extended around the silver blade, which still bathed in dried black blood, contrasting sharply with the unnaturally bloated abdomen. His facial features reflected the final moments of his life,His hollow eyes, once bright, had dimmed, allowing his pupils to dilate and stare blankly into the void. Meanwhile, his tongue hung out, revealing dark, scabbed blood that had dried on his thick black beard. Slowly, the dried blood began to merge with the fluid seeping from the blade's edges.

Despite the gruesomeness of the scene, it was not out of place in this ancient forest,However, something about this particular corpse felt distinct, a subtle change almost imperceptible at first glance 

The pupil, which had appeared fixed, suddenly began to constrict slowly, pulling the iris toward a disturbing clarity,As a precursor to the embers of awareness struggling to return, attempting to awaken consciousness from the depths of death.

At first, it was nothing more than a faint pulse of awareness, a distant murmur like the echo of a heartbeat long forgotten.

Something stirred within him—an instinctive need, a desperate urge to cough that scraped his throat. He longed to clear the obstruction in his chest and feel his lungs expand. Yet no air moved; despite the growing sensation of suffocation, his body remained still.

No heart beat urgently, nor did any lungs fill and expel the cold air enveloping him like a shroud. There were no rhythmic pulses in his veins; only... silence.

Then came the pain, or what should have been pain, shimmering at the edges of his awareness like a distant flame. It shifted and warped, reluctant to take full form, manifesting only as the dull pressure of steel embedded deeply in lifeless flesh. Though he was acutely aware, his senses remained numbed and obscured beneath the fog.

The world around him was muffled, colors flowing out of the frame in a faded haze, and sounds distant, with the scent of decay clinging to him like a second skin. Yet he did not taste the rot nor feel the dampness of the air in his throat. He was aware of his body—and its weight—but it felt as though he were wrapped in the skin of something alien,Something that doesn't have

Awareness struck his chest, penetrating deeply and expanding the cavity. Just a body, it neither pulsed nor breathed; his senses were distorted and warped. Vision was dim, exceedingly fragile, and cold. Unable to blink due to his stiff eyelids, he remained trapped in a perpetual gaze.

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His gaze shifted downward to the sword. The blade jutted from his chest, buried deeply in the forest behind him, pinning him to the tree like a strange insect stuck with a pin. His fingers twitched or attempted to move, but he could not lift or shift them. His muscles felt alien and detached. He screamed for movement, for life.

Nothing. No response. 

He was trapped, ensnared in the decaying shell of a man who once lived and breathed, The faintest movements of panic began to seep through the haze, but they felt weak and hollow, as if his emotions had become numb along with his senses. Was he dead? No, not dead, but not alive either. Something... in between. A realm of existence, of awareness without life.

No hunger, no need for sleep, and the unchanging daylight made it impossible for him to grasp the passage of time. Every moment felt like the last, stretched into an endless fog of sameness, where minutes? hours? days? blended together in a continuous, unbroken stream.

The unchanging brilliance of the sunlight offered no clues or shadows to mark the passing of days, His exhausted mind, worn from the struggle to understand, drifted in a haze of ambiguity, disconnected from the rhythm of time's march.

From time to time, he was jolted by sensations akin to pinpricks on his skin, creeping across different areas. He understood the presence of sensations without actually feeling them.

These unfamiliar sensations and concepts left him in a state of struggle without movement, battling to focus on regaining or concentrating on the things he once knew, the sensations of the living, the needs of the living.

His attempts yielded only a new, exhausting struggle until awareness overwhelmed him. The pinpricks and creeping sensations on his skin were nothing but parasites that had found refuge in his body and insects that saw it as a nest for their eggs,His awareness, growing heavier, and his senses, increasingly lost in the fog were his mind's last struggle to cling to a lifeless anchor. 

He was aging.

His body was decaying, and it wouldn’t be long before the last remnants of consciousness faded and departed along with it.

He awakened only to experience the final moments of a decaying corpse. It was a ridiculous situation, and he didn’t understand why he now found his predicament so absurd, trivial, and laughable.Perhaps it was the dimming of his mind, his exhaustion from the struggle, or both, but he ceased trying or thinking. Now, his only interest lay in the colors around him, which seeped without clear boundaries or edges.He couldn't discern where one color ended and another began, making the scene appear less like a realistic forest and more like looking at an oil painting. Perhaps something closer to Van Gogh? He wasn’t a connoisseur of art, so he couldn’t appreciate the art before him, only feeling awe at the distorted and bizarre sight.

The situation continued in this manner, with him merely enjoying the increasingly distorted view and the sounds growing more distant, interrupted only by occasional louder noises he had initially ignored. As these sounds began to grow closer and closer at a steady pace, they captured his attention.

As the seconds passed, these sounds grew clearer, accompanied by movement at the edges of his vision. Unlike the familiar noises he had heard since inhabiting the corpse—initially mere murmurs—they escalated into a powerful, intermittent roar, accompanied by muffled sounds of impact With a light clattering followed by the jarring screech of metal and the scream of something familiar, it was on the tip of his tongue. It was something he knew, but couldn’t quite recall, which made him focus intensely in an attempt to remember.Eventually, the shapes remaining at the edges of his vision became clear, though still somewhat vague due to his condition. He saw a person carrying a silver rectangle ,He assumed it was a sword of the kind he had seen in museums and some videos, avoiding a large, brown shape with red patches creeping over it. The creature ran on all fours and occasionally rose on its hind legs to attack the person, It took him some time to conclude that the creature was a bear and that the red color was blood, which only added to his confusion. What could possibly drive someone to fight a bear with a sword?

What should have been a struggle for survival continued،marked by evasion, wounds, and stabbing, until the sword was finally thrust through the ribs, pulling a great deal of red with it. This marked the bear’s last breaths and the swordsman's victory, who then redirected another thrust into the carcass before standing upright,Directing the white and green splashes of paint toward him.