Wen Hao’s fingers flew across the keyboard as he worked on his final homework assignment. His eyes stayed fixed on the screen, concentration etched into his face.

In the last semester of his programming major, this was one of his final assignments before stepping into the real world. He and his friends often joked about how graduating was like finishing a game tutorial, only to start playing on the hardest difficulty. With how competitive things had become, it wasn’t far from the truth.

Click.

He pressed the execute button and watched the program compile. The screen flickered and immediately threw out a cascade of errors. Over ten, glaring in red.

“Damn.” Wen Hao sighed and leaned forward, scrolling through the mess of code to figure out what went wrong.

This was how his days went. Classes in the morning, homework in the afternoon, and the occasional trip to the gym if he had time. Life was routine and predictable. He didn’t mind it. Stability was something he’d come to appreciate.

An hour of debugging passed, and the frustration started to creep in. He rubbed his eyes and decided to call it a night.

“Tomorrow,” he said to himself, pushing his chair back and standing up. A hot shower sounded good.

In the bathroom, he turned on the shower and started to undress. Steam filled the room as he stepped closer. What Wen Hao didn’t know was that a frayed wire hidden in the wall had exposed itself, charging the shower’s water pipe with electricity.

Completely unaware, he stepped into the shower, humming lightly as the hot water poured over him.

BZZZT!

The shock hit instantly. Wen Hao’s body seized as the electricity coursed through him, cutting off any chance to react. Within seconds, he collapsed. His life ended as suddenly as the faulty wiring had decided to act up.

One moment, he’d been thinking about finishing his assignment. The next, he was gone.

Wen Hao’s vision went pitch black as his life faded into nothingness.

He felt the electricity coursing through his body, not as pain, but as a dull numbness that left him strangely detached. Everything had happened in an instant, yet it felt like an eternity before his consciousness began to slip away.

So this is how it feels to die, he thought.

To his surprise, it wasn’t terrifying. It was peaceful. He had expected death to be agonizing, filled with regret or desperate clinging to life. But none of that came. Instead, an unusual calm settled over him.

What’s the point of regret now? he mused. It wouldn’t change anything.

With that, he let out an internal sigh and surrendered himself to the void, closing his eyes forever.

…

Silence.

Darkness.

Nothingness.

…

Or so he thought.

“…Wait.”

That single thought cut through the void, sharp and jarring. Why was he still thinking? Why wasn’t this over? Panic surged within him.

Is this what death is? he wondered. An endless black abyss with nothing but your own thoughts for company?

Desperate, he tried to move, to feel anything, but there was nothing. His body was gone. All he knew was the darkness. He had no sense of time, no markers to track its passing. Seconds stretched into minutes, hours into days, days into years, or so it seemed. He couldn’t tell anymore.

At some point, his panic faded. His mind dulled. The void became his new reality, and even his thoughts began to dissipate.

…

Time blurred.

Days?

Years?

Decades?

Centuries?

It didn’t matter anymore.

…

Then, a tiny dot of light appeared in the darkness.

At first, Wen Hao didn’t notice it. He was too numb, too lost in the emptiness. But the light grew. Slowly, steadily, it expanded until it filled his vision, stark and blinding against the void.

“…What is that?” he murmured, his voice hesitant and hoarse, as though he hadn’t spoken in an eternity.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Within the light, something extraordinary emerged. Two massive landmasses materialized before him, suspended in an endless white expanse. They were incomprehensibly vast—tens of thousands of times larger than Earth. He couldn’t see their edges, yet he somehow knew their enormity.

One landmass was clearly larger, dominating his view with its sprawling expanse. The other was smaller, but no less magnificent. Despite its size, the smaller landmass radiated a presence equal to its larger counterpart. He could feel it, a raw, instinctive understanding that both were extraordinary in their own way.

“What… are those?” he whispered, his curiosity awakening for the first time in what felt like an eternity.

The larger landmass shimmered with a strange, otherworldly energy that pulsed like a heartbeat. The smaller one exuded an aura of rigid, unyielding strength as if bound by ancient rules. He had no idea why he was seeing them or what they meant, but he couldn’t look away.

And for the first time since he had died, Wen Hao felt something stir within him.

As he drifted closer to the two enormous landmasses, Wen Hao felt an undeniable pull, like gravity itself was guiding him. At first, the sensation was subtle, almost ignorable. But as time passed, the force became stronger, accelerating his descent toward them.

It was strange. He couldn’t feel his body, yet he could sense the tug on whatever part of him still existed. The closer he got, the more he realized this wasn’t random. These landmasses were drawing him in with purpose, like magnets pulling a loose shard of metal.

Then, a thought surfaced in his hazy mind, unbidden, but impossible to ignore.

Where to go?

The landmass on the right loomed vast and immeasurable, radiating a raw, primal energy that made him feel small in comparison. It was ancient and boundless, like a world that existed long before he had even been born. Yet its sheer scale was intimidating, almost overwhelming.

The landmass on the left was smaller, but it pulsed with life. It glowed with vibrant colors and energy that felt sharp, focused, and bursting with potential. Though it was smaller, it gave off the impression of precision and purpose, as if everything on it was finely tuned.

His foggy thoughts struggled to keep up. His mind was still heavy and slow, and making a decision felt like trying to climb out of quicksand.

The right? The left? he wondered, frustrated by the weight of the choice. It wasn’t just about curiosity, it felt like the choice would change him forever.

But time wasn’t on his side. The pull grew stronger, and his descent sped up. A cold realization struck him: if he didn’t choose soon, he would fall between the two landmasses. The thought of drifting endlessly in the void again made his chest tighten. He couldn’t go back to that.

“URGH!” The frustration boiled over. “DAMN IT!”

His pulse quickened, or at least, it felt like it did. His instincts screamed at him to act, but he couldn’t choose. Both sides called to him in different ways. Both felt important. Both felt right.

“Why choose?!” he shouted into the void. “I pick BOTH!”

A surge of energy exploded within him, raw and unfiltered, as he threw everything he had into moving both ways at once. It didn’t make sense. It shouldn’t have worked. But somehow, it did.

The pull from each landmass latched onto him simultaneously. For a brief moment, he felt like he was being torn in two. His vision split, one part drawn to the right and the other to the left. It was disorienting, chaotic, and overwhelming.

The moment he entered the boundaries of both landmasses, his mind was thrown into turmoil. Images, sounds, and sensations flooded his awareness, faster than he could comprehend. The vastness of the larger landmass filled one side of his vision with endless mountains, roaring beasts, and skies crackling with power. On the other side, the smaller landmass flashed with intricate symbols, towering spires, and people weaving light and energy through their hands.

The sheer intensity was too much.

His consciousness buckled under the strain as his vision collapsed into darkness once more.

…

“Huh?”

“Huh?”

Wen Hao’s eyes snapped open, or at least, that’s what it felt like. His mind reeled as confusion set in. Something was off.

“Where am I?”

“Where am I?”

The words echoed in his ears, but they weren’t quite the same. He wasn’t just hearing himself speak, he was saying it in two different places at the same time.

His vision split. It wasn’t like a blur or double vision; it was two entirely separate scenes.

On one side, he was sitting at a small desk in a room that looked strangely familiar yet completely foreign. A stack of papers covered with intricate, hand-drawn patterns lay in front of him. The room around him looked modern, similar to his room back on Earth, but with small, unfamiliar details that gave it an otherworldly feel.

On the other side, he wasn’t sitting at all. He was in the arms of a woman. Around him was an open arena where older children trained under the watchful eye of a broad-shouldered man. Their movements were sharp and practiced, the sound of their training filling the air.

“What’s going on?” he muttered, his voice overlapping from both perspectives. The experience was disorienting and hard to describe. He could feel the desk beneath his small hands in one world, while in the other, he could sense the gentle sway of being carried.

Trying to move made it worse. In the desk chair, he shifted slightly, the papers crinkling under his hand. Simultaneously, in the other world, his small body wiggled in the woman’s arms. He froze, unsure of how to process the sensations.

His heart pounded, or maybe both hearts? His thoughts felt like they were being stretched, pulled in two different directions at once. Yet he could feel it, he was still himself. Yet somehow, he was in both places at the same time.

“What… is this?” His voice wavered from both bodies, but there was no answer.

At that moment, Wen Hao forced himself to remain calm. Panicking wouldn’t help.

Focus. What’s going on?

With his mind clearer, he began piecing things together. He remembered working on his final assignment and then heading to the shower. The sharp jolt of electricity, the realization of death—and then waking up here. Or rather, in two places.

Two bodies. Two worlds. One mind.

The realization felt bizarre, but it made sense in its own strange way. He could feel it, two sets of eyes, two perspectives, two lives. Somehow, he had split and was now existing in both simultaneously.

On one side, he was a small child, at most 1 year old. He was being carried by a woman. Around him was a large, open space where older children were practicing something. Their movements were fast and sharp, under the watch of a man who seemed to be instructing them.

On the other side, he was seated at a desk in a quiet room. A stack of papers lay in front of him, covered with symbols and drawings he didn’t recognize, but for some reason, he could understand them perfectly. It was instinctive, like breathing.

The strangest part wasn’t the surroundings, it was the feeling of controlling two bodies at the same time. Moving in one didn’t disrupt the other, but it wasn’t seamless yet. Focusing on both perspectives simultaneously was like trying to split his thoughts down the middle.

Still, he felt like he was improving. The longer he stayed like this, the more natural it became. He wasn’t there yet, but he was sure it was only a matter of time before he could control both bodies perfectly.

The possibilities...

The thought lingered in his mind, but he quickly pushed it aside. For now, he needed to focus. He turned his attention to one of the worlds.