Chapter 1

In a strange void filled with seemingly endless amounts of empty space stretching into the distance forever awakens an ancient soul. One which had been resting for reasons and time unknown.

This soul, for the first time in over a millennium had finally awakened yet it did not awaken fully whole.

It realized that it lacked a physical body, and even much of its previous memories, though not all of them. The soul attempted to look around until it realized that it lacked a physical form, yet somehow it saw everything in front of it and even a little on its side. It willed itself to turn around in an attempt to gain more of an understanding of its location. The movement was difficult to accomplish but it found success.

Enclosing it seemed to be a white box or walls closing it on all sides. The walls looked to be so flat that it almost looked purely 2 dimensional.

When it willed itself to look above, it surprisingly did not see more white but a direct opposite.

It saw a near empty darkness with faint twinkles of light signifying possible life far, far, away. When not focusing on the lights, the darkness seemed to match the whiteness in dimensions. It was weirdly flat and even some of the lights seemed to look more like background drawings on a canvas than an actual 3d object.

When the soul focused more, it noticed a certain light that drew it in. It felt different compared to the others and had even felt the part as well. For some reason the soul could not find itself to draw its vision away from this light. It was as if it was staring into a blackhole, leaving it awestruck and unable to look away while it gets pulled into the incoming doom. That feeling of being pulled was not wrong as the soul had started to realize in that moment.

When it tried to push away whatever force was pulling it in it found its effort utterly futile. The light had seemed to get closer to the soul and the mind boggling distance it felt before was quickly being closed in, with space itself seeming to warp in a way that made the darkness and the light look like they were simultaneously moving and getting father away. As the soul watched helplessly as the light got progressively closer and closer it had realized space was warping as well, pulling it right towards the light as well which made it now realize it was not what was expected.

What was seen coming towards it was something which the soul presumed was the size of a star, and had the eye burning brightness of one. It looked to be almost reptilian in looks yet had what looked like wings going all down its spine, they seemed to go on for over thousand of kilometers individually, and were hundreds or even thousands of them. The creature's dozens of planetoid size eyes blazed even brighter than a star as just looking at them made the soul feel like it would cease to exist.

As the space warped it closer to the now close creature the soul began to felt itself get smaller and twist as the effects of the thing warped space all around it except for itself. The creature now close enough to the soul proceeded to stop instantly for but a moment as proceed to look at the soul with its powerful gaze that made it feel like it would wither away into nothingness. The soul for some reason glared back with its non-existent eyes in an attempt to fight back against the almost inevitable death it knew would come from dying from either being too close to the creature, or it killing the soul easily with it’s body titanic proportions.

Expectedly the creature did not just take that even from what amounts to a bug in comparison.

It opened up its dragon-like jaw in a way that should be physically impossible, as it ripped off its own face from how wide it went open. The massive scales broke off its face as its jaw went into a near 180 degrees even ripping open the underside of its mouth in the process as it prepared itself to swallow the diminutive little soul that it could have eaten with just the little gap from its closed mouth that was still big enough to swallow cities accidentally. Space warped the creature so close that all the soul could see was pure yellow as the gaping maw enclosing it.

It failed to notice the almost invisible space bending in the back off the creature’s throat that it was now being pushed towards inevitably.

The soul wondered in that moment many things despite its memories still being foggy. It wondered if all of those beautiful lights were light the creature in front of it, it wondered if it awakened just to die, it wondered where it would go as its already a soul meaning it might already be dead, it wondered if it even had a future, it wondered all this in a furious, fearful and yet determined gaze that it would at least not go down without a futile fight.

The soul was crushed to less than the size of an atom and pushed to the path of the creature's stomach. In warped space it failed to notice the faint smile on the creature's face after it closed its mouth and regenerated its jaw in less than seconds.

In that moment the soul of course could not have known any possible way that the creature did not feast on the soul and enjoy it, but that it saw that the determination of the soul to survive even in the face of sure death which had ignited long forgotten memories making the creature happy as it recognized even in the souls weakened state who it was, and that it still had the strength of mind the soul once possessed in the past.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

As the creature had begun to float in empty space once again it was sure that it was fate that the soul was meant to be eaten by it and that in some way the soul would survive and return again.

Inside the belly of the creature, the soul had lost all sense of vision leaving it in complete darkness. Because of the darkness the creature did not see that it did not go down the creatures body to its stomach, but that it was now at a size where it was entering the imperceivable hole in reality that would take it to a place unknown. As it entered the hole in reality it felt the coils of its existence being unraveled into dozens of other forms, most of which should have been physically impossible yet was not because of the difference between a physical body and a soul.

For the soul this process of travel took only but a few seconds before a bright light had once again engulfed it, finally removing it from the cold, silent darkness.

The soul could tell even without viewing its immediate surroundings that it was in a place that was quite different from where it was before. One major key difference was that the strange 2d or 3d white and dark space was now replaced with a surface which seemed to actually be a real 3d object. After about 30 seconds of taking in the surprising sight of a 3d surface, the soul had willed itself to move, bringing into its mind that something else was vastly different. The soul had realized that its vision was now way different than it was before and that the world seemed more ¨real¨.

With as much effort as it could muster, it tried to push itself to move and realized it had kinda succeeded. Then came the realization that its form was different somehow. It felt something now, physical contact with whats being touched and even feelings it couldn't feel before. It tried to move the weight on its left in order to see if there were anymore changes to be met with and had now saw that it possessed arms to its body unlike as it was before. With that new almost overwhelming sight came the biggest surprise so far being that its memories are way clearer now, and that terms and words, along with memories could now be understood answering why it even knew the word arm.

With its new memories it understood that it had a physical body unlike before and that its memories were lost and locke away, and not just non-existent. The before soul had after a minute of effort turned itself over showing that the place it was in was entirely different than before as everything seemed to be 3d. As it put in more effort the movements became very slightly easier allowing it to look around with less the effort it put in before. What it saw had amazed the once soul, once again showing that reality would keep giving him surprises.

It knew from its few new memories that it was in a library, yet one that was different from any it had ever seen before. It could tell this near instantly as it saw endless shelves going down a hall in what seemed like an infinite amount.

Like a hallway it was surrounded by bookshelves on both sides, some stretched up with books filling it in numbers too big to figure out, but possibly infinite. Some of the shelves did stop though, yet it could see that there were shelves filled with books floating above some of the other shelves with different colors surrounding them. Some of the colors had hurt to look at and some had felt like it was empowering the once soul.

Not just bookshelves were there though as it saw frozen forms of many diffrent creatures, some of which it knew from its memories, and some which took other forms such as 3-4 meter bladed bipedal metal monstrosities that looked like it would come out of a man's nightmare. There were even bigger ones like a fleshy wall monstrosity with many eyes that and a tense dark, yet almost bloody atmosphere surrounding it.

The once soul did not know what the creature was but it for sure did not like it for some strange reason

They were littered around diffrent spots occasionally. The biggest creature around was a 5 meter tall plant thing which looked to be made of long thorny vines, and long sort of legs that stretched up to not a body, but a rose bud as a head and body, with pink flaming petal blades made of what seemed to be more plants.

Around it was about a dozen or so more creatures that it could see.

In front of some of the shelves seemed to be floating blue crystals only a little bigger than its form as it guessed. They contained many different items some being weapons like normal swords or what is guessed to be an air swords, giant metal bows with floating flame arrows or other things like food, unique materials, and armor.

After looking around a bit more the soul had thought to itself of how tired of being overwhelmed it was in the time it had awoken. It dawned more on them that it now possessed emotions and even bodily functions which added to how it felt in that moment. The previous, now living soul had realized it was spiritually, mentally, and even physically exhausted and tired, and that it would have to conform to its new bodily functions. With less effort than before it moved in a slow crawl to the nearest book shelf about a few feet away in order to rest.

When it finally got there and rested on the shelf it had started to ponder abouts its new future and even the present. Since time was different here than the place it was in before, it didn't really know how long it was since it had initially risen. If it guessed though, in linear time it has been but a few hours and yet so many new things have been shown that has left it constantly surprised. Now it is stuck in a form that is both familiar and so very different, in a place that houses creatures and objects which It only knows from some of its recent memories and many of which it does not at all. At this moment it realized all it could do was learn how to use this new body and explore in hopes of finding a future for itself, and hopefully find other wonders in the possibly endless library.

As it grew more tired it began to close its new ¨eyes¨ in order to rest easier, It had a foreign thought being that it was a little difficult to think of itself as it did before as a soul, it came up with a decision to establish itself at least temporarily with a title or more fitting a name to call itself. Since it did not have all its memories it knew this was not its true name but it still felt it would do at least for now. In the last moments of forced consciousness the name that came to it was Loxxus, which in a tongue it did not truly understand yet still somehow knew had meant reborn, a fitting name for the being now known as Loxxus.