"The shortest distance between two points is the silence of the Creator. Between the question and the answer lies a void where morality vanishes and only the momentum of the path remains."
I kept walking, though my legs felt like leaden weights.
Every crunch of my boots against the tall, grey-tinted grass felt like a countdown. The Spirit World had been a place of ethereal beauty, but as I moved further away from the emerald trees, the world began to lose its color. It was fading into a monochromatic wasteland.
My mind was a chaotic storm, circling back to the same two words: **THE CREATOR**.
Who could look at the infinite complexity of the human soul and think to turn it into a currency? Back home on Earth, we lived in the shadow of this App. The government treated it like a digital plague, a forbidden relic of a coder who had gone mad. But they never told us the *why*.
*Is it an experiment?* I wondered, my eyes scanning the horizon for any sign of life. *Is the government hiding the Creator in some deep-sea bunker, or is the Creator someone—or something—that even they are terrified of?* The thought that my entire life, and the lives of those I inhabited, were just lines of code in a cosmic game made my stomach turn. I wasn't a person anymore. I was a variable.
I stopped for the tenth time to adjust my gear. The armor was a curse. I only had the golden gauntlets, the heavy chestplate, and the boots. There was no under-padding, no chainmail—just cold, hard metal rubbing against my skin. Every movement was a chore. I felt less like a knight and more like a prisoner in a gilded cage. I reached down and touched the small, pathetic knife tucked into my belt. It was barely six inches long—a kitchen utensil compared to the vastness of this world.
"Two hours," I muttered, my voice sounding raspy in the thin air. "Two hours of walking into nothing."
The path began to slope downward, the incline getting steeper. The lush grass thinned out, replaced by sharp, blackened rocks that looked like charred bone. Then, the smell arrived.
It wasn't a natural scent. It was the smell of ozone, like a lightning strike, mixed with the sickly-sweet rot of something that had been dead for a thousand years. It clogged my throat. I wanted to gag, but my curiosity was a stronger force than my fear.
Then came the fog.
It didn't drift like normal mist. It rolled up from the abyss like a living carpet, thick and suffocating. I didn't hesitate. I started to run, the heavy thud of my boots echoing off the stones. I needed to see. I needed to know that I wasn't just walking into an infinite void.
I burst through the wall of white vapor, the sudden change in pressure popping my ears, and then I skidded to a halt. The breath died in my lungs.
The **Castle of Mortius** loomed over me like a nightmare made of stone.
The central spire pierced through the thick fog, climbing so high into the bruised sky that the tip was lost to the clouds. Looking up made my head swim; it was like trying to measure the height of a mountain while standing in its shadow. I felt like an ant standing before the throne of a giant.
The architecture was impossible. The base was carved from a substance darker than any shadow—a void-black rock that seemed to pull the warmth out of the air. As the towers climbed higher, the color bled into a bruised, pulsating purple. It didn't look built; it looked like it had grown out of the earth like a malignant tumor.
But it was the path that stopped my heart.
The ground simply ended. Ahead of me was a single, terrifyingly narrow bridge of obsidian stone. It was no more than three feet wide, stretching out into the fog toward the castle gates. To my left and right, there was nothing but a sea of absolute darkness. No trees, no rocks, no bottom. Just a chasm that looked like it led to the end of the universe.
"The spirit..." I whispered, my fingers white as I gripped the hilt of my tiny knife. "He didn't give me a way out. He gave me a choice: jump into the dark, or walk into the mouth of a monster."
I looked at the castle. It was silent, save for a low, humming vibration that shook the very air. This was the place Mortius called home. A being the spirit feared. A being that might hold the first clue to the Creator's identity.
I looked at the red timer hovering in my peripheral vision. I had nearly ten years left. Ten years of this silence.
"Fine," I growled, my fear turning into a cold, sharp anger. "If I'm just an 'Outcome' in your game, Creator... then let's see what happens when the dice start fighting back."
I took my first step onto the bridge. The darkness below seemed to whisper my name, but I didn't look down. I only looked forward.
[USER: RIAN][09 YEARS | 362 DAYS | 21 HOURS | 45 MINUTES]