There was no sky.
No ground. No stars. No warmth. Just an endless, oppressive void — pale and lifeless, stripped of all color, sound, or shape. The kind of nothingness that felt ancient. Dead, but not silent. Empty, but not uninhabited.
Hin Yu opened his eyes.
He stood in the center of it — if "center" meant anything in a place with no direction. The last thing he remembered was the soft hum of traffic, the cold blue glow of his phone beside his bed. Silence had come next. A deep, peaceful kind. The kind that wraps around the edges of your thoughts and tells you that nothing else matters.
Now he was here. And the silence… it was different.
He looked down, half-expecting the floor to give way. But he wasn't falling. There was no ground, yet he stood. No wind, yet he felt pressure all around him, like the world was holding its breath. His limbs felt light. No aching joints, no stiffness in his back, no wheeze in his lungs. The fragile cage of age had been stripped away, leaving a version of himself that felt… unfinished.
He turned — slowly, cautiously — but saw nothing. No horizon, no shadows. The very concept of distance felt broken here.
Then something shifted.
A sound — soft, like paper brushing against skin — rippled through the stillness. Ahead of him, the void shimmered. Shapes pulled themselves from nothing, lines etching themselves into being, forming a path made of stairs that hadn't been there a moment before.
They hung in the air, unsupported. Perfectly still.
Each step was carved from dark stone, so black it seemed to drink what little light existed here. Dozens of them. Hundreds. Spiraling upward into the colorless sky, disappearing into the mist above. A staircase to nowhere — or to something that lay far beyond the reach of reason.
Drawn by instinct more than thought, Hin Yu approached.
The first step glowed faintly as he neared, a pulse of light radiating from its surface. He placed a hand on it. It was warm.
Without hesitation, he stepped onto it.
The moment his foot touched the stone, the world around him changed.
A ring of mist exploded outward, thick and silver, swirling up from beneath the step. Within the mist, images flickered to life — not like a screen or a memory, but as if time itself had folded around him.
He saw a child.
Alone in the corner of a crumbling schoolyard, crouched beside a broken fence. He was building towers from snapped pens and bottle caps while other children ran laps, laughing and yelling. Their voices didn't reach him. He wasn't excluded. He wasn't bullied. He was simply… forgotten.
The boy — the younger Hin Yu — didn't seem sad. He seemed distant, eyes focused on a world only he could see. A teacher walked by and looked at him, then looked away. No one said anything.
The image dissolved.
He stood alone again, the mist gone, the step beneath him dark once more.
A second step appeared above the first.
With only a brief pause, Hin Yu climbed. The air shifted again.
Another memory, this one older — the dim interior of his university library. Dust motes drifted through shafts of pale light. He sat between two tall bookshelves, not reading, just... resting. Escaping noise. Nobody spoke to him there. He liked it that way.
He climbed again.
Another memory. A cracked apartment window in winter. He sat curled under a threadbare blanket, eating noodles from a tin bowl while the television flickered. A comedy played. He wasn't laughing. But he didn't look sad. Just still. As always.
Step after step, the staircase unveiled pieces of him.
Some were clear — his first job, sitting at a call center with a headset over one ear, voice monotone. His friends, laughing around a hotpot table, steam rising like ghosts between them. The brief glow in his chest when someone called him reliable. His awkward attempts at saying "I'm fine" when he wasn't. A quiet funeral with no eulogies.
Others… were not his.
They couldn't be.
A battlefield soaked in rain, under two moons. Screams echoing through a valley of stone spires. A woman with burning eyes shouting his name — a different name. A language he didn't know but understood.
He paused.
These weren't memories.
Or perhaps they were — old ones. Buried deeper than life itself. Inherited from another self. A version of Hin Yu that had walked different worlds, worn different faces. Fought. Lost. Chosen.
More steps revealed themselves, now faster, their glow brighter.
One by one, he climbed, breath even, heart steady. The air around him grew heavier, thicker. The silence pressed in, but not with cold. It was heat now — anticipation. The feeling just before a storm breaks.
On the 108th step, he stopped.
This one was different.
There was no mist. No memory. No glow.
Just the step… and a sound.
A low, resonant hum. Not quite music. Not quite voice. Something vast and ancient stirred above, beyond the end of the staircase, behind the veil of fog and shadow.
Hin Yu looked up.
He couldn't see where the stairs ended — if they ended at all. But something waited there. Watching. Knowing. Calling.
He looked down.
Below him, the staircase spiraled back into the void. Every step beneath his feet had shown him a fragment — a forgotten sliver of a soul fractured across lives, times, maybe even worlds.
His life had felt forgettable. Gray. But maybe it was never just his to begin with.
The silence broke.
A whisper echoed through the colorless world. A single word, spoken not into his ears, but into his bones:
"Remember."
And for the first time in his life — or perhaps across many — Hin Yu felt something in his chest shift. Not fear. Not confusion.
Purpose.
He stepped forward onto the 109th stair.
The void shuddered — subtle, almost imperceptible, like the breath of something ancient stirring beneath the surface of still water.
And then the mist split apart.
A gate emerged.
It didn't rise. It didn't open. It didn't appear with any grandeur or divine proclamation. It was simply… there. As if it had always been — not waiting for him, but waiting for this moment. For the stirring of a memory so old it no longer remembered itself.
The gate loomed ahead, suspended in nothingness.
Massive. Monolithic.
Its surface was forged from some forgotten alloy — blacker than shadow, edged in soft veins of molten gold that pulsed faintly, like the heartbeat of a dying star. Symbols spiraled across its face — etched lines and curves that made no sense to his waking mind, but whispered to something deeper.
He stepped closer.
It wasn't awe he felt.
It was familiarity.
Not a grand reunion, not fate fulfilled — but something quieter. Sadder. Like the echo of a melody he'd once hummed in a forgotten dream. The gate didn't recognize him. It didn't choose him. It responded to something inside him — something that used to be.
And it terrified him.
Because Hin Yu understood, in a way beyond words, that this gate was not calling to the man he had become — the man who lived a quiet life, laughed with friends over cheap food, found comfort in solitude.
It was calling to something beneath him.
A fragment.
A sliver of memory, long sealed, now stirring. Not because it was ready — but because the silence had grown too loud to bear.
He reached out, hand trembling.
As his fingertips neared the symbol at the gate's center, the golden veins flared. Not with welcome. Not with warmth.
But with recognition.
Not of him.
Of what he carried.
And suddenly he saw—
A throne in a burning sea.A blade of bone and starlight, snapped in half.A woman falling into darkness, reaching for him, screaming not his name—but a name that bled power and sorrow.And behind it all, a promise whispered into a dying world:
"Let me forget."
The gate hadn't been waiting for a savior. It wasn't destiny that led him here. It was memory. A buried request that had taken root in time. A promise made across lifetimes.
He had built this gate.
Not to pass through it—
But to seal something behind it.
And now, that seal had begun to unravel.
Not because the world demanded it.
But because he had begun to remember.
The windless void grew tense, as though holding a breath.
The gate pulsed one last time. A low, deep sound echoed through the abyss — not a command, not a welcome, but an invitation wrapped in inevitability.
"Return, fragment.Not to become whole—But to remember why you broke."
And without fully understanding why, Hin Yu stepped forward.
The gate opened.
And the light that met him was not warm.
It was memory — raw, searing, and absolute.