Chapter 2: Chapter 2: The Scatterings

823 Years Ago – 2024

Have you ever felt like you’ll die from work only to die in the alley, well that’s how Seung-yoondied.

It was not how he’d imagined going out, he always figured it’d be aheart attack at his desk— another late night debugging code,energy drinks stacked like monuments to poor life choices, his body finally sayingthis is the end, hold your breath and count to

...Anyways let’s continue.

Instead: wrong place, wrong time, wrongfucking city.

The gang firefighterupted without warning.

One moment he was walking home from the convenience store,ramyeon and beer in a plastic bag.

The next —tat-tat-tat!—muzzle flasheslit up the narrow street like a strobe light, andsomething hot punched through his chest.

He dropped the bag.The beer can rolled away, hissing softly as foam spilled out.

Tsssss...

That’s gonna stain,he thought stupidly, watching hisblood pool on the concrete.

The gangs kept shooting, nobody noticed the civilian caught in the crossfire, nobody cared.

In Seoul’s forgotten districts, peopledied every day.

Yoo pressed his hand against the wound.Blood leaked between his fingers, warm and slick.

His brain already rewired to think like a game developer through hours of sleepless nights, tried to calculate blood loss rates, time to unconsciousness, survival probability.

Zero percent.

He laughed —a bubbling, wet sound.

All those late nights finishing the game. All that crunching to meet deadlines, for what?

Only to die in an alley at twenty-nine, alone, surrounded by strangers who’d step over his corpse on their way to work tomorrow.

The worlddimmed at the edges.

I had things I wanted to do,he thought.Places I wanted to see. A game I wanted to finish.

I wasn’t done yet.

Darkness took him.

But that wasn’t the end.

The Void Between

Yoo’s soulscattered.

That wasn’t supposed to happen.

Normal souls — when they died — went... somewhere. Heaven, hell, reincarnation cycle, oblivion. Pick your mythology.

But they wentintact.

His didn’t.

The moment of death coincided with something else. Somethingvast and incomprehensibletouching Earth for a fraction of a second —a tendril of cosmic energy, searching, cataloging, analyzing this insignificant planet for future use.

It brushed through Seoul. Through that alley, and through Yoo’s dying body.

His soulfragmented like glass under a hammer.

Pieces of consciousnessscattered across dimensional barriers.

Some fragmentsdissolved immediately, unable to maintain cohesion.

Othersdrifted in the void between realities— not alive, not dead, just... existing.

Time didn’t work normally in the void.

Seconds could be centuries, centuries could be heartbeats.

Yoo’s fragmentsfloated, disconnected.

Each piece containing memories, personality fragments, skills, but none whole enough to be called a person.

I’m forgetting,one fragment thought — the piece that held his name.

What was I?another wondered — the piece containing his profession.

Why does this hurt?whispered a third — the emotional core, forever replaying that moment of death.

They drifted apart, slowly losing coherence.

In another thousand years, there would benothing left— just background radiation, cosmic dust, forgotten.

But823 years after his death— subjective time; actual time was meaningless here — yet somethingchanged.

The void pulled.

The Gathering

Two entities started agame.

AethonandChaos, positioning themselves above Earth likegrandmasters over a chessboard.

Their power was so immense that realitybent around them, creatingripplesthat propagated backward and forward through time.

One rippletouched the voidwhere Yoo’s fragments drifted.

Pull.

The fragments felt it.

After 823 years of dissolution, suddenly there wasdirection,purpose, and adestination.

Come,the energy seemed to say.You are needed.

The fragments moved, slowly at first, then faster, likeiron filings drawn to a magnet, they began to coalesce.

The piece holding his name found the piece holding his memories. They merged —awkward, painful, like torn flesh knitting back together.

Yoo Seung-yoon,the combined fragment remembered.I am — I was —

Another piece joined, hisskills— coding, game design, system architecture. The analytical mind that could break down complex problems into manageable components.

I made games,the growing consciousness recalled,I created worlds.

More fragments arrived — hispersonality, sarcastic, tired, cynical but fundamentally decent.

Hisdetermination— the part that stayed up seventy-two hours straight to fix a game-breaking bug because players deserved better.

Theemotional corewas last. It came reluctantly, still carrying thepain of death, theregret of an unfinished life.

When it merged, Yoo Seung-yoon was whole for the first time in 823 years.

And hescreamed.

Not physically — he had no body, but his consciousness shrieked with theagony of reformation, of pieces forced back together, of memories flooding back all at once.

I died I died I died I died—

Wrong place wrong time bullet through chest beer can rolling—

I wasn’t done I wasn’t ready I had things to do—

The screamechoed through dimensional barriers.

Then, gradually, it faded.

Yoo’s consciousness stabilized, whole, aware,confused as hell.

Where am I?

He couldn’t see, had no eyes.

Couldn’t feel, had no body.

But he was aware — more aware than he’d been in the void’s timeless drift.

What happened?

Memories sorted themselves, death, fragmentation, void, time, so much time, then gathering, then—

Now.

Am I dead? Is this the afterlife?

Before he could process further,something grabbed him.

Not physically, but he felt it —cosmic energies wrapping around his reforming soullike fingers around a marble, lifting, pulling,and directing.

Where are you taking me?

No answer, but themovementcontinued.

He was beingdragged through dimensions, through barriers that should have been impassable, through layers upon layers of reality his human mind couldn’t comprehend.

Then —impact.

The Womb

Thud!

Yooslammed into something.

There wasflesh around him,warm, wet, confining.

His consciousness pressed againstbiological matter— a body, but not his.

Wrong size, wrong shape.

What the—

He tried to move, but couldn’t.

His awareness was trapped in this tiny space, this crampedprison of flesh and fluid.

Oh god oh no. No no no no—

Understanding hit like asecond death.

He was in awomb.

I’ve been reincarnated.

Panic surged, he wasn’t coming back to die agin from either overwork or stupid decisions,let me rest in peace, he tried to reject it, tried to pull his consciousness back out, tried to escape—

Pain.

Blinding, excruciatingpain,as if on cue his soul and this body beganbinding together, melding at a level deeper than physics.

He couldn’t separate even if he wanted to.

The binding process was wrong, normal reincarnation — if such a thing existed — would start fresh, new soul, new body, natural development from conception.

This wasn’t that.

His soul wasadult, fully formed, complete with twenty-nine years of memories, personality, skills.

Trying to cram all that into a fetal brain was likedownloading a terabyte of data onto a floppy disk.

The bodyconvulsed.

He felt it — his first physical sensation in 823 years.Tiny limbs twitched, heart stuttered.

The bain matter tried to accommodate consciousness far too large for it.

I’m killing this baby,Yoo realized with horror,my presence is too much, this body can’t handle—

Then something elseactivated.

Avoice.

Not external, but also not the baby’s.

Something that was now part of him, born from the merger of his reforming soul and the cosmic energies that had gathered him.

"I am Akasha Archive," the voice said calmly, coldly.

"Initiating emergency protocols. Adjusting host body to accommodate consciousness. Estimated time: 47 hours. Warning: process will be extremely uncomfortable."

Who the fuck are you?

"I am your innate skill. Born from the unique circumstances of your reincarnation.

Designation: Akasha Archive.

Function: information storage, analysis, optimization.

I am not external. I am you."

Before Yoo could process that, theadjustment began.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by lotustale.com