Bab 1: CHAP 0: Epilogue
Opening my eyes, I found myself in the middle of a blizzard. The cold made me shiver uncontrollably, the shards of ice hitting my body felt as if I was being shot at by a rifle that uses glass as ammo, the sound making my brain go into overload. I started digging into the snow beneath me as fast as I could, the adrenaline running through my veins allowed me to tap into energy I never knew my old body would have. My fingers entered the cold snow repeatedly and rapidly, feeling as if they would fall off at any moment.
At the same rate the hole opened, I felt my body growing more and more tired. I laid back inside the hole and started putting the snow on top of me, hoping to maintain my body temperature. Sadly, I could feel that the hemorrhage, the hypothermia, and the frostbite were slowing my movements down. I was dying, and all I had done was bury myself. As most of my body laid buried beneath the snow, the blizzard cleared, and as I looked to the sky, I saw nothing. There were no stars, no moon, only pure darkness, such was its purity that I didn't even recognize that I had blacked out.
As I once again opened my eyes, I didn't feel the aching pain, only the cold. My whole body was numb, maybe some kind of paresthesia? I started moving my body slowly, feeling the numbness drift away. I managed to get out from my supposed cove, and as i passed my hands throughout my body, I felt no open wounds. I thought it strange that even having nothing covering my body, the cold I felt was only mild, nothing close to the freezing temperatures I had felt while inside the blizzard.
While I wouldn't call such a decision exactly smart, I decided to walk blindly in one direction, with the only things making me believe I was not asleep being the sensation of kicking the snow, the sound of the snow falling, and the cold. I walked and walked, not growing tired, thirsty, or hungry, thoughts spinning around my head, fueled by the silence and the arrhythmic sound of snow being thrown around.
How did I get here?
What is this place?
Why did my wounds supposedly regenerate?
How much time has passed?
Where are the stars?
Is this hell?
Is this purgatory?
Is this what whatever higher beings there are found worthy to be my final judgment?
Is this me finally going insane?
And as quickly as those thoughts came, they would go away, being replaced by daydreaming, fits of insanity, and more questions bound to go unanswered. And after what felt like at least three eternities, I saw a glimmer of light. I immediately tried to guide my unsteady steps to it, but the distance never seemed to shorten, so I returned to a habit I had developed around the middle of the second eternity, counting my steps, hoping to silence my own head, which had grown even louder than the sounds of moving snow.
200 steps.
600 steps
1000 steps.
3700 steps.
8214 steps.
29512 steps.
78966 steps.
200000 steps.
300000 steps.
400000 steps.
786123 steps.
1236789 steps.
3535353 steps.
6814973 steps.
492836481.
508029304.
782930412.
GIAHCFEBGD.
9,37*10^36.
I discovered that you tend to never lose count when you have nothing to distract you. And when I thought this, I lost count and found that I would need to develop another habit before I started seeing numbers floating around me. Sadly, the only thing that had been brought to this place was my body, so I couldn't have either a smoke or a drink. And I surely was in need of a lot of both things. Time passed as I thought about dumb things I wish I could be doing, and I finally was starting to close into the light, hearing a very loud noise that I was familiar with.
The light was the fucking blizzard.
But I couldn't stop now. The blizzard was the only thing that wasn't pure darkness with snow on the ground I had seen, and while throwing myself inside the same situation that supposedly almost killed me ages ago, even if I am dubious if said danger was ever really a possibility, was dumb, by now I would take anything that wasn't walking around while seeing nothing.
I trailed the storm, because it seems the thing was a bubble of chaos that moved around. Finally regaining some semblance of life, I started running towards the blizzard, which would've made my bones crack and my body falter were I not some kind of immortal being in this place. And as I approached the blizzard, I found a strange sense of comfort in the deafening sound of rippling ice and fast winds, this sense being amplified by finally having some fucking light and being able to see something, even if the reflecting nature of the snow made such light be the equivalent of a flashbang.
And I jumped inside the blizzard, as one would jump on a comforting bed after a hard day of work. The moment I entered it, I saw that I was being made the center of the storm, the light that came from seemingly nothing being directly above me. I found such relief in seeing something different that I looked directly into it as one would look at the most awing of natural wonders, and took the feeling of having pieces of flesh being ripped apart like one would take the feeling of having a dip into a hot bathtub in a cold day, all the while listening to the sound as if it was the most beautiful music of all.
What I felt was true happiness, having such a multitude of feelings after ages of numbness and nothing. It was bliss, pure bliss. But then, there was nothing. The feelings stopped, the darkness returned, the hotness of my blood flowing through my body faded away, the only remnant of sound being the ringing in my ears.
As I looked into the darkness, I saw stars, which, while it could be the effect of scintillating scotoma, I would like to believe something has finally changed in this accursed place. What's strange, other than the whole situation, is that there were a lot more stars than i ever saw, even if they were currently faded.
I tried getting out of the snow, but the combination of a very powerful migraine and military-grade tinnitus disoriented me, so i stumbled and fell back. I did this cycle at least 4 times, before I stopped trying and just laid back, looking at the combination of visual hallucinations and the stars, reminiscent of that night painted by that famous dutch painter, what was his name?
It was peaceful.
I really wish I had a smoke right now.
After pondering whether I should just stay here til I die, if that is even possible now, I got up and started walking once more, stumbling through the snow, which was now very slightly shimmering from the faint light coming from the stars. This confirmed my theory of being on a plain filled with nothing but snow. So I walked and walked, and walked.
The slight light made this endless walking much less insanity-inducing, which did make eternity much more pleasurable. Walking straight in a line absentmindedly made time pass very fast, and it wouldn't take long, at least I felt, for me to find the blizzard once again. This time, the storm was much bigger, and louder, so that made me find it easier.
And so I ran to it, the distance never seeming to decrease. I have no idea how much time it took for me to reach it, but it felt much less than before. I once again entered the blizzard, and while the bliss wasn't as big as before, it was still pretty good. The light once again focused on top of me, and something inside of me compelled me to keep my eyes open, the light focusing on a single point. As the blizzard drove away, I saw the stars once again, this time there were even more of them, and they were bright, very bright.
As I appreciated the view, my vision darkened. I couldn't see, even if my eyes were open.
Blind.
I have gone blind.
Not only that, my sense of touch was dulled, I couldn't feel the snow against my skin, my limbs were there, but they felt as if they were not, an inverse phantom pain. As I tried to get up, I fell over, or at least I think I did, because I heard only a faint thud. I tried and tried, hearing the faint thuds again and again until the sound stopped.
I stopped.
Getting up wouldn't help me, because I had no way to find the blizzard again. It would be better to just lay here and wait until the thing passed over me if that was even something that could happen.
And lay there I did, for another infinite amount of time, if infinite even has meaning now. Hearing nothing, feeling nothing, seeing nothing. Even the cold, which I had come to appreciate as a comrade before, had left me. The only thing I have now is my mind, or whatever remains of it. I would be laying there, silent, still, the body trapped in a world of snow and the mind trapped in a world of darkness.
If that was to be, then so be it. A man who knows nothing is a happy man. Ever wondered what would happen to the human mind if we were to remove the body but leave the conscience? Catatonia, a behavioral syndrome where man becomes rock, puppet, attached to invisible strings that are clearly visible, a disease with no cure, for the disease is the cure. What would happen to the human mind if we were to remove the body but leave the conscience? Floating down an endless river, getting stranded in an endless desert. Mind and body are one, dividing them is like ripping apart a heart. Heart is synonymous with feelings, and mind is synonymous with logic. Breaking the brakes of an icebreaker, hoping to brake the infinite stream of hot snow, coming from the stars. A sound was heard, it reminded him of a long-since-forgotten memory of a long-lost mind. A sound is heard, reminding him that there could be a chance, even if the chance is no chance. Infinite means infinite possibilities, like monkeys using a typewriter.
A ripple of sound was made in the endless dark puddle, breaking apart the wall of the blue, blue ice and generating an infinite amount of colors, kaleidoscope.
The sound approached, encroaching all frequencies, putting back a mind that was scattered by the cold cousin of the sand. Recollecting circuits, waves, energy, generating something completely new, yet that was seen in a museum a week ago. The ship of Theseus, if we were to break a ship apart and rebuilt it from the parts I had collected from his remain, would it still be the same mind? Catatonia is broken by a cat catching the strands of a ball of wool that had become a tangle, then ripped apart, maybe this cat was inside some kind of box? Duality of the man becomes trinity of the man, alive, dead, half-alive and half-dead. The man of Theseus.
A photon is both wave and particle, so why can't man be both alive and dead? The sound grows stronger. The doubtfully sane is replaced by the doubtfully insane. A phoenix rises from its ashes, and the ashes rise from the phoenix.
PERTIMBANGAN PENCIPTA 
The_Biblioteka
The_Biblioteka Welcome to the Ashen Fox(maybe again for some of you), i'm sorry for making you guys read all of that in the end, but i found it appropriate for the feeling i was trying to convey. Anyways, this is what i believe will be the last reboot of the series, since i stopped being a dumbass and decided to stick with the ideas i had, instead of changing things and confusing myself. I believe the book will not have an "insanity" moment quite like the one above once again, can't promise anything tho, since i quite like doing those kind of "experimental" texts. I sincerely the reader appreciate this little tale i have to count.
(This was probably the first and last time i'm going to speak directly to the reader, the next notes will probably be in-universe, not directly necessary to understand things, but more of an deeper dive in some things, coming from the big man himself, whose identity i cannot tell yet.)
Status Power Mingguan
-- Peringkat
Power 
-- Power
stone