The Void
Klein's first thought after death was that dying hurt less than he'd expected.
His second thought was that being dead hurt more.
He was aware. That was the problem. No peaceful darkness, no gentle fade to black—just raw consciousness stripped of everything that had made it bearable. No body to anchor sensation. No heartbeat to mark time. No breath to focus on when panic set in. Just thinking, endless thinking, with nothing to distract from the fact that he'd bled out in a Tondo alley over two hundred pesos.
His mother would get the call tomorrow. Maybe the next day, depending on how long it took someone to identify his body. She'd be waiting for his money transfer, checking her phone obsessively, and instead she'd get news that her son was dead in a ditch.
The grief hit him like a physical blow—
—and stopped.
Not vanished. Not numbed. Stopped. Like it had crashed into a wall he didn't know he had.
Klein felt around the edges of it cautiously, the way you'd probe a broken tooth with your tongue. The pain was still there, a screaming weight of guilt and loss and I failed her, but there was suddenly a structure around it. A containment. He could observe the grief without drowning in it, like watching a storm through a window instead of standing in the rain.
The void itself was pearl-white and infinite, stretching in directions that shouldn't exist. Klein tried to look down at himself and found... nothing. No hands. No body. Just awareness shaped vaguely like the memory of Kahiramura Klein, holding together through sheer stubborn habit.
I'm dead.
The thought should have destroyed him. Should have sent him into a spiral of existential horror. Instead, something in him filed it away like paperwork. Yes. Dead. Noted. What next?
It was deeply disturbing. Like discovering someone had installed a stranger's operating system in his brain. But it was also, Klein had to admit, the only reason he was still coherent.
"Kahiramura Klein."
Klein spun, or whatever counted as spinning when you had no body.
A woman stood there. She was the first real thing in this place—not just awareness but presence. Warmth radiated from her like heat shimmer on summer pavement, an actual sensation against his formless being. She wore robes that shifted between colors he had names for and ones he didn't. Her face was kind. Tired. The kind of tired Klein recognized from mirrors.
"I'm Cariel," she said. Her voice was gentle but carried weight, like she was speaking through water. "I'm a Path guide. You're in the Waiting Zone—the space between death and judgment. I know this is disorienting."
"Where's..." Klein gestured at the space where his head should be. "Where's the rest of it? Heaven? Hell? The light at the end of the tunnel?"
Cariel's expression flickered—something that might have been uncertainty. Fear. "Follow me. We need to get you to the Oasis. Quickly."
"Why quickly?"
She didn't answer. Just started walking, her form leaving traces of light in the void.
Klein followed, because the alternative was standing still in infinite nothing.
The void shifted around them, and suddenly there were others.
Hundreds of them.
Translucent figures drifted through the space like plastic bags in wind, some moving with purpose, others just floating. Above each head burned a crown of light. Some were molten gold, warm and holy, making Klein's new soul instinctively relax. Others were crimson and writhing, pulsing with a hunger that made him want to recoil.
"The Hails," Cariel explained, walking faster now. Her eyes kept darting to the other souls, then back to Klein, like she was watching for something. "Every soul receives one upon death. Gold for Paradise. Red for Damnation."
Klein looked up at his own space, where a Hail should be floating.
Empty.
"Where's mine?"
Cariel didn't answer immediately. A nearby soul—its Hail a warm amber-gold—drifted close. It started to pass by Klein, then its light flared. The soul jerked backward like it had touched a live wire, putting distance between them.
Others began to notice. Golden Hails dimmed. Red ones writhed and retreated.
They were afraid of him.
"Cariel." Klein kept his voice level. Whatever was managing his emotions helped with that, smoothing out the edge of panic. "Where. Is. Mine."
"I don't know." She grabbed his arm—he felt the touch as pressure, as reality in a way nothing else here had been. "That's why we need to move. Your signature is... undefined. The other souls can sense it. Something that shouldn't exist."
She pulled him forward, and Klein followed, because the alternative was standing still while hundreds of dead souls backed away from him like he was radioactive.
They reached a gate.
Klein's consciousness couldn't process it at first. His awareness kept sliding off the edges, unable to find where the structure ended and space began. It was a wall of crystallized light so massive it might as well have been infinite. Beyond it lay a city—if "city" was even the right word.
Towers of impossible geometry rose into a sky that wasn't sky. Rivers of aurora flowed upward, defying physics Klein's dead brain still insisted should matter. The architecture was beautiful in a way that hurt to perceive, angles that shouldn't fit together somehow creating structures of heartbreaking elegance.
And it was dying.
Cracks spiderwebbed through everything. Where they intersected, the light bled—not dripping but leaking, reality itself hemorrhaging through the fractures. Souls clustered near the wounds, their forms beginning to melt and merge, individual consciousness dissolving into something plural and screaming.
Klein had seen buildings collapse in Manila. Had watched the aftermath of fires in Tondo where structures held together just long enough for people to think they were safe, then came down all at once.
This place had that same feeling. That held-breath moment before catastrophic failure.
"The Oasis," Cariel whispered. "The last stable point in the afterlife."
"Last stable point?" Klein looked at the fracturing architecture, the melting souls. "What happened to the first ones?"
"Paradise and Hell are full." Cariel's voice was hollow. "The system was designed for thousands. Maybe millions. Not..." She gestured at the endless stream of souls pouring through the void. "Not this."
They passed through the gate, and Klein felt it—like walking through a membrane, a barrier between states of existence. The Oasis pressed down on him with the weight of reality, making him feel suddenly, viscerally dead in a way the void hadn't.
A voice filled the space.
Not sound. Light given linguistic form, bypassing his nonexistent ears and writing itself directly into his consciousness. It was beautiful and terrifying, like hearing music that could unmake you with the wrong note.
"Cariel. You've brought me someone... unusual."
The temperature dropped to absolute zero and rose to the heart of a star simultaneously. Klein's form flickered, his essence instinctively trying to compress itself into something small enough to ignore.
"Lord Illumi." Cariel bowed so deeply she nearly folded in half. Fear radiated from her—not the fear of a subordinate before a boss, but something older. Primal. The fear of a candle before a wildfire.
"Where are you?" Klein asked. His voice came out flat, analytical. Whatever was managing his emotions had stripped away his survival instincts, the ones screaming at him to shut up and bow. What remained was blunt curiosity and the deep, grinding exhaustion of someone who'd already survived the worst thing imaginable.
What was divine judgment compared to bleeding out in an alley?
"I am the light you see by," the voice replied, and Klein felt himself being examined. Not looked at—dissected. Every atom of his being X-rayed by something that understood consciousness at a level beyond comprehension.
A pause. Long enough that Klein felt the weight of it.
"You have no Hail."
"I noticed that, yeah."
"Klein—" Cariel's voice cracked with warning.
The space twisted.
Between one moment and the next, a man stood before them.
He wore a grey suit—perfectly ordinary, the kind a salaryman might wear to a forgettable office job in Makati. But reality groaned around him. The void bent like fabric under impossible weight. Just looking at him made Klein's new soul ache, like he was trying to perceive something that existed in more dimensions than consciousness was meant to process.
The man's face was kind. Almost human. But Klein somehow knew it had never been human at all.
"Kahiramura Klein," he said. His voice was normal. Conversational. Somehow that made it worse. "You're an anomaly. A soul that registers neither virtue nor sin in sufficient measure to trigger standard classification."
He tilted his head, studying Klein like a fascinating specimen.
"The system doesn't know what to do with you."
Klein's mind—or whatever passed for it now—raced through possibilities. He'd stolen from Annie's church. Lied to get Santos's job. Let Rico's loan sit unpaid while Rico's wife lost their baby. But he'd also refused Miguel's offer. Died rather than compromise someone else.
Not good. Not evil.
Just... what? Useless?
"What happens to souls the system can't process?" Klein asked.
The suited man's expression didn't change, but something cold passed through the space between them.
"Errors must be corrected."
The light changed.
One instant, it was illumination. The next, it was a solvent.
Klein didn't have time to scream. The pain bypassed every category his mind had for suffering and created new ones. Not burning—unmaking. He felt the edges of his soul begin to dissolve, his memories starting to static out. Rico's face when he'd shared his food. Annie's invitation to church. The taste of his mother's cooking. The color green. Not forgotten—erased, scrubbed from the fundamental code of his existence like a programmer deleting corrupted data.
Klein threw up his hands—barely-formed constructs of will and desperation—and focused everything into a single concept: NO.
Grey energy flickered around him, his own essence shaped into something like a shield. It was pathetic. Laughable. Like trying to stop a tsunami with a chain-link fence. But it was his, and he poured every scrap of will into the gaps as they cracked open.
"I EXIST!" The roar came from somewhere deeper than thought. "You don't get to erase me!"
It held.
Barely.
"Stop!" Cariel threw herself between Klein and the light.
Her essence flared—a shield of iridescent complexity, the work of something that had existed for eons. Beautiful and intricate. The light hit it and the shield screamed, cracks racing across its surface like lightning through glass.
"My Lord, please!" Cariel's voice broke. "He's just a soul! Give him a chance—"
"He is undefined. Undefined variables destabilize the system. They must be purified."
"Then give him a Path!" Cariel's shield buckled, cracks spreading faster. Klein could see her form dimming behind it, her essence being burned away like candle wax. "Send him to the abandoned worlds like the others! Let him have a chance!"
A pause. The dissolving light dimmed slightly.
"The abandoned worlds are for souls with clear classification. Divine or Damned. He has neither."
"Then make a classification!" Cariel gasped. Her shield was failing, pieces of her consciousness flaking away like ash. "You're the system's administrator—administrate!"
The suited man stepped forward. Klein felt his presence like gravity, like standing too close to something massive enough to have its own orbit.
"She's right," the man said. His voice was still conversational, but it carried an edge now. Something that cut through Illumi's light like a knife. "You have protocols for undefined variables. I should know. I am one."
The temperature plummeted.
"An unsanctioned intervention," the light said, colder now. "You break protocol."
"I am protocol." The suited man smiled, and it was the most terrifying thing Klein had ever seen—warm and human and completely wrong. "The contingency you didn't plan for. The answer to a question you didn't think to ask."
He turned to Klein, and for a moment, Klein saw something behind those eyes. Not madness. Not chaos. Just... complexity. The weight of existing outside every binary the universe had ever created.
"You have a choice," the man said. "Let Illumi purify you—become nothing, cleanly and completely. Or step through that door."
He gestured, and space tore.
Not like fabric. Like reality was a living thing and he'd just opened a surgical incision. Klein felt the wrongness of it in his bones—in the memory of bones he no longer had.
Beyond the tear: chaos. A void that howled with possibility. Colors that had no names screamed across impossible physics. Shapes tried to form, failed, tried again.
It looked like annihilation.
It looked like being ripped apart by a universe still learning the rules.
It looked like life.
"The abandoned worlds," the suited man said. "Primordial. Unstable. Deadly to unprotected souls." He paused. "But you won't be unprotected. Will you?"
Cariel's shield shattered.
The sound was a musical note that meant ending. She screamed—a sound of pure essence being unmade. Her form dimmed, flickering like a candle in wind. But she kept her arms spread. Kept herself between Klein and oblivion.
"Go," she gasped. "You'll have a chance there. A life. Go!"
Klein looked at the sphere of perfect silence behind him. Felt its pull. Felt how much easier it would be to just... stop.
Then he looked at Cariel, burning herself away to give him a choice.
He looked at the chaotic, screaming void beyond the tear.
The image of his mother's face flashed behind his eyes—not grief-stricken, but proud. The smile she'd given him when he left for Manila. Make something of yourself, Kahi. Be better than what life gave us.
She hadn't said 'be perfect.' She hadn't said 'never fail.'
She'd said be better.
Klein turned away from the silence.
I didn't survive Manila to give up now, he thought.
He grabbed the edges of the doorway with hands made of will and desperation, and pulled himself through.
The suited man's smile was the last thing he saw.
"Try not to die immediately."
Reality snapped like a rubber band.
Klein wasn't falling. Falling implied direction. He was being expelled, consciousness stretching across impossible distances. Time became meaningless. Space forgot how to work. He tumbled through geometries that shouldn't exist, his awareness fragmenting and reforming with each impossible angle.
And in the howling void outside, he saw them.
Shapes of absolute negation.
Things that weren't creatures because "creature" implied they were part of creation. These were the opposite. Holes in reality shaped like hunger.
They turned at the scent of him—something wrong, something undefined, something that shouldn't be—and Klein felt their attention like being noticed by an avalanche.
His consciousness started to fray at the edges.
But that strange emotional management—that alien architecture in his mind—held. Kept him from dissolving completely. His awareness was a ship in a storm, and whatever this thing was, it was the mast he'd lashed himself to.
I survived death, he thought. I survived divine judgment. I survived being unmade by God's own light.
What's one more impossible thing?
The void didn't care about his defiance.
It swallowed him whole.