Chapter 7 — The First Year of Stillness
The void has no days, yet I have learned to measure time.
Not with suns or shadows, but with the intervals between my own deaths.
At first, every rebirth was panic stitched together with agony. My heart would restart in pulses too fast for comprehension, lungs inflating with something that wasn't air. I'd rise, stumble, get torn apart again. A pattern without meaning.
But meaning — like muscle — grows in repetition.
After the first hundred deaths, I stopped counting pain. It dulled into language. The Monkey killed; I reformed; it waited. Each encounter became a conversation conducted in suffering. I began to notice the rhythm behind its violence — a deliberate tempo, as though it were teaching through destruction.
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Month 1 — The Lesson of Death
I learned the geometry of its claw. The curve, the distance, the angle of its descent. The moment its shadow thickened, I could read intent the way a swordsman reads wind.
Dying became predictable. With prediction came reaction. Slowly, bursts of instinct replaced chaos. I learned to move before death struck, delaying it. Not escaping — just extending the frame.
The Button inside my chest responded differently each time. On the sixtieth regeneration, it pulsed faster, syncing with my heartbeat until both rhythms merged. The void's pulse, the artifact's thrum, my blood — a trinity of motion against endless stillness.
I began to see faint lines in the space around me — veins of thin gold threading the emptiness, perhaps cracks in the dimension or traces of the Button's influence. When I followed them, pain lessened. Perhaps that was how the artifact anchored me — tethering fragments of sanity to a realm with none.
The Monkey never spoke again, but its stare carried instruction. Every time it crushed me, its eyes widened fractionally, studying repair speed, precision. It was shaping me — or conducting research on endurance itself.
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Month 3 — The Anatomy of Silence
By what I estimated as the third month, I realized silence here isn't absence; it's pressure. The void hums below hearing, an oceanic resonance that seeps into thought. Dreams began forming when I regenerated — echoes of voices whispering old equations, diagrams of celestial machinery. Each image vanished upon waking, but instinct remained.
I started building "steps" from the energy veins, sculpting platforms of half‑matter beneath my feet. With practice, I could stand above the initial arena — high enough to see how vast the void truly was. There was no ceiling, only curvature, like existing inside an infinite marble—translucent, breathing faint light.
Far below, I sometimes saw silhouettes crawling: other echoes — fragments of beings half‑erased, crawling through the silver dark, repeating cycles of disintegration slower than mine. The Monkey ignored them. They were unfinished failures.
I promised myself I wouldn't join them. If I had to die, I would die moving upward.
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Month 5 — The Language of Movement
Something inside me changed. The new bodies my regeneration built came improved — not human upgrades, but refinements. My balance sharpened; reflexes snapped tighter. The void's hostility had programmed me.
I began experimenting with the Button directly — holding it between palms and driving thought into its glow. At first it resisted, burning like molten gold. But after a hundred iterations, it responded, not by speech but by resonance — a series of oscillations syncing with thought patterns. When I focused on survival, the vibration steadied. When I focused on escape, it spasmed violently, as though disapproving.
Escape, then, was not yet permitted.
The Monkey watched. Whenever I neared understanding, it would attack again — forcing regression, obliteration, recreation. But even destruction can't erase learning; it only folds it deeper into bone.
Somewhere within that cycle, emotion dimmed. Fear receded to background hum, replaced by analysis. I observed death like a scientist—detached, methodical. My humanity slipped quietly away, and I didn't mourn it. Emotion was luxury; data was eternity's currency.
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Month 6 — Fractures of Self
By midyear, fractures appeared—not in the space, but inside me. Post‑regeneration echoes began to overlap. I'd awaken hearing multiple thoughts — versions of me from previous deaths still whispering their unfinished sentences.
At first, I thought I was breaking. Later, I realized the Button was experimenting too. It didn't delete prior consciousness; it archived it once memory exceeded tolerance. I became plural—a colony of selves trading experience through neural resonance.
When the Monkey struck, each fragment screamed at different pitches. Then silence unified us again. Many minds, one goal.
During one transient rebirth, a mirror appeared before me—polished silver liquid standing freely. I saw my reflection, but the eyes stared back independently. The being inside the mirror smiled, something I hadn't done in centuries—or seconds; time had dissolved.
"You learn quickly," it mouthed without sound.
I reached out. The reflection followed.
Touch met touch, and I realized it wasn't a reflection at all, but another iteration from a slightly divergent death queue—one version born a fraction earlier, overlapping reality. Before I could question, the surface collapsed, dissolving both images into gold dust.
The lesson: coexistence equals collapse. Only one version may persist.
Even the self obeys the Monkey's rule—survival through devouring itself.
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Month 8 — The First Counterstrike
Patterns implied systems. Systems imply keys. By now, I understood the Monkey's strike sequences. More instinct than sight guided me. When its claw descended again, I moved—not to dodge but to disrupt the moment before impact.
The Button exploded in light, creating a ripple so potent the surrounding void stuttered. For the first time, the Monkey recoiled. Its eyes narrowed, astonished. The shock hurled me far into the silvery expanse, bones fragmenting mid‑air, but the damage to it was real—a slim scorch along its forearm, sizzling black into gray smoke.
Pride flared for one dangerous moment—the first real emotion in months—and in that moment of triumph, hesitation cost me my next life. The creature struck, faster than causality, splitting me once again.
But dying that time felt different; somewhere deep within, satisfaction echoed. The void had noticed me.
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Month 9 — The Ruin Garden
Death no longer terrified me, so I explored. Beyond the central arena, I found fields of debris—ruins suspended mid‑collapse, fragments of forgotten civilizations dissolved into half‑geometry.
Skeletal towers floated upside‑down; bridges led nowhere; colossal statues of beings older than stars cracked open like shells. One structure resembled a massive library, tomes of molten crystal pinned inside invisible cages. When I brushed a page, memory—not mine—flooded me: names, wars, lost galaxies.
I understood none of it, yet everything resonated as though encoded in blood. The void was a museum of all realities devoured.
The Monkey rarely left its core, but even from distance I sensed its vigilance, eyes burning from horizons that bent like mirrors.
Inside the library, I discovered relics carved with the same patterns as the Time Button. This confirmed it—my artifact wasn't unique. It was part of a system, fragments of divinity scattered across planes. Perhaps each dimension held its "Button," and mine happened to malfunction into eternity.
I started practicing drawing runes from those carvings into air using bloodlight from reopened veins. The marks didn't persist, but they changed local gravity slightly, enough to shift debris. Motion meant control. Control meant hope.
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Month 10 — The Collapse of Emotion
Solitude became chemical. Without measure of day, I lost track of weeks. My vocabulary decayed. Thoughts shortened to impulses. Sometimes I screamed simply to feel vibration.
The Monkey didn't intervene for long intervals—centuries measured by heartbeat maybe. I assumed it was busy attending to other dimensions of its body.
Whenever it returned, destruction resumed — sudden, unprovoked, like storms meant to remind prey what gods are.
Yet during absence, I learned meditation: focusing entire consciousness into synchronization with the Button's hum. The result was strange clarity — a comprehension that the void functions like a living equation, every act of will inserting variables into eternity's formula.
By experimenting, I made the environment sing. Vibrations rippled outward, harmonious at first, then destructive, collapsing small pockets of immaterial matter into dust clouds. The Monkey noticed immediately. Its roar—silent yet tectonic—erased my experiment in one gesture.
Still, I'd tasted creation. Knowledge stayed. Madness whispered: perhaps one day I can rewrite the same law that forged the Demon.
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Month 11 — Reflections in Hunger
Hunger finally returned—not for food, but for meaning. My body no longer required sustenance, yet something essential starved. I began fabricating illusions of taste and texture—memories of tea from Earth, rain‑slick bread, the smell of burnt sugar at night stalls. They flickered briefly, comforting phantoms dissolving into the metallic tang of void atmosphere.
Dreams grew vivid again. I saw Seraphine, Elowen, Father—all staring with unfamiliar expressions. Pity softer now, as if time diluted their hatred. Each vanished before I could speak. Maybe the Button let them appear to keep me tethered to the concept of reasons.
When I awoke, I found faint golden scripts burned into my arms—lines shaped like pulse traces. The Button rewriting biology again. Perhaps documenting experience in flesh.
The Monkey approached once that cycle, stopping closer than before. Curiosity radiated—or anticipation. One claw extended, dragging lightly across my chest, not hurting, just outlining the Button embedded there. Then it withdrew.
Testing proximity? Or preparing for greater evolution?
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Month 12 — The Gift of Understanding
At the close of my first measured cycle—one year by Earth's memory—the void shifted color.
Gold veins brightened. The pressure behind silence lessened, replaced by rhythmic resonance: time's forgotten heartbeat. The Monkey sat still, motionless in contemplation.
I took the chance to speak. Not from mouth—there's no sound here—but thought broadcast shaped by will.
"Why me?"
For long, nothing.
Then a vibration shaped itself into meaning: not words, but memory impressions—images of stars collapsing, moments rewriting, entities crafting universes then abandoning them. Among them, a symbol—a circle divided into twelve layers, each etched with my artifact's pattern.
When comprehension dawned, despair followed. The Time Button was not a gift. It was inheritance. The entity that gave it hadn't chosen me randomly. It had chosen a successor.
The Monkey was part of that same lineage—another keeper of eternal loops. The artifact was one of its seeds, fallen into mortal dimension. Through its malfunction, I inherited the curse meant for gods.
The Monkey rose silently, looking down at me one last moment that year, and for the briefest instant, bowed its head—as if acknowledging kinship rather than dominance.
Then, with elegance terrible and slow, it raised the claw again.
I didn't resist this time. I welcomed dissolution, curious about what waited beyond pain.
The Button pulsed once—slow, satisfied.
And as the void reclaimed me for the thousandth time, I realized: every death was lesson, every rebirth a transcription.
The void wasn't prison. It was a classroom.
I am its only student.