The feeling of the heart stopping was much calmer than Enron had imagined.
There was no sharp pain, no exaggerated struggle, and even the ritual of saying goodbye to the world was skimped on. One second, the world in his eyes was still a damned quarterly KPI statement made up of countless pixel dots.
The next second, those cold numbers turned into a distorted mosaic, like instant coffee thrown into water, quickly dissipating, blurring, and finally returning to nothingness.
At the last moment of consciousness, he saw his hand, which was gripping the mouse and whose knuckles were slightly whitened by the exertion, dropping helplessly and knocking down the cup of Americano in the corner of the table that had long been cold.
Is this the end?
Yes, after several consecutive all-nighters, it would be a miracle if it didn't collapse!
The brown liquid snaked across the floor like a meaningless graffiti, just like Anran's life in the past twenty years. The never-ending overtime work, the mountain of reports, the leader's pie-in-the-sky promises, and the broken computer that buzzed as if it would go on strike at any time.
These were all he had to live for.
He had fantasised about his death countless times, either with a bang or lying peacefully in his bed at home.
But he had never imagined that it would be "sudden death", the most social way, and that he would be gone in a light manner.
That's fine.
If it really went away, there would be other siblings in the family.
There are other siblings in the family, and his savings should be given to his parents.
The most important thing is, the next quarter's statement, is not necessary for him to do.
I don't know how much time has passed. Perhaps a second, perhaps a century.
When Anran's consciousness coalesced again from the chaos, the first thing he felt was the ultimate "nothing".
There was no light, no darkness, because he had no vision at all.
The space he was in was even purer than the deepest night, a kind of absolute nothingness that could not even be accurately described by the concept of "darkness", his skin, muscles, bones... all of which should have formed his "body". Skin, muscles, bones... all these parts that should constitute a "body" disappeared without any feeling. He just "existed".
Where is this?
Heaven?
Hell?
Or ..... The ICU ward of a hospital?
Anran has read the labour law, this should be considered a work injury!
He might be able to collect a large sum of compensation, making this unscrupulous company haemorrhage!
This one thought gave him a faint glimmer of hope.
Maybe he had been rescued?
In a coma now?
Could those top-notch medical equipment allow him to feel his heartbeat again?
He tried to concentrate on spirit, to "hear", to "feel"!
But there was nothing.
The world was a dead, eternal void.
No, no.
It wasn't completely dead. When Enron had gathered all his "concentration", he finally caught a faint, almost imperceptible sound in the background of the nothingness.
What was that sound? It was like eavesdropping on his neighbour Old Wang's conversation through a thick wall, or like the rustling sound of an old radio on a poor signal band. The sound was subtle and mixed, as if thousands of people were speaking at the same time in a very faraway place, and countless syllables were intertwined and collided, eventually merging into a meaningless sea of whispers.
"...Help me. ..."
"... Bless my son ."
". May the Holy Light . Mal yiu..."
"... Why doesn't he go and die..."
"... Money .... More money..."
Countless fragments of thin, unidentifiable syllables of unidentifiable origin, like flotsam, drilled into his consciousness from all directions.
This was .... A hallucination?
The last bit of struggle in his cerebral cortex before he died?
A great panic surged within Anran's heart.
This feeling of being deprived of all his senses, like a sponge that could only passively soak in this unknown noise terrified Enron.
"Hello? Anyone!"
With all his might, he cried out from the depths of his consciousness.
No sound came out.
His "vocal cords" had disappeared. "Damn it!"
"Dead hands, dead feet, move! Move!"
He tried to move his fingers, even if it was just the tiniest of flexes.
However, he couldn't even feel where his fingers were.
It was as if his will was an invisible electric wave, echoing futilely in this cage of nothingness, but he couldn't find any shell to carry out his orders. Panic, like ice-cold sea water, began to drown his sanity, inch by inch...
Enron frantically struggled and roared, using every method he could think of to try and justify his existence
He recalled his life, from the first perfect maths paper in primary school, the first time he got the certificate of award for being a third-rate student, to the flattering hands with his first girlfriend in the sunset in university, to the scene of being reprimanded by the leader every time after work .....
Anran tried to use these memories to fight against this dead nothingness, to prove that he was a living, breathing person, not a sliver of a lone soul that was about to dissipate However, all was in vain.
All of his efforts were like light thrown into a black hole, not stirring a single ripple.
I don't know how long it was, when the panic and struggle that stemmed from life's instincts was finally worn out.
He gave up his useless cries and allowed his consciousness to drift in this nothingness.
Like a drowning person, after giving up struggling, he could instead hear the sounds above and below the water more clearly. The ocean of whispers, which he had initially dismissed as hallucinations, became clearer and clearer by the moment. He still couldn't hear individual, complete sentences, but this time, he caught the emotions shared behind the voices. There were pious prayers, desperate pleas, greedy desires, vicious curses, sincere confessions, and perfunctory praises .... A myriad of human emotions, complex to the extreme, were crumbled, mixed, and brewed into a pot of crazy noise, pouring into his "ears" day and night!
"Where the hell am I .... Where am I?"
This is the only question left in Anran's consciousness. He no longer thought about the hospital, also no longer think about science.
Everything in front of him had long exceeded the materialistic worldview he had built up for more than twenty years.
At this time, Enron was a patient prisoner, and began to listen to this ocean of sound.
He found that as long as he maintained absolute concentration, he could, like adjusting the knobs on a radio, occasionally lock on to a relatively clear one out of a cacophony. Channel."
It was during one of these aimless "tuning" sessions that a single word, with a very high frequency, resounded clearly and repeatedly from countless different "channels", like a lighthouse light penetrating through the fog, instantly illuminating his entire consciousness.
"Hierophant Kallestis.
The moment he heard this name, Enron felt that the viscous darkness that wrapped around him seemed to fluctuate slightly.
At the same time, another word, too, was sifted out by Enron from those devout prayers.
"Glow Holy Maiden.
Immediately after the information slowly summed up, eventually Enron seemed to know that the current situation .....
Hierophant Kelestis ?
Glow Holy Maiden ?
This is talking about himself!!!?
change
This was the only word left in Anran's consciousness.
He had, surprisingly, come to the Otherworld after the company fell.
And became a statue of the otherworld...
Holy Goddess Statue?!