Everywhere was white. No matter which direction Brand was looking at, it was all white.
"Where is this?" He asked into the open space. He was drifting around, afloat in the space. There was nothing, and he was pondering whether he was dead. Has he arrived in the afterlife?
Then he saw something floating toward him from afar.
It looked like an angel, but a small one, similar to the cupids he had seen in books or movies.
The angel has long pink hair and is flying at high speed, crashing into him. He didn't even have a moment to prepare for the crash. It was too sudden!
"Hurry! Follow me!" The angel shouted at him urgently.
He hadn't fully grasped his current situation yet, but he understood it in that moment. He needed to follow this angel.
The wide white space began to twist and coil down, spiraling into a tunnel. Brand was running through the tunnel alongside this unknown angel.
He wanted to ask where they were heading, but he stayed silent because he felt a peculiar familiarity with this angel.
As they run across this tunnel, the scenery begins to change. There were many different colors of light mixed in the spirals, but he kept running without lingering his gaze on them, focusing his gaze on the angel and the path she led him.
After a long while, they finally reached the end of the tunnel. They would finally escape the eternal white space!
They leaped toward the rift at the end of the tunnel and landed safely, with his face hitting straight into the ground.
His mouth was full of sand.
***
His ears were ringing with a loud metallic clanging sound, which persisted for a long time. It was so loud that he covered his ear, but the voice persisted. It seemed to come from within him.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself in a foreign place. There was sand everywhere. Sand dunes piled upon one another stretched across the horizon.
"Boo!" A little girl's face appeared in front of him, and he staggered with the surprise. Strangely, the metallic sound in his ears stopped when she did it.
His vision began to change, with a weird red tint layered upon his visions.
[Seraphine—Your personal guide.]
A series of text began to appear at the side of this little angel.
Brand was shocked that he stumbled on the ground. He pushed himself up with his trembling arms and looked at the surrounding environment once more.
It was a foreign place, unlike the desert where he had found the ancient ruin and encountered the mechanical eye. There were only sand dunes everywhere.
"Were we still on Earth?" He asked this little angel, since she was the only one he could communicate with, and they shared the same journey together when they were escaping from the white space.
But now that he thought about it, the familiarity of this angel and the unfolding of events seemed prearranged. He flashes back to how the angel came to ask him to follow her out of the collapsing white space.
"Were you the 'Little Sera' that the mechanical eye mentioned?" He asked carefully, as he still has trauma from the experience in the ancient ruin.
"Yes, and I'm your assigned guide!" Seraphine exclaimed.
***
Brand was stretching his body, and he was fascinated with his current state. His tattered body was repaired.
Yes. Repaired. Because that 's what spooked him.
"My body was… reconstructed into a cyborg?" He tried to hide his displeasure, as he at least has a healthy body now.
"Yes, Brand, the serum injected to you all over the body was a power the Seraphim infused into your blood." Seraphine explained. "The serum then flowed along your bloodstream and reconstructed your body from within!"
"..." Seraphine started to talk in more detail, explaining the serum in detail—its origin, and the concept it worked on.
But all of those did not matter to Brand. The only thing that mattered was that he was alive, and he was grateful for that.
Revenge for what he suffered? He could not even imagine that.
That mechanical eye was like an alien with the presence of a demon, even if Seraphine says it was an angelic being of the highest authority, 'Seraphim.' The suffocating feelings he received when even exchanging eye contact with it were immeasurable pressure.
"By the way, Seraphine, I was only curious about one thing." Brand stopped Seraphine's monologue.
"Why did it leave me alive?" He asked. This was the most important question, as such being would leave him alive without any purpose. He doesn't believe that the being was that benevolent.
"Ahem, yes." Seraphine replied after some coughing. "He had given a sacred task to you."
"Let's run a series of tutorials, shall we?" Seraphine asked while circling Brand, and a space began to envelop Brand. The sight of an endless stretch of sand dunes was now replaced with a dark void with a light-grid floor.
"This…" Brand was shocked at the sudden transition of space.
"I have some useful functions imbued within me, hehe." Seraphine giggled.
Brand felt a chill running across his now cybernetic skin. Seraphine was far more powerful than he imagined, to even be able to manifest a false space.
But Seraphine shrugged it off as if it were not worth mentioning. Instead, she started her 'tutorial.'