Gautam was an IT engineer. On a smog-choked Tuesday on Earth, he stared at a flickering cursor, his mind numb from the fluorescent lights and the dull tap-tap-tap of keyboards.
He mumbled to himself, a mantra lost in the office hum, "What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of this life... the life of a worker?"
His mind drifted, as it often did, to places it shouldn't. He was thinking about something that he felt he did not need to know, a truth that hovered just at the edge of his perception, vast and terrifying.
Outside, the sky turned a sick, bruised purple. Before he could process his next thought, the world vanished. Lightning didn't just strike; it bombarded him, an apocalyptic judgment from the heavens.
He died.
He sensed it instantly. The cessation of pain, the end of the keyboard's tapping, the sudden, absolute silence.
And then, the knowing.
This was not his real life. Gautam, the IT engineer, the tiny man in a vast country on a small planet, was nothing but a dream.
He... was a butterfly.
Not a simple insect, but a butterfly as vast as a universe, its wings scattering nebulas with every flutter. This vast butterfly was him. He felt time flowing past him, not in seconds, but like a great, surging river. He felt himself live and die, over and over, as this cosmic creature.
The butterfly roamed, drifting through multiple samsara—countless cycles of reality, birth, and death. He felt an ancient, aching purpose: he was searching for a supreme item.
He lived millions of lives. And every time he died, he felt the same agonizing loss. The most important thing, the very thing he sought, was lost during the journey. His heart, the burning core of his butterfly-self, hurt with a grief that spanned eons. But he stubbornly continued.
He lived through millions of samsara.
Finally, the butterfly found it: the Core of Samsara.
It was a space where time held no meaning. Here, there were only millions upon millions of purple rings, each one a complete cycle of reality, spinning in an impossible, silent void.
The butterfly flew toward the center of this space. He flew for millions of years.
When he finally arrived at the center, he saw five statues. Their height was measured in millions of feet, dwarfing galaxies. They stood in a circle, surrounding a roiling, five-colored light that pulsed like the core of all creation.
Each statue had a nameplate, carved in a script older than light.
The first statue: Divine Spirit. It radiated a novel, ethereal aura of pure creation.
The second statue: Devil Spirit. It was drenched in a suffocating, ancient devil qi.
The third statue: Demon Spirit. This statue thrummed with the power of absolute authority over heaven and samsara itself.
The fourth statue: Immortal Spirit. It was filled with the power of true immortality, a force upon which time and the cycles of samsara had zero effect.
The fifth statue: Ghost Spirit. From it poured an immense, chilling ghost qi that seemed to drink the very light.
The butterfly beat its vast wings and traveled toward the five-colored light.
As he went, his life began to fade. His very existence, the nebulas on his wings, began to unravel. The Core did not welcome intruders.
But the butterfly was stubborn. He burned his own body, igniting his cosmic form in a final, defiant flare of energy to move forward. He was consumed, burned into cosmic ash, until all that remained was a single, flickering wisp of soul power.
This wisp of soul finally saw what lay at the center of the light.
It was a locket. Simple, small, and ancient. The five-colored light poured from this single object.
The wisp of his soul began to fade, its power all but spent. The butterfly, in its final moment of consciousness, finally made its mind. With the last of its will, the wisp surged forward and entered the locket.
The instant it did, the five colossal statues—Divine, Devil, Demon, Immortal, and Ghost—crumbled into dust. The five-colored light, the very core of samsara, left the void and rushed into the locket, sealing itself within.
The space began to crumble.
The butterfly's soul, its power utterly exhausted and its quest complete, flowed out of the collapsing core, swept away into the great river of samsara.
It reincarnated thousands of times, its cosmic nature shattered. It lived and died as a simple, mortal butterfly, trapped in the cycles it had once sought to conquer. With each new life, its memory was erased by the relentless power of samsara, the memory of the locket and the five spirits buried ever deeper.
Millions of years passed.
Finally, after countless cycles, the soul was born again as a human.