Aarav Sen never imagined his life would end quietly. People always expect death to be loud—accidents, hospitals, flashing lights—but for him, it arrived as softly as everything else in his life had: silently, unnoticed, and almost politely.
He lived in a cramped rented room in a rundown building. The walls were stained, the ceiling fan clicked every few seconds, and the window had been jammed shut for months. He sat on his thin mattress that night, staring at a bowl of instant noodles that tasted like disappointment. His phone buzzed in his hand with yet another job rejection. The same phrases stared back at him: "We regret to inform you…" and "We cannot consider your application at this time."
His bank balance had dropped to ₹62. His landlord had called three times earlier. His boss at the part-time shop had cut his hours again. Life wasn't cruel—it was tired of him.
Aarav leaned back against the cold wall, exhaling softly. There was no anger left in him, no frustration. Just a kind of numbness that made everything feel blurry. Depression isn't dramatic; it's quiet and suffocating. He felt like he had been drowning slowly for years, and tonight, he simply stopped kicking.
A strange heaviness spread through his chest. At first, he thought it was just hunger or stress, but the pain sharpened until even breathing felt difficult. His fingertips went cold. His vision dimmed. His pulse stuttered like a dying engine.
No one was there to help. No one would notice if he was gone. And in his final moments, he didn't scream or fight. He simply whispered in his mind, almost like a prayer to no one in particular: "If there's a world where I can rise… a world where I'm not useless… let me go there."
His heart stopped. His eyes closed. And the world he had once belonged to forgot him.
But death wasn't the end.
Something pulled him, as if an invisible hand had reached into the darkness and lifted him out of the broken shell of his human body. He floated weightlessly in an endless void. There was no light, no sound—just a vast, cosmic silence that felt older than time itself.
Then a crack of violet light split through the darkness, opening like a rip in existence. Without choice or resistance, he was dragged through it.
Aarav awakened on a cold metallic surface. But he no longer had arms or legs. He didn't breathe. He didn't blink. He didn't even recognize the shape of his body.
He was small—tiny, even. A creature made of shadow and star-dust, wriggling across a fractured battlefield suspended in the void. There were massive bodies floating around him—gigantic corpses of beings that were definitely not human. Shattered halos, broken divine armor, wings torn to particles. A graveyard of gods.
Somewhere inside his new consciousness, a word surfaced. Void Larva. It wasn't spoken. It wasn't heard. It was simply known. He had been reborn as something the universe tried to erase long ago.
A sharp hunger surged through him—a strange, instinctive craving that had nothing to do with food. It wanted light, energy, emotion, time, concepts themselves. He felt something faint nearby: the last flicker of divine light from a fallen god. His body twitched toward it, driven by pure instinct. When he touched it, the energy burst into him like a star collapsing.
Concept consumed: Light.
Knowledge bloomed within him, choices forming out of nothing. Evolution paths. Things he didn't understand but felt in his core. His mere existence had shifted the cosmic balance.
The universe stirred.
Far away, two ancient presences woke from their slumber.
"A Voidborn…?"
"That's impossible. They were exterminated."
Aarav froze. He could feel their attention sweeping across the battlefield, searching for him. Panic rose inside him, yet the hunger burned even stronger.
He sensed another dying concept in the void: Fear—the last echo of a deity's final moment.
If he consumed it, he would grow—but the hunters would sense it too.
He hesitated only for a moment.
Hunger won.
He devoured the fear, and power rippled outward.
Concept consumed: Fear.
And instantly, the cosmic beings noticed.
"There! Something has devoured concepts!"
Aarav's tiny body pulsed violently. His evolution had begun. The universe had already marked him as a threat.
He didn't know what he would become.
He didn't know why he existed.
But he knew one thing:
The last Voidborn had awakened.
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