Violently.
As if something behind it had been pressing against the glass the whole time, waiting for the moment my attention slipped.
The room turned thin. The air grew layered. I felt the "lines" of reality the way you can feel a spiderweb without seeing it—threads against skin, tension that tells you where the center is.
And suddenly I wasn't only here.
I was seeing possibilities.
Scientists in my world theorize about parallel universes like they're distant stars: interesting, unreachable, safe to discuss because they can't touch you back. Certain yogis brush the boundary and call it enlightenment, but rarely walk through because the crossing changes you, and most people—no matter how spiritual—still want to return to the life they recognize.
I had no such comfort.
Because I didn't just glimpse those other worlds.
I remembered them.
I had been to worlds where I was worshipped as a god and worlds where I wasn't allowed to exist. Worlds where I wore a king's crown and worlds where I wore chains. Worlds where the color of my skin meant nothing and worlds where it meant everything. Worlds with no humans at all—only strange humanoids whose bodies were more like living computers than flesh.
When you've lived that many lives, your identity becomes less like a name and more like a function.
Observer. Survivor. Problem.
And, eventually, Guardian—whether you want the title or not.
The first world I truly stepped into outside my home was called SRX.
No humans. No familiar architecture. Their cities didn't reach for the sky the way ours do—like a prayer or a challenge. Their structures felt grown, assembled by intelligence rather than by labor. Their people—humanoid, yes, but not in the comforting way—moved like they could edit the rules of physics if they disagreed with the draft.
They didn't talk about "dimensions" like my world's theorists did. They called the layers evolution points of reference—as if reality wasn't a place, but a ladder.
In SRX, I learned the difference between a law and a Law.
Some energies, they told me, are simply expressions of rules: gravity, time, decay, motion. But beneath those are deeper anchors—origin laws—the principles that decide what kinds of worlds can exist at all, what kinds of life can form, what kinds of miracles are permitted.
I was hungry for that knowledge.
Not because I wanted power for its own sake, but because I'd spent too long watching power abused by people who didn't even know what they were holding. In my home world, "government" was often just a mask—an excuse to tell people they were free while quietly guiding them like cattle. Truth was treated like a disease, and lies were rewarded like currency.
In SRX, truth was treated as an engineering problem.
And that terrified me almost as much as it excited me.
They called me something there.
A name that felt more like a diagnosis than an identity:
Minac.
A self-evolving consciousness whose body barely keeps up.
In other words: I was becoming more than I could safely contain.
They warned me plainly. If my body didn't strengthen—if my vessel didn't evolve alongside my mind—then the mind's growth would stall or the whole system would collapse. Death wasn't punishment there; it was math.
So I trained.
Not in a gym. Not with weights and mirrors and the shallow culture of visible effort. I trained across worlds—letting each reality teach me a different way to survive stress, fear, contradiction. I learned to endure pain without letting it own me. I learned to rebuild habits from the ground up. I learned that distraction is a weapon the weak use against themselves, and the powerful use against everyone else.
I learned something else in SRX too—something that stitched the first monster's metallic horns to a larger picture.
There are objects—seeds, keys, sparks—known across realms by different names. In SRX's tongue, the higher-knowledge ones called them ignite. In other places, people called them origin stones.
The idea was simple and terrifying:
An idea, if strong enough, doesn't just live in a mind.
It can become a world.
Ignite stones are where those ideas crystallize—where possibility hardens into something you can hold, steal, trade, weaponize.
And someone was collecting them.
I heard the name the way you hear thunder when the storm is still far away:
Galvan.
At first I thought it was a person.
Then I realized it was a method.
A philosophy.
A hunger.
The Galvan Empire didn't conquer by marching armies alone. They conquered by standardizing worlds—turning wild, strange, unique realities into predictable systems they could control. They were obsessed with efficiency. They saw diversity as chaos. They saw chaos as weakness. They saw weakness as something to be "corrected."
They didn't just invade cities.
They invaded origin laws, rewriting the foundations of existence the way a tyrant rewrites history—so the new version makes their rule seem inevitable.
That's what the horns meant.
Not nature.
Manufacture.
One night, while moving through SRX's higher layers—where thought becomes a hallway and intention becomes a door—I met a being that felt like a presence at the beginning of everything.
A creator.
Not "God" in the way my home world uses the word, like a label people slap onto what they don't understand. This was a builder—a mind shaping a world in progress, crafting a new possibility with careful hands.
I watched them assemble an idea the way you might watch someone build a fire: one spark, one breath, one steady decision at a time.
And sitting near their work, half-buried in luminous sand, was an ignite stone.
It wasn't glowing like a cliché. It was quieter than that. It looked like ordinary rock until you stared too long and realized your thoughts were starting to lean toward it, like iron toward a magnet.
The creator didn't look up, but I felt them acknowledge me.
You're early, the silence said.
I didn't understand until later.
Early… for the war.
Because Zianttra hadn't fallen yet.
Because the Galvan Empire was only beginning its ascent.
Because the guardians were still being gathered—pulled from different worlds like scattered matches being collected before the night grows too cold.
I tried to do what I always told myself I should do.
Observe. Don't interfere. The moment you get involved, disaster follows.
I had learned that lesson in lives I only remembered in fragments—lives where my intervention saved one city and doomed another, where every "victory" was paid for in ways I didn't anticipate.
I was tired of paying.
I was tired of being the sacrifice the world never deserved.
So when the first call came, I resisted it.
It came as a sensation first—a tug behind the ribs, like a string tied from my chest to somewhere far beyond the sky. It came as a dream second—an image of a world with a bruised-purple horizon and a sun that looked like a coin held in a clenched fist. It came as a word third:
Zianttra.