Jordan opened his eyes to white stretching in every direction, his body transparent, colors bleeding through him purple, gold, shades he had no names for.
He'd expected something. Pearly gates, maybe. Fire if the universe had a sense of humor. Not this.
Time passed, or didn't. Nothing moved, and his mind drifted back to the pavement, the gunshot, his body stopping all at once. Twenty-two years, and the last ten seconds of them were the most alive he'd felt in any of them, just legs and air and concrete moving because there was nothing left to do but move.
He thought about the store. About crawling toward the door while everyone else sat against the wall waiting for someone else to handle it. Waiting hadn't protected them either, and if this void was suggesting something was coming, he wasn't repeating that approach.
No more managing. No more waiting for someone else to decide.
He needed strength, real strength, the kind that meant freedom. Wishing for infinite power was how you got cursed in every story he'd ever heard, and he had no idea what rules governed whatever came next. A system felt like trading one set of instructions for another. Power copying was useless if the next world ran on bloodlines or technology or something he couldn't picture from here.
He needed something that worked anywhere, something that grew with him and couldn't be taken.
The sprint came back to him. Pure movement, just legs and air and ground, and he'd felt more alive in those ten seconds than in years of keeping his head down. He wanted that, to fight and get stronger from the fighting itself, every win and every loss building into something that actually belonged to him. No shortcuts, no parts to juggle, just him and whatever stood in front of him moving as one thing.
That was it.
The void pulsed, and Jordan felt it where his chest should have been. He blinked and the white shifted, color bleeding through, the pulse coming again softer, like something on the other side of it had heard him.
He blinked faster.
The void rippled, purple and gold and red and shades without names, the space around him breathing, pressure building against him or inside him until he couldn't locate the difference, and then the blast threw him backward and his edges came apart.
Not his body. His soul, every piece of it scattering into the light while he screamed with no sound and his consciousness frayed outward across distances he had no scale for, stars igniting, space folding, galaxies spinning into being, light pressing against him like standing inside something vast and indifferent.
The universe bloomed around him and he dissolved into it.
Then darkness.
When he woke he was still moving, carried by momentum that didn't belong to the void anymore.
The white was gone. Eight universes hung around him at distances he couldn't measure, different sizes, different colors bleeding from their edges, one pulsing with heat that made his awareness contract, another cold enough that even the thought of it felt like it would freeze something permanent.
His soul slowed as the momentum faded.
The smallest universe pulled at him with something close enough to recognition that he stopped resisting and let it draw him in.
Stars streaked past. Something that wasn't wind rushed through him, pulling at whatever held him together, and below him a planet came into focus, massive, mountains scraping the upper atmosphere, oceans stretching beyond any horizon he could find. Dragons moved across it in every direction, hundreds, thousands, flying and sleeping and hunting across a world built entirely to their scale.
His soul fell toward a castle at the planet's peak and passed through stone like it wasn't there, through hallways, into a room where a dragon slept, and slammed into the dragon's body with an impact that knocked the breath out of him despite having none to lose.
He lay still.
When he opened his eyes energy moved through his chest like a shockwave, rolling outward through the room and the walls and the planet and into space beyond it, stretching him thin across a distance his mind couldn't hold, his hands tingling and his chest aching. Then it collapsed back and was gone, and the body around him felt entirely too small for what had just passed through it.
Black scales covered arms that weren't his arms. A tail curled against the bed. Claws where his fingers should have been. He lay there taking stock of it, and then his body started changing on its own, the tail retracting smooth as a muscle, scales pulling back into skin, limbs shortening as bones ground themselves into a new shape.
When it stopped, he had hands. A human body, maybe five years old, the palms smooth and unmarked like they'd never done a thing.
The door burst open.
A woman carrying a tray of towels stopped in the doorway and the tray hit the floor with a crash that made him flinch. She covered her mouth, turned, and ran.
"THE PRINCE IS AWAKE!" Her voice carried down the hall and kept going. "THE PRINCE IS AWAKE!"
One way to greet a person.
Heavy footsteps, and then two figures filled the doorway. The woman was tall with dark hair and golden eyes that caught the light like metal, one hand pressed to her mouth, tears running freely. The man beside her was broader, horns curving back from his temples, eyes wet but expression giving nothing away.
The man stepped forward.
"Welcome to the world of the living, Kaos."