1 Chapter 1: Where Is This Place?

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. I own this story and everything written here unless there's an outside reference to something owned by someone else. Please do not share or copy this story. I worked hard to write it. It's my first ever passion project, even if it's not that great.

Disclaimer 2: Not fully edited or polished.

Disclaimer 3: Not actively supported or published here.

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A/N: Read the pre-written story on my P@treon.

https://www.p@treon.com/poz

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**Prologue**

It's not every day you open your eyes, yet, unable to see anything at all. Well, unless you're blind, I suppose.

But I wasn't blind. I was a healthy­­­­­—well, kind of—young man who was sleeping in my room before I ended up in this situation. What situation, you might ask. Well…

I was floating in a void.

When I first woke up in this place, I felt incredibly strange. At first, I thought it was a dream. But after doing various things like pinching myself, having rational and abstract thoughts, and touching my body to see if I could feel the sensation, it wasn't much of a doubt that this was no dream. Even lucid dreams had their limits to how real they could be, so it was not that either.

After realizing my situation my first reaction was panic.

Just what the hell is going on? I didn't die, did I? But I don't think this is how the afterlife is supposed to be.

It was one thing if I went to heaven or hell, according to religions, or stopped existing altogether, according to some scientists. But it was none of those things. Instead, I was here, in nowhere.

So, I concluded that I hadn't died.

I tried raking my brain to come up with possible conclusions. First, I wasn't in my room, which is the last place I remembered being in. I also couldn't see anything besides myself. I tried moving my limbs to touch and feel something other than myself but I couldn't feel anything. It hadn't hit me immediately that I was floating. Only once I tried to move did I realize that.

Haha… What the hell?

Just what was I supposed to do in that situation? Call for someone to help? I tried. Many times. Nobody replied. I tried to move, flapping wildly, to swim to an endpoint, but no matter what I did my circumstances remained the same. Everywhere I floated to was the same. I couldn't even tell if I had moved at all in the first place.

My orientation had long gone out of my control and I didn't know if I was upside down or laying horizontally. But even with a lack of orientation, my body wasn't uncomfortable. In fact, a certain calmness developed inside me, as I kept floating in the silent void.

After exhausting all my initial plans, I just floated there in the darkness, silently.

In the absence of choice and control, my thoughts were my sole companion. It was the most significant thing to me at that time. Without this companion, I was

certain to lose my sanity to the eerie quiet. It was like I was in outer space. But this place couldn't be that. Or else, I would have long died without Oxygen, radiation, and other horrid stuff.

Since I had nothing left to do physically, and I couldn't decipher the nature of this place, I decided to think back to the last thing I remembered before coming here. Perhaps there might have been a clue somewhere.

***

It was like any other day for a completely normal college student like me.

I woke up late, as usual, despite my gazillion alarms judging my soul with their ringing. I attended college classes, and then came back home. My Computer Science bachelor's program was already in its second last semester but I had yet to do any career-building activities. I was a master procrastinator. I spent my time playing games and watching countless anime. My particular interests were the ones in which a regular guy is transported to another world, and become the savior/hero, using nothing but the cheat ability or, the equally destructive, but much more cringey 'power of friendship'.

However, it wasn't the 'saving the world' part that drew me in. It was the countless harems the protagonist would amass, and the numerous adventures in his travels that held my interest. Nothing beats a slice-of-life powered by a fantasy world.

I wasn't a loser enough to constantly wish myself to be transferred to another world since I still had my grip on reality. But every now and then, just as a fleeting thought, I would think– Man, I kinda feel like going to another world. It was nothing more than the mumblings of my bored and lazy mind, and I didn't pay much heed to it.

The boring classes sucked enough for me to make me want to do some physical exercise. The best I could think of was cleaning my pretty messed-up room. I wouldn't call myself a neat freak but, I was also not content with living in a room that resembled a garbage can. So, I did just that.

After a while, my room was looking decently organized. I couldn't help but be proud of my work.

Phew… That took a lot of work. But damn, my room looks so much better now.

Satisfied with the cleanliness of my room, I sat on my bed, exhausted. It wasn't long before I lay down and scrolled through my phone, hoping I had any missed messages.

But, there wasn't any.

None, huh? Well, I guess it's not that surprising.

I wasn't really popular in my batch; still, I had some good friends. Being introverted kept me aloof from active participation in groups and college activities.

I tossed my phone aside and looked at my bedside clock. I could have checked it on my phone itself but something inside made me take this approach instead.

4:00 PM.

Eh, I might as well take a nap until the neighbor aunty calls me for dinner.

The neighbor family was something like my second family in this apartment building I lived in, alone. They took great care of me, for which I was eternally grateful.

Closing my eyes, I saw a dream.

I dreamed of getting married to a stranger. A girl who was arranged by my parents because I didn't get good grades in my finals. A nightmarish dream.

How can that be a nightmare, you wonder? Simple. I was a single, young male, living alone, and still a virgin. I never had so much as a kissing or hand-holding experience, let alone the R-rated things. Yet, I wasn't so desperate that I'd accept a sudden marriage to a girl I didn't know. In fairness, though, she was quite decent-looking. If it came to the worst, I might have married her. It wasn't like she was getting a Hollywood star either…

Okay fine, it wasn't exactly a nightmare. But, it definitely scared me, okay?! Marriage is scary. Responsibility is scarier.

I jolted out of the dream-cum-nightmare, thankful that it wasn't real, and spent the rest of the evening scrolling through social media, binging on memes and stuff.

Dinner at my neighbor's house was delightful as always.

Back in bed after dinner, I scrolled through my social media some more, until I fell asleep.

It was a completely normal day. It wasn't much different from what I usually did.

Then, why exactly did I end up in this abyss?

***

As I thought and mumbled to myself, I glimpsed a thin flash of light before me. It was directly in my line of vision.

I initially thought it was my imagination, but in an instant, it blinked again, and then again, till it was a constant gleam. My ray of hope had finally come! Quite literally.

As I kept staring at the small light dot, I felt like it was slowly getting bigger, and before I knew it had become big enough to start to strain my eyes. As I narrowed my eyes and then eventually closed them from the brightness which was now almost blinding, the light had swallowed my entire field of view.

After getting used to the light, I slowly opened my eyes and blinked to adjust my pupils to this new light setting. (A/N: Dark mode users when they turn on light mode lol.)

When I finally noticed, I was in a blank white space.

First, it was pitch black and now it's pure white, huh?

I was surprised but I still hadn't panicked or lost my mind over it. I was a relatively easygoing person who didn't easily get flustered.

I took in my surroundings, attempting to figure my left from my right, or up and down, but failing because nothing served as a point of reference other than myself. Then I heard a small voice from behind me.

"󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆󠅆%€^0"

I turned around, eager to identify the origin of the voice. A girl. She looked no more than 7 or 8 years of age and wore a black dress, oddly torn at the hem. The dress didn't look damaged, however. It could have been the design of the cloth itself— hard to tell with the weirdness of kids' clothing nowadays. I never took interest in it.

Besides the ruinous appearance of her dress, she didn't have footwear on, and her plain, long black hair hung down, resting above her hips. She had eyes the color of blackness, revealing the depths of the abyss as she stared at me. It was as if they would swallow my entire existence. It was difficult to tear my eyes away from those pitch-black eyes, but I needed a better look at her face. So, after much struggle, I managed to divert my eyes from hers and looked at her other features.

Her facial features were in the right proportion suited to the frame: small. And her skin tone was fair enough to deduce she was a foreigner. It differed from my slightly wheatish skin tone. However, I couldn't tell which region of the world she was just from her appearance alone.

Furthermore, her face was unusually expressionless. I didn't notice it at first when I saw her since I was busy checking her features, but a 7 to 8-year-old girl with no expression and such deep obsidian black eyes gave off an uncanny aura. She was a mysterious loli.

We kept staring at each other. No words. No movement.

Whatever force held me spellbound let go at some point later because energy began to well up within me and I could finally start thinking again. So, I asked her.

"Umm, hello there, little girl. Do you know where this place is?"

Hearing my curious voice, she blinked twice and uttered the first clear words I heard in her soporific, silvery voice, still stripped of any emotion.

[Zeno]

"Huh?"

Zeno?

Was that the name of this place? Or was she perhaps telling me her name? I couldn't figure it out.

It sounded like a person's name. Though, not from any region of the world I was familiar with. It could have been Greek or something for all I knew.

I bent over till my line of sight was leveled with hers, and with a kind smile, asked her the same question. This time in a simpler manner.

"Is Zeno your name? My name is Rio. Nice to meet you. Where are we, Zeno?"

She stayed quiet for a few seconds before parting her little mouth to utter her next words.

[Go. There.]

She pointed at me, or so I thought at first, but it was in the direction behind me.

I turned around to see where the emptiness that once surrounded me, stood a red door. A red door, from the most ordinary wood, and matching frame which looked rather dull, except that it suddenly appeared.

It had a knob attached to it and was shut.

What magic is this?! This is a strange place. First a dark void, then white space, then a strange loli, and now a magically appearing red door? I can't make sense of this situation. What on earth is happening? Please tell me this is some extremely lucid dream after all.

I turned back to the little girl to enquire about the sudden appearance of the door. But much to my dismay, she was no longer there. That little girl disappeared just as mysteriously as she appeared. I was once again alone and without answers.

"The hell, man! What is happening?"

I sighed as I looked around in confusion, quickly followed by resignation. The absence of anything else subconsciously pushed me to the newly appeared door.

She pointed at the door before vanishing; so, this door must have some clues to how I can get out of this strange space. Maybe it's way back home.

It was certainly intriguing to experience being in a white space that had nothing, but I had no intention to remain here much longer.

Upon reaching the door, I touched it. It felt like sanded and buffed wood, coated with fine varnish. I tried pushing on it, but it didn't budge. As if it was hooked to the floor. I examined the back of the door, curious to see if there was anything there. Besides looking like the mirrored version of the front side, there was nothing spectacular.

Once I was satisfied, I went back to the front side and turned the knob. The door shook lightly. One would think that at this point, nothing should surprise me. However, the dark tunnel that appeared inside the door did just that. There was light at the end of the tunnel, literally. It looked as if some monsters may be hiding in the shadow. But nothing of sorts came out. It was eerily quiet as usual. I immediately went to the backside of the door but found out it just showed the same white space that it should. That made no sense. How could one side have a dark tunnel and the other side nothing?

I turned back, once again, to the front side.

I proceeded to do what seemed like the silliest things: I pushed my index finger past the doorway first; then, half of my right hand followed. Nothing strange happened. I had neither lost my arm to a tunnel monster nor obliterated into fragments. This gave me a sliver of courage to proceed further with the right half of my body, but no more. A few seconds passed and I decided to look behind the door again. White space.

There wasn't much more about the oddity of the door to research. I finally took a deep breath and went right through it.

The series of events so far had been nothing but bizarre. I didn't know how much time I had spent in total since I was in the dark space. I only hoped it would end soon. I had classes to attend in the morning after all.

***