1 Chapter 1. Prologue

When I opened my eyes, I saw… Nothing. Not as it usually happens, a cacophony of different colors grouped into a distinct image, and not even the impenetrable darkness that you can see when you wake up in the trunk of the kidnappers. It's quite difficult to describe, as if I lost all my organs of vision… And not only them, trying to sniff, I did not even feel the usual smell of air. I tried to jerk my hand — there was no reaction, no sense of touch, no ability to move at all. I couldn't open my mouth either, but I couldn't even swallow my saliva — I couldn't feel my mouth.

It's a strange feeling, and I haven't been able to get used to it for hours. It was as if my soul had simply been plucked from my body and placed in some strange space. My experience of reading various fan fiction, novels, and short stories told me that some super-entity would soon come to visit me.

After a fairly long period of time, no one came to me, so I decided to take the situation into my... uh, into my unknown substance, and started trying to somehow move my carcass.

The idea was not particularly brilliant, because its own… Let's call this state the soul. For I did not feel my soul in any way, which is quite logical, my mind used to rely not on the abstract sensations of the soul, but on a fairly objective and scientifically based nervous system and everything connected with it. And I didn't have any sense of direction or vision, so even if I could somehow move, I wouldn't be able to feel it.

After thinking for a moment, I realized that the only thing I can feel in this space is my mind, which means that it is the only anchor that can get me out of here. Remembering the instructions of the master who taught me meditation at the age of six, I cleared my mind of extraneous thoughts and began to focus on my form.

The master is the only person in my life that I could call my own without a doubt. Even from the very beginning of my adult life, it was he who took care of me, and I did not have the courage to ask about my biological parents before his death, and I was not so interested in this topic.

I immediately felt a tugging at my soul. A rather unusual, but at the same time pleasant sensation caused me to interrupt my meditation, which caused the recently compressed substance of the soul to spread out more than ever.

- Damn it! - I thought, and immediately tried to return to the state of meditation. It turned out to be more difficult than the last time, but having had a bad experience, I no longer made such a mistake and continued to compress my soul into the simplest possible form — a ball.

Meditation in the state of the soul was very different, it was much easier to concentrate, and the soul itself was much more plastic than the mortal human body.

There was nothing to do in this unknown space, and meditation itself was a good time killer, which is why I did not notice how I squeezed my soul into thousands, tens of thousands of times more tightly than it was before. The euphoria I felt was nothing compared to all the sensations I had experienced in my previous life. When the pleasure of squeezing reached its peak, my mind could no longer resist and simply disconnected from the pleasure impulses transmitted by my soul.