1 The Tale of the Cube

It all began long after it ended, deep in a human country sat a human city, on its outskirts lay a human town with human citizens. In the most human of places in the universe, in there laid an ancient dimly lit alley bordered by a music store, still playing jazz that night even if the genre was long dead. That alley had a little cart and a stall and in that stall sat an old man missing an eye.

Rotting wood marked the passage of many seasons of missing the funds to repair his quaint little cart, there was a lantern that lightly hummed and rocked a little from time to time providing a minimal amount of visibility to the man's wares. A glass eye flashed in a myriad of colors whenever the light landed on it, there was an old book far more ancient than the one eyed man, it had a winged monkey gripping atop a spire, and words across the top that read "The Rise of the Monkey King" and finally there lay a cube.

The cube was akin to one of those 54 squared spinning cubes from the first 10,000 years of the Gregorian calendar, you would expect a side of white, and one of blue, one of red or green, yellow would surly be there as well along with orange, but there was none of that. This cube was nearer in design to one of those century dead globes that would stand showing a great many continents and there on the globe, you could've expected along with those continents, seas and lakes.

A child looking a mere 13 years was strolling to a music store to buy a jazz album, that didn't happen much these days, even ignoring that jazz was a dead music, no one buys physical albums these days, what with the advent of smartphones thousands of years ago, and eventually of better and better gadgets. These days music plays directly in someone's mind perfectly synced to a linked one's soul, the quality surpassed even seeing music live since there wasn't even the pain of bursting eardrums when one was too close to the speakers, which they often were. The experience may be slightly lacking, but drugs could be taken to absolve anyone of that minor setback.

The boy was walking and as he was walking he felt the need to turn his head a radian or so, he saw an alleyway and a cart and a stall. There was the one eyed man with his rainbow glass eye, his tome, and his cube. The boy was a bold one, danger a long forgotten fear, no one died anymore unless they wanted to, which was quite often, but at least only those who accepted death ever really died. If he felt scammed, he could always report the man or just not purchase his wares, so even if it seemed a little sketch, it should be fine he felt.

The one eyed man noticed a small figure creeping his way closer, and this rarely happened, so he wore an ecstatic grin.

"Old man, don't have weird thoughts okay, I was just interested in this little rig you've got set up. What have you got?"

The one eyed man gave a little chuckle, "I've got a story, a legacy, and a world seed young one. Would you like to hear the story of the Monkey King, the one they called Klein?"

The boy's eyes started to sparkle, he was always a sucker for stories. The one eyed man took the silent cue and stretched out his emaciated arm, a light creek could even be heard showing his arms of disuse. He grabbed his tome, some dust could be seen falling away from the book, the man opened the cover, flipped a page, and from there time stopped.

The cube began to float, and the eye returned to the now two-eyed old man, though now he was a much younger one, and a tad less human, well then again I guess much less human seeing as he was a monkey with a tail and fur. Fangs grew from his mouth, not long ones, just as much as a monkey has, wings grew from his back, and they shrunk back in, he got younger and younger, his eye changed back to jade green, his fur changed from silver to brown, his arm from monkey's to tiger's to monkey's again, from there, every second become a million years, the universe was uncreated, and the one from the before times when cultivation was the law of the land replaced it, threads of elements dashed about, time encapsulated the monkey and the boy. The boy he shrunk, his form turned incorporeal, nothing more than a bright light, he merged into the head, er well, the soul of the monkey king, and from then they were one, a young boy and a young monkey just born in the same body, sharing the same soul.

There was an ancient god, ancient because he came from an ancient universe, even if right now he was a god as young as the boy was from the new world, he had a mixed up spinning cube, that day was the day he spun it for the last time, all the sides we uniform, and mountains grew, oceans formed, beasts were born and plants were too. In a single corner were the human's lands, the rest belonged to the ones not man. And in another part of the cube where there lay a jungle, there lay too a family of monkeys, one looked to be a new-born, all of them actually were new-born monkeys, but only this one had no implanted memories from a life not truly lived, the rest could almost be called fake, though no one would dare call the beasts of this world fake.