Chapter One: The Silver Void
1. A Sanctuary Without a Speck of Dust
In that room, there was no scent of life.
The "Special Document Management Room" was located on the third basement floor of the Central Archive in Atla—a preservation city. It was a space governed by a mathematical silence, engineered solely to halt the degradation of organic matter, maintained at a precise 20^{\circ}\text{C} and 50\% humidity.
Elen stood before a gargantuan shelf, clad in white dust-proof work clothes, hearing nothing but the faint, rhythmic hum of nanomachines. In his hand, he held a "book." It was not digital data, nor was it a hologram. It was a relic of the Old Age—a corpse of memory created by crushing trees, weaving fibers, and searing them with the "filth" known as ink.
"...Death and Religion."
Elen’s fingertips traced the title on the frayed cover. In the modern era, this string of characters was practically a dead language. To the citizens of Atla, "death" was merely a record of Old Humanity's defeat found in history textbooks, or perhaps a joke referring to a fatal system bug that someone had forgotten to patch.
Elen slowly turned the page. The dry sound of paper rubbing against paper—a sound so alien in this city that had forgotten how to "end" for thousands of years—echoed with a strange, dissonant weight.
2. Residents of the Mirror
Leaving the archive, Elen headed toward the "Citizen’s Gallery" in the city's mid-stratum.
It was a glittering promenade where those who had attained eternal life enjoyed their existence. Looking up, a perfect cobalt blue stretched across the sky, maintained by the weather control system; a cloudless, fair sky that had persisted for centuries.
The people traversing the walkway all possessed succulent, youthful skin and maintained ideal proportions. An old woman over eight hundred years old laughed with the vibrant voice of a girl in her twenties, while a five-hundred-year-old youth walked by, flaunting muscles like those of a classical sculpture. Cellular degradation was constantly repaired by nanomachines; the concepts of aging and disease no longer existed, even in the most extravagant fantasies.
"Elen! Were you in the basement again? You look pale."
A lighthearted voice made Elen stop. It was his colleague, Theo. Theo seemed to have just changed his eye color to emerald green with the latest genetic regulator, and he was narrowing his eyes proudly.
"Theo. How long do you think you’ll stay here?"
At the sudden question, Theo blinked in confusion for a moment.
"How long? Forever, I suppose. If something breaks, we fix it. If we get bored, we sleep (cold sleep). There are no inconveniences. We live in the 'Perfected World' that humanity dreamed of for tens of thousands of years."
Theo’s smile was as flawless as a polished mirror. However, Elen couldn’t help but feel that nothing was reflected in the depths of that mirror.
Everything was known from the start. Tomorrow, the day after, centuries into the future. One’s health would never decline, and a loved one would never suddenly vanish. The religious texts of this planet were said to teach how to face death. But now that "death" itself had vanished, what were people supposed to think about as they lived?
"If there’s no need to think about anything, then nothing ever begins... Don't you think so?"
"You say such difficult things. More importantly, you're coming to the 'Aeon Festival' tonight, right? It’s the greatest party, celebrating thousands of years of rule by the Progenitors."
Theo tapped him lightly on the shoulder and walked away. Elen watched him leave, recalling a passage from the old book in his pocket:
Religion is broadly divided into three modes:
The first is to treat death as someone else's business.
The second is to pity death and offer it affection.
The third is to face death head-on.
Theo was undoubtedly the symbol of a generation for whom death was no longer even "someone else’s business." To him, death wasn't even "the misfortune of others." It was a "non-existent void."
3. Branches Without a Trunk
Elen turned his steps toward the observation deck at the boundary of Atla.
Beyond the dome surrounding the city lay a "wilderness" that had escaped the control of nanomachines. There, trees grew with abnormal vitality, standing like a wall of jet-black, thick enough to shroud the heavens. The forest, which must have been beautiful once, had transformed into a "damp darkness" where leaves that forgot how to wither piled up in layers, preventing even sunlight from reaching the ground.
"If there is no trunk to serve as the branches and leaves, the fruit will not ripen..." Elen muttered.
The city and the wilderness were the same. Cells that did nothing but continue to be updated had lost the purpose of "growth." Without the strict ending that is death, the story of life cannot reach the "conclusion" of its introduction, development, and turn. A story without a conclusion is merely a tedious repetition of character strings.
Suddenly, Elen looked at his own palm. A perfect hand, without a single scar. They say that ancient mystics read destinies in the lines of these palms and agonized over what to do in their limited time. But if everything is a known fact, destiny does not exist. There is only a void present from the very beginning.
"...Are we alive? Or are we just being preserved?"
That question dissolved into the sterile air, vanishing without reaching anyone. However, deep within Elen’s chest, a small ember had begun to smolder. A fear similar to the "dignity of a father" described in that old book. And beyond that fear, a thirst for the true "silence" that ought to exist.
4. Echoes of the Aeon Festival
On the night of the "Aeon Festival," the city of Atla was swallowed by a deluge of artificial radiance.
In the sky, holographic sparks burst in a silent, programmed choreography, while the melodies of the jubilee—unchanged for centuries—reverberated even up to the aerial corridors thousands of meters above the ground. The citizens, their euphoria amplified by the latest sensory adjustment drugs, danced through a night that had no end. For them, celebration was not an event, but a permanent state of being.
Elen, seeking escape from the relentless cacophony of joy, returned once more to the depths of the underground archive.
The corridors were a seamless stretch of silver walls, where the madness of the surface world felt like a distant, forgotten dream. In this sterile vacuum, Elen felt he could finally maintain the flickering outlines of his own identity.
"...Who’s there?"
He froze in front of the door to the Special Document Management Room. The massive blast-resistant barrier, which should have been sealed by biometric locks, was slightly ajar. No alarms had been triggered. It was a primitive breach, one so low-tech that the sophisticated surveillance systems had failed to perceive it as a threat.
As Elen stepped into the room, a scent hit him. It was a smell that should never have existed in this domain of ozone and disinfectant. It was the scent of damp earth, of crushed wild grass, and—most shockingly—the faint, acrid smell of human sweat, the byproduct of a body actually burning energy.
A small shadow was huddled in the gloom of the bookshelves. As Elen’s light cut through the darkness, the figure sprang up with the agility of a startled animal, casting a sharp, defiant gaze toward him.
"Don't move," the shadow commanded.
The voice was like a rolling bell, yet it possessed a parched, weathered quality Elen had never heard. Standing there was a girl who appeared to be fourteen or fifteen. She didn't wear the smooth, bioluminescent silks favored by Atla’s elite. Instead, she was clad in thick, coarse fabric, stained with the grime of manual labor.
But what truly transfixed Elen was her face. Near the corners of her eyes were small, unmistakable lines—wrinkles. They were the footprints of time, etched by laughter, or perhaps by deep sorrow. It was raw, unshielded skin that had never known the corrective touch of nanomachines.
"Did you... come from outside the dome?"
The girl didn't answer. Instead, she clutched an old book to her chest—the very book on religion Elen had been reading.
"What do you intend to do with that?" Elen asked, his voice trembling.
"I’m just returning it," she said quietly. "The last 'Trunk' that was supposed to belong to my tribe. Your ancestors stole our history just to display it in a museum of dead things."
5. The Pulsing Rhythm of "Time"
Elen tried to close the distance between them, but he was physically pushed back by the sheer intensity of the aura she radiated.
Her breathing was fundamentally different from the rhythmic, optimized respiration of Atla’s citizens. It was shallow, rapid, and desperate. It was the sound of a body consuming its own oxygen like a finite fuel, a rhythm that suggested every second was being scraped away from a limited supply.
"Your eyes..." Elen whispered. "You haven't installed nanomachines? Why are you... decaying like that?"
The girl curled her lip in a self-deprecating smirk. Even that slight movement of facial muscles felt like a miracle to Elen. In Atla, expressions were calculated for maximum aesthetic appeal. Her face, however, possessed a "fluctuation of life" that was entirely beyond control.
"We are the Tribe of the Fallen Flowers (Adabana)," she said. "We are the ones who guard the 'lifespan' you discarded as if it were a sacred curse. Our time hasn't stopped like yours. It flows, second by second, toward the end—like sand falling through an hourglass."
Time flowing toward death.
Elen was struck dumb. The poetry he had read spoke of "facing death head-on," but this girl carried that reality on her narrow shoulders as a daily existence.
"Aren't you afraid? Knowing that one day, you will simply... stop moving?"
"I am terrified," she admitted, her voice small but firm. "But that is exactly why I am here, right now."
She squeezed the book tighter. "Because there is an end, we are able to walk. Because there is an end, every single word in this book feels hot enough to burn my throat. You wouldn't understand... living in this graveyard of a city where everything is a known fact and nothing can ever be lost."
With a sudden, fluid motion, she leapt toward an open ventilation duct hidden between the shelves.
"Wait!"
Elen’s cry was hollow. She vanished into the darkness of the shaft, leaving behind only a single withered leaf she had used as a bookmark and the lingering, scorched scent of a life being lived at full tilt.
6. The First Palpitation
Elen stood staring at the darkness where the girl had disappeared. He pressed a hand to his chest and felt his heartbeat. It was regular, quiet, and efficient.
Yet, he realized with a pang of horror that his heartbeat was fundamentally different from hers. His was the mechanical movement of a piston, designed to last forever. Hers was a prayer—a rhythmic counting of how much remained before the silence.
He knelt and picked up the withered leaf she had dropped. It was brown, brittle, and looked as though it might crumble at a touch. It possessed a "beauty of death" that the genetically perfected trees of Atla could never achieve.
"If there is no trunk to serve as the branches and leaves..." Elen recited the continuation of the poem under his breath, "...the fruit will not ripen."
The girl’s existence was a jagged streak of lightning through the void of Atla. For the first time, a crack had formed in the "certainty" of his eternal life.
Without thinking, Elen began to run. Not toward the radiant lights of the Aeon Festival, but toward the "Shadow of Death"—the dark, strict, yet vibrantly pure reality the girl carried. He realized that a life without an end was not a life at all; it was merely a state of being "preserved."
7. The Phantom of a Father, the Doubts of a Youth
Elen retreated to his private quarters, located in the deepest, most secluded wing of the Archive.
The encounter with the girl had acted as a catalyst, prying open a heavy, rusted lid that had been sealed over his memories for centuries. In Atla, childhood was an antiseptic process—an era of life managed by flawless educational programs and emotional optimization. However, a single, jagged memory had survived the scrubbers.
He remembered a day, centuries ago, when he was still small. Through the crystalline window of their estate, he had witnessed a sight that defied the city’s logic. His father was collapsing in the middle of the geometric garden.
His father’s face was not the serene, ageless mask mandated by social norms; it was contorted in a violent, raw agony. His skin, usually glowing with the help of dermal nanites, turned a sickly, ashen grey as the light of life drained from his eyes. It was a visceral manifestation of "Death"—a phenomenon Elen had only ever seen as a sterile definition in a textbook.
The cover-up had been instantaneous. Within seconds, medical drones descended like vultures, encased his father’s spasming body in a preservation capsule, and whisked him away. The ground was chemically scrubbed of any trace of the struggle.
Elen, too, had been "repaired." His memories of that traumatic expiration were flagged as a "malfunction" and overwritten by a sedative-laced narrative: his father had simply been placed in temporary stasis due to a minor systemic imbalance.
But as Elen sat in the silence of his room, the truth clawed its way back. That face had not been a "system error." It had been a Conclusion. And in that final, terrifying moment, amidst the pain, Elen now realized there had been a flicker of something else: a profound, quiet sense of relief. A release from the burden of eternity.
"Is never dying truly the same as being happy?" Elen whispered to the empty air.
Atla’s society had achieved peace by treating death as "someone else's business," severing even the most sacred bonds of kinship to avoid the "infection" of grief. It was the most cold-blooded form of indifference.
8. Resolve, and the Great Escape
As the artificial dawn began to bleed through the city’s upper layers, the echoes of the Aeon Festival grew thin and hollow.
Elen placed the old religious text on his desk. "I’m just returning it. The last 'Trunk' that was supposed to belong to my tribe." The girl's voice was a drumbeat in his mind.
He accessed the Archive’s terminal one last time, bypassing the high-level security firewalls. He wasn't looking for the official exits—those were guarded by sentient AI and biometric scanners that would flag his departure immediately. Instead, he mapped out the labyrinthine network of primitive ventilation shafts and ancient waste-disposal chutes—the "back doors" the city had forgotten even existed.
"It begins now," he murmured. "From the void where no thought is required, into the heat of a true life."
Elen stripped off his pristine, white dust-proof work clothes. He cast aside the uniform of the immortal. In its place, he donned a set of coarse, heavy rags he had salvaged from a restricted "Historical Costume" bin—garments from the Old World that smelled of dust, mold, and the faint, lingering scent of human history.
He reached into his pocket and felt the dry, brittle leaf the girl had left behind.
"Goodbye, Silver Void."
He stepped into the darkness of the service duct. Behind him, the vibrant, holographic lights of the festival flickered one last time before being cut off by the heavy sliding of a metal grate.
He was no longer moving toward the light. He was heading for the "Wet Darkness" beyond the dome—a place where trees choked the sky, where the "Tribe of the Fallen Flowers" lived and died, and where "Death," the strict yet honest father of humanity, still held sway.
"If there is no trunk to serve as the branches and leaves, the fruit will not ripen," he repeated, the words now a vow.
His soul, after thousands of years of stasis, began to move. He was walking toward his own "End," and for the first time in his life, Elen felt truly, terrifyingly awake.
