Chapter 17 : "The Bitter Truth"
As Azar wandered through his dark, chaotic world, surrounded by the scattered remnants of the realms he had destroyed, a strange feeling began to creep over him. It was an unsettling sensation, a sudden doubt whispering in the depths of his mind: "Is this reality? Or have I been living a long illusion?"
The skies around him grew darker, and a peculiar voice echoed faintly in his thoughts. It told him something unimaginable—that everything he had experienced might be an illusion. The world he believed in wasn't as real as it seemed. It was like a bubble, fragile and on the verge of bursting.
Suddenly, his vision shifted. A new image appeared in his mind—a life both unfamiliar and yet eerily familiar. Azar found himself sitting in a dimly lit room, an ordinary space filled with mundane objects. The faint voice grew louder, its words unrelenting as they echoed in his head.
"You are just an experiment. Everything you've experienced was nothing more than an illusion created by scientists."
Azar felt dizzy. Could it be true? Was everything he had lived through—those realms, those emotional moments, the immense power he had wielded—merely a fabrication? A strange clarity dawned upon him, yet his mind rebelled against it, refusing to accept this bitter revelation.
There was no absolute power. No destroyed worlds. He was merely part of a scientific experiment in the year 2034. Azar's real life was utterly ordinary—a mundane existence in the human world we all inhabit. He was just an average man, burdened by debts and struggling through life, until a peculiar offer came his way.
"Have you ever tried the New World Experiment?"
Those were the words he had once heard from a stranger—a strange proposal he hadn't fully understood but had accepted without hesitation. With debts weighing heavily on him and a growing dissatisfaction with his life, he agreed to the experiment, hoping it might offer an escape.
"You will enter another world, living a life entirely different from your own. You'll embark on adventures, grow, and acquire extraordinary powers. But in the end, it will all be part of an experiment. What you experience will be nothing more than a segment of a scientific study on human evolution."
Those were the terms of the offer, and at the time, he dismissed them as nonsense. But now, the truth stared him in the face. Every moment of his epic journey, every trial he endured, had been nothing more than a meticulously orchestrated sequence created by scientists in a hidden laboratory. He had been part of an experiment he hadn't understood until this moment.
Everything was artificial. He wasn't a god, nor a destroyer of worlds. He was just an ordinary man living an ordinary life. The battles he fought, the pivotal moments he had lived, were all part of a system designed to test him, to observe how an average person would navigate challenges and make life-altering decisions.
It was all fake. Azar had never been anything more than a subject in a grand scientific simulation. And now, he had returned to his normal existence. The epic wars he waged and the decisive choices he made—none of them had been real. They were merely fragments of a carefully constructed program.
In that moment, Azar woke up to a painful reality. His struggles, his hopes, and the aspirations he had chased for so long had all been illusions, bursting like a fragile bubble to leave him face to face with the bitter truth.
Yet, he felt no anger. Instead, he felt something strange. He realized that, despite everything, he had not truly failed. In a way, he had succeeded in the ultimate test of life. Because that was the truth: life itself is nothing more than a series of experiments.