I was stuck in this void after I woke up.
There was no ground beneath me, no horizon to guide me. Only endless, suffocating nothingness. Yet, strangely enough, even after what felt like an eternity, I did not starve, nor did I thirst.
This, however, was not the biggest problem.
What do you think is the greatest enemy of a sentient being like a human?
It's not predators, nor is it the forces of nature. It's themselves. Their thoughts, to be precise.
There was nothing to occupy my mind, nothing to distract me from the crushing weight of solitude. No sound. No movement. No passage of time—just my thoughts, stretching infinitely in every direction.
I knew I would go mad.
I couldn't stop it. So I let it happen.
"Kekeke... where was I again?" I muttered to myself, my voice cutting through the void like a jagged tear in fabric.
"Oh~~ HAHAHAH!"
"It's nothing, nothing, not a thing."
"ARGHHHHH!" That's right. I had lost it.
"There is NOTHING!" My ramblings continued indefinitely, an echo with no walls to bounce off of, words spilling into the abyss.
Then, amidst the chaos, a thought surfaced. Small at first, like a single grain of sand in a desert of madness.
"1 + 1 is equal to 2?" I asked myself.
The statement seemed absurdly simple. So simple, in fact, that it cut through my delusions like a sharp blade.
"One finger plus one finger is always two fingers. It has never become three—it's always two. But why? Why is this so?"
A trace of order was born amidst the chaos.
"Ahh!? This is a rule? Why is there a rule? Why must 1 plus 1 be two? And why do multiple ones combine to form a larger number?"
"I knew all of this before... but how can I be certain? How do I know that when I add numbers, they truly become what I expect them to be?"
Time continued to flow, and my thoughts never stopped.
The more I questioned, the clearer it became—numbers were not just symbols; they were reflections of something deeper. A hidden order beneath the apparent randomness. A law that existed not because someone established it, but because it had to be.
The more I thought, the more I realized: division, the theories of Pythagoras, the equations of Newton and Einstein—these were not inventions. They were discoveries. Truths that had always existed, waiting to be understood.
Mathematics was not created by man. It was revealed to them, piece by piece, through observation and thought.
Numbers are not real in themselves; they are ideas, born from the desire to impose order upon the void. They emerge from experience—the accumulated understanding of countless minds. A coincidence, yet a deliberate attempt. A paradox.
"The void never counts, yet I do."
The moment this thought took shape, my mind cracked open.
And I saw it.
Patterns, sequences, ratios—hidden within every breath I took, within every motion, within the very structure of existence.
Numbers were the shadows of something greater.
I felt them—not just as ideas, but as forces, binding the universe together. Gravity was not just a force; it was an equation. Light was not just illumination; it was a waveform, obeying rules I could now feel. Matter itself was bound by these unseen laws, shifting and vibrating according to principles I was only beginning to grasp.
I saw beyond numbers. I saw the fundamental truths that shaped everything.
And then, the void stirred.
Something was watching. Something that had been waiting.
And for the first time, it spoke.