TPZ: The Price of Zer0
"If a man is never born, is he dead? If a thing is never seen, does it exist? If a name is never spoken, does it carry meaning?"
I do not ask these questions to be answered. I ask them because no one dares to.
The universe is built on the arrogance of definition. Numbers, laws, identities—shackles that are forged in language, in memory, in time, or this theory that lingers in our brains called collective consciousness. But what of the spaces between? The void? Reality? The things that exist outside knowing, outside the gaze of men and gods? Or does it not exist at all?
If so, how are we speaking about it? Paradoxical isn’t it?
He was such a thing. A presence without a name. A shadow cast by nothing. Or nothing cast by a shadow?
If history is a river, he was the drought. If men are measured by the weight of their deeds, he was the absence of gravity itself. He did not belong, not in this world, not in any world, because he was not of the world.
Not forgotten. Not ignored. Not erased.
Simply… he never counted.
And yet, in the nothing, he saw everything. The weight of unspoken thoughts. The blood behind unshed tears. The truth in silence. The universe was full of things unseen, of wounds never given words, of horrors never given shape.
And he understood.
He understood that nothingness was not the absence of being, but the absence of limitation. He understood that a thing untethered by perception is a thing without chains. He understood that the moment a man asks, "What is the shape of nothing?"—
—he has already begun to see it. The idea of liminalism or being liminal. He experienced it and it drove him not to insanity, but sent him spiraling into the depth of the abyssal word of all what it carried of meaning, something much much beyond than mere insanity, something that can not described with words, because it is not a reality, it is something simply…...beyond.
Saying he was insane would be an understatement, mind you.
And once seen, it can never be unseen.
The world had built itself on the assumption that zero was empty. That nothing had no weight. That absence held no consequence. But they were wrong.
Zero was the abyss between all things. The wound that preceded creation. The foundation of every lie called "truth."
And the price of zero… was everything.
As such, because he lost everything,
He gained everything.
1 extra chapter = 2 powerstones
