Note: Many things may seem mysterious at first, but everything will become clear with time. I only ask that you enjoy the novel and not try to imitate anything you read in it.

Just enjoy the story.

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Inside a quiet house, a young man sat alone.

He looked about seventeen years old, with black hair, dark eyes, and skin so pale it seemed to have forgotten what sunlight felt like.

Dark circles shadowed the space beneath his eyes, and at that moment, he was staring down at his phone, scrolling through nothing, opening and closing apps without purpose, and wiping the screen again and again as if keeping his hands busy could stop his mind from sinking too deeply into the silence around him.

This strangely thin and sorrowful young man was Ryan.

His mother had died that morning from stage-four lung cancer.

Ryan was drowning in a grief he had never known before. His mother had been the person who had spent the most time by his side, and after divorcing his father at some point during his childhood, she had raised him entirely on her own.

His father did not return when he heard the news of her death.

In fact, he did not seem to care at all.

And so, Ryan now sat inside his home, alone. No mother. No father. No relatives of any kind.

He tried to distract himself with his phone, but the emptiness around him only grew clearer the longer he stared at the glowing screen, and in the end, he tossed it aside, lay back on the bed, and stared blankly at the ceiling.

"What do I do now?" Ryan asked, hoping someone would answer him.

Unfortunately, no one did.

"Can I even go to work tomorrow in this state?" he asked again.

Still, no reply came.

"If you don’t go, you won’t have money to feed yourself, Ryan," he muttered to himself.

For a while, he stayed silent.

Then he pushed himself up and sat on the edge of the bed.

"Should I try that thing again?" A faint smile crossed his lips. "I have stopped myself so many times before, but this time..."

He had found something to help him escape reality, and for the first time in a long while, nothing was holding him back from it.

In truth, Ryan was not completely ordinary.

Well, he was close to ordinary, but there was one thing that set him apart from everyone else his age.

Absolute Focus.

A terrifying level of concentration that allowed him to excel at virtually anything he turned his attention toward. School, programming, biology, chemistry, astronomy.

Even his secret work.

Nuclear research.

Yes, Ryan was secretly involved in one of his country’s nuclear research stations, under a special role created exclusively for him.

A seventeen-year-old working as a nuclear scientist and researcher?

It sounded like nonsense, but it was real, because if it were not, how could an ordinary young man without a father to rely on have supported both himself and his mother, a stage-four cancer patient who could not rise from her bed, let alone work?

The answer was simple.

He had to take either an extremely dangerous path or an extremely prestigious one.

Naturally, Ryan chose both.

His genius had been identified long ago.

He had completed his university studies at fifteen and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nuclear engineering. After that, he entered a classified research program, and through a special exception granted on the basis of his results, he began working in a restricted research role at the age of seventeen.

Insane, wasn’t it?

That was what everyone at his university and workplace called him.

The Mad Genius.

Ryan liked that nickname very much. He did not know why, but his madness did not stop there, because then he attempted something even crazier.

A forbidden act he should never have touched.

Soul Ascension.

It was a strange term Ryan had once come across in an old book. According to the book, it involved deep meditation and the deliberate separation of the soul from the body.

Pure madness, and that was exactly what drew Ryan to it.

Ever since he had first read about Soul Ascension three years ago, Ryan had attempted the technique every single day after finishing his studies, his research, or whatever task had been placed in front of him.

The strangest part?

He succeeded after one year of daily attempts.

It was an extraordinarily mysterious experience.

The first time, he could not remain outside his body for more than a few seconds, because the moment he saw himself from a third-person perspective, panic struck him so hard that he snapped back into his body at once.

But day after day, Ryan repeated the experiment, and each time, the duration he could spend outside his body grew longer.

As weeks turned into months, Ryan became able to travel between countries in soul form in the blink of an eye.

He observed people from different lands and places, and he even spied on the nuclear research of several foreign countries before presenting what he had learned to his own country as if it were original work.

Could he be blamed?

In his mind, he had simply performed an act of charity, pushing his country’s research forward by several years, all for a modest payment.

But Ryan discovered something else while in that form.

Whenever he moved farther away from Earth, he began hearing abnormal sounds, voices, screams, and a roar that did not attack his senses so much as gnaw at the fabric of his soul itself.

The first time he heard it, he was near the edge of the atmosphere. For a moment, Ryan thought some kind of entity had noticed him, and he returned to his body immediately.

But his curiosity, and his madness, refused to let him sleep in peace without knowing what it was.

So he went back the next day.

This time, he did not stop at the atmosphere.

He continued onward.

The moment he fully left the planet, Ryan felt his soul being pulled toward something specific, and this time, he did not turn back. He moved closer, and the closer he came, the louder the sound grew, until he realized it was less like screaming and more like the ancient roar of something vast and sleeping.

When he finally reached the source, the sight stopped him cold.

A hole.

To be precise, it was something far greater than a hole.

A massive, black hole-like anomaly, even though every law of physics he knew insisted that no true black hole could exist this close to Earth without devouring the entire world. It was the raw, living definition of cosmic terror.

The anomaly pulled at Ryan’s soul the closer he approached, and from that day forward, he returned to it every single day to study it.

He had been doing so for the past two years, and for reasons he could not fully explain, he felt as though that black hole was somehow strengthening his spiritual form with each visit. He did not know the cause, but he was certain of the result.

Today, however, Ryan had decided to do the craziest thing any person could possibly imagine.

In the past, he had always stopped himself at the final step, because he had still been worried about his mother.

But now...

There was nothing left for him to worry about.

Ryan settled into the lotus position and cleared every thought from his mind, then activated his unique ability.

Absolute Focus.

Within mere seconds—

Swoosh.

His soul left his body.

A pure white form emerged from the figure sitting motionless on the bed and looked back at it.

"I really do look exhausted," Ryan said in his spiritual form, though no physical sound came out.

Then he looked upward, and in the next moment—

He was gone.

Out in space, beyond the planet’s atmosphere, Ryan’s soul tore through the dark at terrifying speed, drawn toward that familiar pull. After several hours of traveling at his soul’s maximum velocity, he arrived at the place he had visited more times than he could count.

The edge of the black hole.

It was so vast it filled his entire vision, swallowing the space behind it with its sheer, incomprehensible size.

"Did you miss me, my dear?" Ryan said in his spiritual form.

As expected, no answer came.

"Well, this time is a little different," he said, the faint smile returning. "This time, I am here to do what I could never bring myself to do before."

He turned and looked out at the endless dark surrounding him, the infinite, indifferent expanse that had never once judged him or asked anything of him.

Ryan did not know what the result of this experiment would be. He did not truly care, either. He only wanted to fill the hollow space inside his chest and give his curiosity somewhere to go.

The black hole seemed to have a heartbeat.

Ba-dum.

Ba-dum.

And then, without another moment of hesitation, Ryan’s spiritual form crossed the threshold and entered the heart of the black hole.

Everything before this had been nothing more than a prelude.

From this moment onward—

Reality began.