Lively Void

Void—and not void.

There was clearly nothing here, yet anyone who entered could still sense the distortion of the space. Of course, perhaps it was not space that was distorted, but time.

Countless invisible streams of light fused and converged here, crisscrossing and splitting apart. Some ran parallel along the same lines, while others became mixed and tangled. They surged toward an indistinct future, yet also wound back toward a long-blurred past.

But no matter how these streams of light moved or where they led, they remained trapped in this corner of the world, like prisoners shackled at the feet, unable to escape.

It was like a prison—a strange prison. There were no screams, no protests. There was only mechanical distortion and eternal silence.

But soon, that silence was broken.

A pair of eyes covered in stars and spirals opened without warning at the center of this spacetime. The instant they appeared, all the invisible streams of light were dyed in dazzling, multicolored hues by the brilliant stars within them. At the same time, their arrival made those streams of light grow even more turbulent and distorted.

Only then could these streams, having taken visible form, be seen by living beings. Only then could the lifeforms beyond this spacetime realize that this was not an empty void devoid of everything, but a black hole holding back countless ages.

The black hole had originally remained here without anything unusual happening, but with the arrival of those eyes, it instantly absorbed all the time within sight. With a thunderous rumble, it shrank and transformed into a pair of black-hole-like eyes, opening opposite the Starry Eyes.

Within those black-hole eyes flowed distorted splendor that alternated between speeding up and slowing down. Every blink seemed to bear witness to the drying up and swelling