...It hurts...
...It hurts so much...
...My head hurts so much...
A pure "discomfort" and "lack" that transcended the realm of sensation, an affliction on the level of existence itself, like the primordial darkness and cold at the dawn of the universe, made up the entirety of Jingtian's restored "perception."
He had not "awakened," because awakening implied having once "slept." His state was more like the accidental, unconscious "ripple" of the faintest rule after absolute silence.
There was no concept of "self," no perception of a "body," no passage of "time."
Who knew how long had passed? Perhaps an instant, perhaps eternity. Within that faint "imprint," in its deepest, darkest, nearly lifeless corner, a final backup system based on an "octopus" life-form—a secondary heart that had not yet completely ceased functioning—had, under the extreme circumstances where the external Annihilation Vortex Core and its own silence rule reached a strange balance, absorbed traces of destruction energy embers, spatial Fragments, and the most fundamental rule Fragments contained within the Annihilation Vortex Core over countless years...
It twitched, ever so faintly.
Like the tremor of a heart dragged back from death's threshold by the strongest electric shock after it had stopped beating.
"Bzz—"
It was not a sound, but an exceedingly tiny disturbance on the level of rules.
I...
An immensely blurred, immensely fragmented "point of consciousness," as though barely pieced together from hundreds of millions of motes of soul dust, was extraordinarily fortunate, extraordinarily accidental, rekindled by that twitch.
...Still... alive?
His "consciousness" began laboriously trying to "understand" its own state. There was no sight, no hearing, no touch. There was only the most primitive inward perception of its own form of "existence."
He could not "feel" his body. Or rather, his "body" was no longer flesh, bones, or tentacles. It had