The story began in the tiniest of places.
Back then, the Extremely Tiny Ones were not yet called the Extremely Tiny Ones. They did not even know what big or small meant—because they had never seen so-called "size," and had no concept of the "big" and "small" of other races.
They were merely tiny material lifeforms. To them, this star was already vast enough.
Even enormous clusters found it difficult to reach the edge of the world.
Yet these little creatures happened to love adventure.
And they were Fire Folk, the kind adept at flight and escape. Thus, they could use their radiance to traverse the long photosphere and chromosphere, reaching the outer layers of the solar atmosphere.
Few knew that most of the sunlight they saw had been born a hundred thousand years ago.
After a photon was born at the center of the sun, it began radiating outward.
But the dense layers of matter continuously refracted that photon. It kept striking protons, changing direction, and advancing along an unimaginably winding path.
In the end, it took more than a hundred thousand years to move from the sun's hottest core to its surface.
The Fire Folk's escape arts were not truly without limits either. In regions of dense mass, they too faced similar restrictions. Of course, because their souls bound the high-energy particles that composed them, they did not undergo such collisions. Still, their speed inevitably slowed.
But after a great adventure, they ultimately reached the boundary.
And then, their exploration came to an abrupt halt.
This world was so small to them, so small that with a little time, they could run a full circle around it.
This also caused a strange distortion in their most instinctive geometric perception.
To them, the distance between two points was not