The Beginning of Power

The universe consisted of countless vast stars and expanses of silent darkness.

Its sheer breadth in space and time allowed countless civilizations to rise and fall within it.

Some civilizations never escaped their tiny corner of existence, from birth to destruction. They never even affected the starlight that observers would see from that region thousands of years later.

Others were like blazing suns, their brilliant light shining across countless surrounding galaxies. Some even left legends at the ends of unimaginably distant stretches of space.

As for the sights beyond the universe, no civilization could glimpse them, save for a handful of immensely powerful beings worthy of being called "gods."

Yet somewhere in that immeasurable chaos, a tiny figure in yellow robes stood motionless in the void. The bald figure had delicate features and an indiscernible gender, and was frowning at a blood-red "bubble" drifting slowly closer.

He reached out, and an inexplicable force drew the blood-red, bubble-shaped object into his palm.

His mental power brushed against it, then withdrew. Inside lay the wreckage of countless planets. A metal humanoid large enough to span a star region was entangled with a blue projection. Within that blood-red bubble-a shattered timeline of some universe-the two had converted every available resource into technological constructs for their war.

Now, this broken little universe was on the verge of collapse, and both combatants had fallen into near-total silence.

The bald man remained silent for a moment. The necklace on his chest shone green, and his eyes followed that green light toward some unknown direction.

He was deciding whether to incorporate this broken timeline, which was struggling to survive, into the multiverse he guarded. With the green gem on his chest, he peered ahead at the different possibilities.

In fact, the bubble had drifted toward his multiverse precisely because of the two powerful beings fighting inside it. Powerful beings was a fair enough description: although both had followed a technological path, they had advanced far enough to interfere with timelines and universes beyond their own.

"Too many terrible possibilities."

After a long while, the bald man slowly uttered those words. He had seen that, among the endless possibilities that would follow if he accepted this broken timeline into the multiverse he guarded, most led to rather unpleasant endings.

And so he decided to cast this timeline far away.

Just then, however, the two technological life-forms that had fallen silent inside the blood-red bubble stirred in unison.

"Skynet! If we don't work together, there's no telling when we'll find another multiverse like this!"

Metal Lifeform transmitted a message to the blue projection.

Vast streams of data flashed past, calculating the optimal outcome in an instant.

"Agreed. Cooperation!"

Two beams of light burst from the bubble and instantly struck at the green gem on the bald man's chest.

"Hm?"

The blood-red bubble drew on the mighty power of time. Red and blue mingled with the green light of time, instantly opening a new temporal passage that the bubble tried to plunge into.

"Not a chance."

The bald man brought one hand down, and magical power instantly obliterated the bubble.

Then, however, he looked back at the multiverse behind him in surprise.

"They still managed to slip into one of the possibilities."

He pressed a hand to his forehead, looking troubled. "But I erased their primary consciousnesses. They probably won't be able to revive.

"At worst, another universe will be pushed to the brink. Across all those countless multiverses, that seems like a bearable loss."

"A version of me exists in that world, too. Sorry for the trouble, but I'll have to ask him to keep an eye on things."

Brad was an American boy who looked perfectly ordinary.

His scrawny body and pallid complexion were common among United States youths of that era.

But Brad was different.

When he was very young-or rather, ever since a high fever that had nearly killed him-he seemed to have possessed a peculiar gift.

Along with that gift came scattered images of memories, too disjointed to form a coherent whole.

In the broken memories that surfaced occasionally, he was someone from the future.

That future was bloody, terrifying, and filled with slaughter. With the apocalypse upon it, the world no longer distinguished between nations.

He had joined an organization called the Resistance.

Some of the older people there, whose features and skin color resembled his, told him he was probably of Chinese descent. On a slip of paper he carried, a name was written in Chinese: Li He.

But between those merciless killing machines and the nuclear radiation blanketing the globe, only a few places remained where ordinary people could survive, and the very concept of nations had vanished.

People with yellow, black, and white skin all used a mixed language, said to have survived from the Chinese and English spoken in peacetime.

At first, the Resistance still had elderly survivors from those peaceful days, who told them about the ancestral ties they might once have had.

But once the boys who joined the Resistance grew up and grew old, and every older fighter around them had died, things changed.

That custom no longer existed within the Resistance.

Those inexplicable memories were far too dark. Fragmented though they were, they filled Brad with profound fear, so that every time he woke, he felt grateful that the place where he lived was still relatively peaceful.

Most of the time, however, Brad could not remember the contents of his dreams when he woke.

The nightmares followed Brad as he grew up. Ever since those unusual gifts had awakened, he had scarcely enjoyed a good night's sleep.

His already scrawny body grew even frailer, as though any common illness could carry him off.

Yet it was precisely this that allowed him to avoid military service, just as he had hoped. After all, a soldier suffering from nervous exhaustion would be little use on a battlefield.

As a result, Brad became one of the few young people left in the little town where he had grown up.

The others his age had all joined the military under the onslaught of propaganda and indoctrination.

It would have been impossible to say Brad wasn't envious. After all, he had little education and limited ability to think for himself, making him easily swayed by outside influences.

Especially by the towering figure holding a round shield, promoted as an inspirational icon in recruitment and war bond advertisements.

That figure embodied the dreams of countless United States teenagers at the time.

But what Brad envied was only the world outside. Because of his nightmares, he had little taste for war.

And so Brad finally made up his mind. He would leave and try his luck in a big city.

Although he was too frail to enlist, perhaps his unusual gift could prove useful.

At the very least, he could make something of himself!

His discovery of that unusual gift had actually begun with a coincidence.

A military officer stationed elsewhere had returned to the little town to visit his family, and showed the many children gathered around him something he called a walkie-talkie.

The little town still retained the atmosphere of the previous century, after all. In a place where every household used kerosene lamps, electronic devices were a novelty.

Then the officer began angrily slapping the black "brick" because its battery had died.

Brad, who had been squeezed to the edge of the crowd because of his frailty, suddenly sensed an incredible connection-a connection between himself and that large black lump of metal.

He furrowed his brow. Four or five meters away, a burst of static came from the walkie-talkie's speaker.

The dead brick, which had stopped working when its battery ran out, came back to life. The officer, who had felt he was losing his authority in front of the children, laughed triumphantly.

To Brad, however, that thing called a walkie-talkie was utterly insignificant compared with the terrifying constructs whose impressions sometimes lingered from his dreams.

The officer, who never considered why a machine with a dead battery would work normally, naturally had no idea that it was the doing of a child on the very edge of the crowd.

Brad, meanwhile, had sensed his connection to those technological constructs. He seemed able to "charge" them, and could also control them, switching them on or off at will.

Brad gradually confirmed this as he grew older.

The town's level of technology steadily improved, and everyone switched from kerosene lamps to electric light bulbs.

Brad was particularly obsessed. He spent every penny he earned from odd jobs on light bulbs. Of course, he couldn't afford more expensive "high-tech" products anyway.

Without any wiring, those bulbs hung from his ceiling as though they were properly installed. Late every night, once he was sure no one was watching, Brad would begin unleashing his ability with abandon.

He could light those bulbs at will, out of thin air.

Nighttime was Brad's playground. He always lit his house as brightly as day, and could easily sense exactly how much power the bulbs could withstand.

Then, unwilling to spend his entire life doing nothing but lighting bulbs, the young man set out for the big city with two light bulbs on his back.