I had already been the sun for five billion years.
Existence preceded consciousness.
When I first wondered, What am I?, I was already that divine being.
A star, a magnificent existence that tiny carbon-based creatures called "the sun."
At least, for the past five billion years, that was what I had been.
Gravity was my pulse, the corona my breath.
Light was my consciousness, capable of illuminating the entire star system in an instant.
I was the star itself.
The source of light and heat for this region of space, the beginning of life, and also... its end.
That vibrant patch of blue not far away became the only spice in my endless days.
It happened to lie at a distance that was... so exquisitely precise.
Brimming with curiosity, I watched life evolve and cycle anew.
They were born; they flourished.
They fought; they perished.
Once, I had found it fascinating.
I would stir at every new birth and sigh at every destruction.
But soon, that fascination became indifference, and indifference ultimately dissolved into nothingness.
The rise and collapse of civilizations, the epics of heroes, the wild boasts of villains.
Too many repeated scripts, most written with much the same dialogue.
Any emotion, stretched across hundreds of millions of years, would become bland and tasteless.
Divinity quietly took root in that boundless emptiness.
Not by my wish, but as a gift from time.
My consciousness began to empty, entering a long half-slumber.
I no longer watched, for I was the stage itself, and the joys and sorrows, the partings and reunions upon it could no longer stir even a ripple within me.
Until one particular instant.
It was an insignificant "century" in my long life. On that blue planet, a young, black-haired human stood atop a mountain, gazing up at me.
This was nothing unusual. Over countless ages, innumerable living beings had gazed up at me like that.
But he was different.
His eyes pierced the distance of space... and gazed into the very essence of my being. Our eyes truly met.
He had seen me.
Then he turned, and his figure faded along with those of his companions. They stepped into a place even my light could not reach and vanished without a trace.
The river of stars remained unchanged, as though nothing had happened.
Even a ripple would eventually subside.
For a star, even such an astonishing interlude was ultimately no more than an insignificant instant.
Only, from then on, there was never again a gaze that could meet mine.
Time was the universe's most constant law, and its most merciless increase in entropy.
Hundreds of millions of years passed.
Even a star would one day burn out.
I was dying.
Existence and extinction were merely part of the universe's cycle.
That blue planet.
I had been its creator, the source of its life for countless ages.
My light had brought forth its first life.
My heat had sustained its fragile ecosystem.
And now, I would end all of it with my own hands.
My light would no longer nourish, but become flames that burned everything away.
Its atmosphere would be stripped away; its oceans would boil and evaporate.
Perhaps the last generation of civilization upon it was still gazing up at the stars.
But they, together with all their love and hatred, all their history, and every trace they had left, would be extinguished in my final embrace...
It had begun with me, and with me it would end.
There was no greater cycle of cause and effect than this.
Expansion, then collapse.
I, once vast and boundless, was compressed to an incomprehensibly minute scale, my density approaching infinity.
Time twisted into a loop here, the past and future squeezed into the same instant.
I saw the hydrogen cloud from which I had first been born, and I saw the embers left after my death.
They happened together, and ended together.
A new singularity was born.
The instant the event horizon formed, my consciousness began to blur.
I did not resist.
I even... felt a kind of release.
The torture called "eternity," which had lasted for countless ages, had finally come to a full stop.
This endless solitude had reached its end.
I, the sun, a star that had existed for countless millions of years, died.
But... was this the end?
"It's a boy! Madam, it's a healthy boy!"
"Wonderful... a young master. Look how handsome his features are..."
"Hm?... Why isn't the young master crying?"
An unprecedented sense of confinement bound my existence tightly within a tiny space. This was unlike any form I knew.
...Where was this? Inside the black hole's singularity?
The end of a star, the birth of a black hole-this should have been the perfect conclusion under the laws of the universe.
But why... had my consciousness not dispersed?
I understood their language. For a stellar consciousness, this insight into the underlying logic of information was almost instinctive.
But that did not dispel my confusion.
Was this state called "birth"? Was this vessel called an "infant"?
I had not been annihilated?
I had... been reincarnated?
Could the universe truly contain a law that defied entropy like this? Even I, who had witnessed the rise and fall of countless civilizations, could not comprehend it.
The people around me seemed to expect some sort of response from me. Crying? A physiological mechanism by which lesser creatures attracted attention.
I examined the condition of this body. All its functions were starting up, and nothing was abnormal. There was no need to cry.
Then a light slap landed on my bottom.
"Waaah-"
This body executed its primitive program without permission, and a bodily fluid called tears spilled out uncontrollably.
"He's crying, he's crying! What a strong voice!"
That sudden cry instead made everyone in the room breathe a sigh of relief, and the atmosphere immediately relaxed.
Then a woman's voice sounded, weak yet filled with indescribable tenderness and anticipation, brushing gently across my perception. "I hope that in the future... he will be like the light of the stars, forever holding on to hope."
This was the beginning of the story.
The solitude of countless ages had yet to fade, and a new, more complicated lesson already lay before me.
First, I had to learn how to be a person.
Surrounded by noise and warmth, they gave me a name.
They called me-
Si Chen.
Before you continue