I had already been the sun for five billion years.
People said: existence preceded consciousness.
When the thought What exactly am I? first arose in me, I was already that divine being.
They called me... the sun.
Gravity was my pulse, and the corona was my breath.
That will named "light" could illuminate the entire stellar system with a single thought.
I was the star.
As the source of light and heat for all living beings, I had witnessed the beginnings of countless species and granted them their ends.
Only that nearby celestial body, radiating azure vitality, offered a sliver of solace in my endless solitude.
It hovered at just the right distance.
Filled with wonder, I watched life evolve and cycle through birth and death.
They were born, they flourished,
They struggled, they perished.
I had once found it interesting.
I would stir at every new birth and sigh at every destruction.
But soon, that interest became indifference, and indifference finally turned to nothingness.
The rise and collapse of civilizations, the epics of heroes, the wild declarations of villains.
Too many repeated scripts, most written with similar lines.
Any emotion, stretched across hundreds of millions of years, would become bland and tasteless.
Divinity quietly took root within that boundless emptiness,
Not by my wish, but as time's gift.
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, partings and reunions upon it could no longer stir a single ripple within me.
Until a certain moment.
It was an insignificant "moment" in my long life.
It was also a "variable" never seen before in the five billion years this universe had been running.
On that azure planet, a black-haired human youth stood on a