Chapter 1: Chaos Within Contemplation

Before all time had been named, before cause and effect were still tangled like mist and had not yet learned to arrange themselves into before and after, the divine once sank into a long and boundless contemplation.

(It was not sleep. It was more like an opened eye gazing at itself inside the void.)

The divine’s thoughts had no boundary and no direction. They were like stardust scattered by an invisible wind, brightening and dimming in the dark, revolving, pursuing one another; and like light that had not yet learned how to fall, hovering between existence and nonexistence, lingering there, unwilling to choose a form.

Some thoughts were gentle, like first snow falling on unnamed earth; some thoughts were fierce, like stars that had not yet taken shape, rumbling softly within their own weight.

They drew near one another and repelled one another, overlapped, misaligned, and rewrote each other. There was no order, but there was longing everywhere.

At the instant when countless thoughts layered upon one another and surged back and forth like a tide, WentUrc was born.

WentUrc was not “created.” It was more like the natural overflow of the divine’s thought: the trace left when imagination, after losing all restraint, cooled by itself inside the void, crystallized, and took form.

So from the moment of its birth, it was extremely beautiful.

The sky did not obey height. Seas of cloud rose from the ground, like white mountains migrating slowly through the air; shadows hung upside down, and light flowed beneath one’s feet, so that walking felt like treading on the underside of the sky.

Rivers did not know direction. Water spilled from the mountaintops, then turned back in midair, condensing into transparent arcs and bridges in the air; droplets hovered, like tears that had not yet fallen, reflecting images that did not yet exist.

Flowers bloomed at night. They drank moonlight, their petals spreading gently in the dark like thin star charts; while the stars drooped low in daylight, like weary lamps, faintly flickering in the lower places of the sky.

Gravity would hesitate because of a song. When melody rose, stones forgot to fall, mountains trembled slightly as if listening; the wind circled around the notes and was slow to leave.

Everything here was real. It had warmth when touched and weight when watched.

Yet none of it could be repeated.

Because WentUrc’s beauty did not come from rules, but from: thoughts born in an instant and scattered in an instant.

However, it was precisely this unreserved freedom that made WentUrc unable to remain in “harmony” for long.

When beauty no longer waited for beauty, when miracles competed with one another for the space of existence, the world began to tremble lightly and continuously.

Yesterday’s rainbow had not yet faded before it tore open today’s sky; this morning’s sea of flowers was still breathing and had already drowned last night’s village in silence.

A bell rang, but there was no echo; a footstep fell, but there was no direction.

None of this held malice, yet it was full of collisions that could not be avoided.

Cause and effect hesitated here. A line had not yet been drawn straight before it was covered by a new possibility; time lost its way here, like a bird without a shadow, flying back to the same instant again and again.

One wish had not yet completed itself before another wish erased it from farther away.

WentUrc was like a child loved without limit. It had countless names, but did not know which one it should answer; it had countless futures, but could not choose the first step.

With every breath it took, a miracle would be born; and with every breath it released, another miracle would quietly go out without anyone meaning for it to happen.

At first, the divine watched all of this with tenderness in the heart.

For every fissure in WentUrc, every tremor, every disorderly blooming, had once been a true and burning thought of the divine.

But contemplation brings fatigue in the end. When the divine realized that beauty, if it could not remain, would finally become a weight impossible to bear, like all the stars falling at once into a single heart, the divine fell silent.

(The wind briefly stopped in that moment. Clouds ceased flowing, light and shadow hung in midair, as if the whole world were holding its breath.)

The divine did not send down punishment and did not erase the world. The divine only… slowly looked away.

And so WentUrc lost the final gaze. Not destroyed, but left behind.

At that instant, WentUrc did not collapse at once. The sky still hung low, rivers still flowed backward, and flowers still breathed in the night.

Only, among countless miracles, a gap appeared for the first time.

A feeling that could not be filled, could not be rewritten, and could not be covered by beauty:

loneliness.