Chapter 1: I Am the Star (Only Chapter 1 is written in first person)

I have been the sun for five billion years.

Existence precedes consciousness.

By the time I first asked myself "what am I," I had already become It.

A star — a magnificent existence that tiny carbon-based creatures called "the Sun."

At least, that is what I had been for the past five billion years.

Gravity was my pulse; the corona was my breath.

Light was my consciousness — illuminating an entire galaxy in an instant.

I am the star.

The source of light and heat for this stellar region. The origin of life, and its… end.

That vibrant blue speck not far away became the only seasoning in my endless expanse of time.

It sat at just the right distance — a precision so exquisite it bordered on the miraculous.

With curious wonder, I watched life evolve and cycle through its endless turns.

They were born; they flourished.

They struggled; they perished.

I once found it interesting.

I would stir at every new birth, and sigh at every destruction.

But soon, that interest became indifference, and indifference dissolved into nothingness.

The rise and fall of civilizations, the epics of heroes, the ravings of villains —

Too many repeated scripts, most written with the same lines.

Any emotion, stretched across hundreds of millions of years, eventually loses all flavor.

Divinity quietly took root in that boundless emptiness —

Not by my will, but as a gift from time itself.

My consciousness began to drift, slipping into a long, half-dormant state.

I no longer watched, for I was the stage itself. The joys and sorrows playing out upon it could no longer stir even the faintest ripple in my depths.

Until one particular moment.

It was an insignificant "hundred years" in my long life. On that blue planet, a black-haired young human stood at a mountain peak, gazing up at me.

This was, in itself, nothing unusual. Over billions of years, countless beings had looked up at me just the same.

But he was different.

His eyes pierced through the distance of space… and fixed upon my very essence. A true meeting of gazes.

He saw me.

Then he turned, his silhouette fading alongside his companion's, stepping into a place where even my light could not reach — and vanished without a trace.

The river of stars remained unchanged, as though nothing had happened at all.

Even ripples, in time, will settle.

For a star, even such a startling interlude was ultimately nothing more than a fleeting, insignificant moment.

Only — from that day on, there was never again a gaze that could truly meet mine.

* * *

Time is the most constant law in the universe, and also its most merciless entropy.

Hundreds of millions of years passed.

Even a star has a day when its fuel runs out.

I was dying.

Existence and extinction are merely part of the universe's cycle.

That blue planet.

I had been its creator, the wellspring of its life across billions of years.

My light had kindled the first sparks of life.

My warmth had sustained its fragile ecosystem.

And now, I would end it all with my own hand.

My radiance would no longer nourish — it would become a blaze that consumed everything.

Its atmosphere would be stripped away; its oceans would boil and evaporate.

Perhaps the last generation of civilization still stood upon it, gazing at the stars.

But all their love and hatred, all their history, all their traces — everything would be extinguished in my final embrace…

Begun by me, ended by me.

The cycle of cause and effect — nothing more, nothing less.

Expansion, then collapse.

The once-vast and boundless me was compressed to an incomprehensibly minute scale, density approaching infinity.

Time twisted into a loop here; past and future were squeezed into the same instant.

I saw the hydrogen cloud from my birth, and the embers left after my death —

Happening simultaneously. Ending simultaneously.

A new singularity was born.

In the instant the event horizon formed, my consciousness began to blur.

I did not resist.

I even… felt a sense of release.

That torment called "eternity," which had lasted for hundreds of millions of years, had finally come to an end.

This boundless solitude had reached its conclusion.

I — the Sun, a star that had existed for roughly billions of years — was dead.

But… was this truly the end?

* * *

"It's a boy! My lady, it's a healthy baby boy!"

"Wonderful… a young master — just look at those fine features…"

"Hmm?… Why isn't the young master crying?"

An unprecedented sense of confinement locked my existence tightly within a narrow space — unlike any form I had ever known.

…Where was this? The interior of a black hole's singularity?

The death 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-level consciousness, this kind of intuitive grasp of the underlying logic of information was almost instinctive.

But it did nothing to resolve my confusion.

This state was called "birth"? This vessel was called an "infant"?

I had not been annihilated?

I had… reincarnated?

Could there truly exist in the universe a rule so contrary to entropy? Even I, who had witnessed the rise and fall of countless civilizations, could not comprehend it.

The people around me seemed to be expecting some kind of reaction from this body. Crying? A physiological mechanism by which lower lifeforms attract attention.

I examined the state of this body — all functions were initializing, nothing abnormal. There was no need to cry.

Then, a light smack landed on the backside.

"Waaah—"

This body executed its primitive programming on its own. A bodily fluid called tears spilled out, beyond my control.

"It's crying! What a strong, clear voice!"

That sudden cry actually made everyone in the room breathe a collective sigh of relief, and the atmosphere instantly lightened.

Then, a weak voice — carrying an indescribable tenderness and longing — rose and gently brushed across my awareness: "I hope he will be… like the light of the stars, forever carrying hope."

This was the beginning of the story.

The solitude of billions of years had not yet faded, and already a new, far more complex challenge 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.

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Edited by Fat Goose