On a certain year, a certain month, a certain day, at a certain hour, minute, and second.
The world below remained unchanged—clear skies, thin clouds, no wind within the visible region.
Gwayne floated silently, gazing down at the distant land from an absolute, top-down perspective, quietly contemplating life—because, frankly, he had nothing else he could do.
He had long since lost track of how many years—or centuries—he had been stuck like this. He didn't even know what he looked like anymore. Sure, he could roughly gauge time by the cycle of day and night, but after watching it happen hundreds of thousands of times, he stopped bothering.
Was this... a kind of reincarnation?
Honestly, Gwayne had already made peace with the idea of "crossing worlds." Not because he was especially enlightened or could face death without fear, but simply because—well, back when his plane was going down in a catastrophic crash, he had realized pretty quickly how fragile life was. In that kind of situation, if you got a second chance—any second chance—it beat ending up as a splattered mess on the ground.
What he couldn't understand was: why the hell was his "new life" spent floating in the sky?
And not just for a few days or months. It had been God only knows how many millennia.
Gwayne didn't know what kind of state he was actually in. He couldn't move his viewpoint, couldn't feel a body—aside from sight, he had no other senses. He couldn't tell if he was a lingering soul or some floating space corpse stuck in orbit. But one thing was absolutely clear: he was no longer in a normal human condition.
Because no normal human mind could stay isolated for tens of thousands of years and still remain clear, intact, and self-aware.
Anyone else would've gone insane ages ago.
Yet here he was—lucid, with a memory sharper than ever.
Time had no hold on him. He could still recall, with brutal clarity, the last moments of his previous life: the deafening screams, the blaring alarms, the shuddering cabin, the spinning sky outside the window, his neighbor fumbling helplessly with a breathing mask, and that final, earth-shattering boom as the plane tore apart in midair.
It was vivid—like it happened yesterday.
And right after that explosion, when he opened his eyes again, he found himself floating above an alien world. No question about it—this wasn't Earth.
It hadn't taken him long to accept that he'd landed in another world.
But figuring out how to stop floating?
Yeah, no luck on that front.
He was stuck—anchored somehow. His entire existence reduced to an unchanging, downward-facing viewpoint over a specific stretch of land, surrounded by oceans. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't move, couldn't even glance sideways. For all he knew, maybe just beyond his field of vision was a white-bearded god holding a giant spotlight.
He would've laughed if he could. Hell, at this point, he would've welcomed a swim—even if it just meant seeing that old man with the spotlight.
But no. His locked perspective didn't allow for that.
Still, after who knows how long, Gwayne discovered something: while he couldn't turn or drift, he could zoom in and out. He could push closer or pull back, adjusting his "altitude" within the restricted viewing area.
That tiny discovery gave him a small taste of hope.
He spent what felt like years playing with the zoom function, pulling closer to the land below.
The land was lush, green, teeming with life.
If nothing else, he thought, maybe he could at least pass the time watching the world evolve—seeing the customs and lives of alien people.
So he zoomed in closer—so close he could see every blade of grass, every leaf.
And then he realized: there weren't any intelligent beings yet.
Not even one species that could walk upright.
But Gwayne had patience now—godlike patience. Maybe back when he was alive, he had been a little hot-tempered, but in this state? Patience was the only thing he had in abundance.
And so he waited.
He waited until the day some ape-like creatures finally stood on two legs.
He watched them discover fire.
The moment fire was born, everything changed.
Gwayne couldn't say why, but time suddenly seemed to speed up—or rather, his experience of it did. Civilization sprang up at a frantic pace. Tribes, then city-states, then early kingdoms. People wielded strange, mystical powers. Great nations rose and fell before he could even blink.
It was overwhelming.
But eventually, he realized: time itself wasn't speeding up—the problem was with him.
He was no longer observing in real time. Instead, his consciousness was flickering—only "waking up" every few years or decades to catch a snapshot before going dormant again.
Between those snapshots, he was... gone. His mind was completely offline.
When he came back, it felt seamless, but the world had changed drastically in between frames.
It hit him then: This is bad.
Really, really bad.
The thought, as simple as it was, probably took hundreds of years to form.
Because with each passing cycle, his active consciousness grew shorter and rarer. Kingdoms flourished and collapsed like time-lapse videos. Dragons—were they dragons?—appeared, soared across the land, and vanished.
Battles raged, empires crumbled, new civilizations took root.
And all the while, Gwayne's awareness was fading, fragmenting.
He could feel it: his mind, his identity, his very self was disintegrating. Soon, there wouldn't be enough of "Gwayne" left to even realize he was gone.
Maybe a hundred years would pass in what felt like a blink.
Maybe a thousand.
And soon, even those blinks would stop.
He had to escape. He had to get out—somehow, anyhow.
He didn't care if it meant falling back into that doomed plane crash—anything was better than dying in this slow, surreal death.
Desperation gripped him. He fought to think faster, to stay awake, to do something—but it was like trying to swim against an ocean of molasses.
The world below blurred faster and faster, his mind staggering along at an ever-slower crawl.
Then, just as he felt his final thoughts slipping away—
A voice echoed from nowhere: "Energy failure. Host system reboot failed. Escape protocol initiated."
The fixed viewpoint vanished.
Gwayne was plunged into darkness.
But for the first time in forever—he could still think even with his eyes closed.
He didn't know how long he drifted in that darkness. It felt like falling, like crashing into something cold and confining. Sensations he'd long forgotten returned—pain, cold, pressure, the weight of a real body.
Confused and overwhelmed, he caught a faint, panicked voice from nearby—a young woman shouting: "Wait—don't kill me yet! Forget about me—the old ancestor's coffin is about to burst open!"
Hey everyone... I'm back!