Chapter 1: What the Hell Is This “Perspective” I’ve Become?

On an unspecified year, month, day, at an unspecified hour, minute, and second—

The world below remained as usual: clear skies, no wind, sparse clouds.

Gawain quietly gazed down at the distant land from an absolutely overhead vantage point, silently pondering life—after all, there wasn’t much else he could do.

He had long since lost track of how many years, or even millennia, he’d been stuck like this. He didn’t know what form he currently took. Though he could roughly gauge time by the cycle of day and night, after hundreds of thousands of such cycles, he’d simply stopped counting.

So, this counts as “crossing over,” right?

Honestly, Gawain was surprisingly okay with the whole “crossing over” thing. Not because he was some enlightened sage who viewed life and death with detachment, but because in his previous life, when he fell from a plane, he’d already come to terms with the impermanence of life and the inevitability of death. After all, if you’re already a goner, getting a chance to cross over somewhere else beats just crashing and dying.

What he couldn’t wrap his head around was how, after crossing over, he ended up just… floating in the sky.

And not just for a little while—he’d been drifting for who knows how many tens of thousands of years.

Gawain had no idea what state he was in. He couldn’t shift his perspective or feel his body. In fact, aside from vision, he’d completely lost all other senses. He couldn’t even tell if he was a lingering soul or some kind of space-floating corpse orbiting a planet. The only thing he was sure of was that he was definitely not in any normal human state.

Because he was certain no normal human mind could stay sane, coherent, and fully intact after drifting alone in the sky for tens of thousands of years—and still have the leisure to contemplate life.

A normal person would have gone mad long ago.

But he hadn’t. Not only that, his memory was razor-sharp.

Countless millennia had passed without dulling Gawain’s recollections. To this day, he could vividly recall the final moments of his previous life—the piercing screams, the alarms blaring, the violent shaking of the cabin, the endless rolling sky and earth outside the window, the breathing mask his neighbor couldn’t get on no matter what, and the deafening explosion as the plane broke apart midair.

Everything was as clear as if it had happened yesterday. And he remembered the shock when he opened his eyes again and found himself floating above an unfamiliar planet.

From that moment on, he knew the land beneath him was no Earth. He took some time to deduce and accept that he had arrived in another world, then spent even longer trying to figure out how to stop floating like this.

Unfortunately, that second goal failed.

He discovered he was “fixed” in place—or rather, his current form might not even have the ability to move. He had become a fixed vantage point, locked rigidly in position, looking down at the land below. But even that view was limited: he could only see a patch of irregular continent surrounded by a ring of ocean. His vision couldn’t extend beyond that.

He couldn’t turn his gaze left or right, so he had no way of knowing if there were other lands beyond the ocean. For the same reason, he’d never seen the night sky of this world.

He wasn’t even sure if other celestial bodies existed—maybe if he could just turn his head, he’d see some white-bearded god holding a spotlight, shining down on everything.

Damn it, he just wanted to float on his back…

Even if all he saw was that white-bearded old man with a spotlight, it’d be better than this.

But it was all wishful thinking. This fixed overhead perspective couldn’t be changed.

After a long time of trying, Gawain finally found one small thing he could control: while he couldn’t move his view side to side, he could zoom in and out within that limited field of vision.

Discovering this made him happy for quite a while. He experimented with zooming, though even zooming out to the maximum didn’t reveal anything beyond the ocean ring. At least zooming in let him see what was on the continent.

It was lush and vibrant—obviously teeming with life.

It would be nice to watch the daily lives of these otherworldly beings. Even if he was stuck floating here, at least observing their customs might ease his boredom.

So he zoomed in as close as possible, until he could see every blade of grass and leaf clearly.

That day, he despairingly realized that none of the mammals on the land…

Had yet learned to walk upright.

But it was okay. Gawain had patience—maybe not much in his previous life, but after becoming a fixed perspective, he found he had an almost infinite amount.

He waited until those monkeys finally learned to stand upright.

Then many years later, he witnessed the birth of the first man-made fire.

Flint and steel.

Change came after that fire was born.

Gawain didn’t know exactly what happened, but after that first spark, everything seemed to “speed up”—or maybe his own perception of time was breaking down. The events on the land unfolded rapidly, like a video fast-forwarded countless times.

He saw those humanoid creatures quickly build primitive tribes, which grew into early city-states. He saw them wield incredible powers, using techniques that seemed like magic to expand their territories. But before he could fully grasp what was happening, those early kingdoms crumbled into ruins, only for new humanoid beings to rise from the rubble.

Humans and various other races fought for survival on the continent. They built kingdoms, worshipped countless gods, waged wars under their names, then vanished just as quickly.

The pace kept accelerating, and Gawain gradually found himself overwhelmed by the flood of information. He saw dragon-like creatures suddenly appear in his view, but couldn’t tell if they evolved on the continent or came from beyond the seas.

He saw weapons rise, wars that nearly burned the entire land, but then new civilizations sprang up in the blink of an eye.

After a long time, he realized it wasn’t the land’s progress that sped up—it was that he was “skipping” huge chunks of information.

His “observation” had become fragmented. What started as continuous viewing turned into glimpses every few years or even decades. These huge time jumps made it seem like everything was happening faster.

He hadn’t noticed this before because during those gaps, his own thinking was frozen.

When the observation resumed, his thoughts picked up seamlessly, so he never realized anything was wrong.

This was bad.

The words flashed through Gawain’s mind like lightning: “Trouble ahead.”

But that lightning thought probably took hundreds of years to form.

Because as the words appeared, another kingdom crumbled from glory to ruin.

Gawain didn’t understand what was going on, but he knew this was far from normal. From the fleeting images spanning years, he realized his mind was fading.

Every hundred years, he might only get less than a second of actual thought.

And the “thinking gaps” were growing longer.

The leaps in time on the land had become absurd. The flickering “slides” were almost incomprehensible.

At this rate, at some point, the consciousness called “Gawain” would completely vanish in this strange place. He would fall into eternal sleep with no chance of reboot.

For the first time in countless millennia, Gawain felt urgency. He frantically pushed his mind, desperate to break free. He felt his thoughts racing (if he still had a brain), ideas bursting forth like a flood.

But watching the flickering images on the land, he knew his thinking was actually slowed to one frame per thousand years.

Well, that was an exaggeration, but not by much.

Break free, break free, break free, break free…

No matter what it took, no matter how, he had to escape this state—even if it meant returning to that doomed plane. Anything was better than dying in this bizarre limbo.

His mind began to cloud, consciousness blurring. The once seamless flow of thought faltered. He raged and struggled to think harder, but as a fixed perspective, no amount of anger could change his fate.

Just as he felt his mind about to dissolve or freeze forever, a voice suddenly echoed from nowhere:

“Power failure. Mainframe reboot failed.

Escape protocol activated.”

In the next instant, the fixed perspective vanished—Gawain was plunged into darkness.

But his thoughts did not stop.

For the first time in countless years, he was still thinking with his eyes closed.

He didn’t know how long he stayed in the dark. He felt as if he were tumbling, falling into a cold, cramped place. Strange sensations flooded his limbs, scrambling his mind.

Amid the chaos, he faintly heard a young woman’s voice, panicked:

“Don’t… don’t kill me yet! Compared to this, your ancestor’s coffin lid is about to pop off!”

(Everyone! I’m back!)

(End of chapter)