Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, depending on how I would grow to look back on the event in the future, it seemed destiny had finally taken pity on my miserable self and my suffering as a perennial metaphysical vegetable was coming to an end in the form of a sudden explosion of sensations shaking up my world forever.
A rush of emotions and a thunderous maelstrom of lights flashed through my senses at a speed I was certain would have left me breathless and queasy at best, or writhing in epileptic seizures at worst, had I still been alive with a body to go with my consciousness. I had no explanation for the strange occurrence, but I weathered the storm, which thankfully stopped as quickly and suddenly as it had appeared, letting me shakily regain my bearings.
My world, however, had been flipped on its head and rather than the absolute darkness I had grown accustomed to over the past eternity, I was surprised to see that a new addition had been made to my domain in the form of a small little flickering blue flame, barely more than an ember or a spark, burning prettily in a cerulean glow, illuminating the ether.
For someone like me whom had just spent eons in the void, famished for even a small crumb of change and praying for something, anything to happen, this sudden source of light was a miracle and a dream come true all in one. I couldn't help but observe it in fascination for hours, almost immediately getting attached to it and becoming unnaturally invested in its survival and well-being, the mere thought of it disappearing again, leaving me alone to my wallowing and self-pity displeasing me greatly.
There was nothing but the small flame and me in the whole wide world, and I was mesmerized by the spectacle, watching it dance away as it shrank slowly, the light being swallowed by the surrounding emptiness, flickering away as tiny wisps lost their light at a steady rate.
I wasn't exactly sure why, but I knew part of me had instinctively imprinted on the little ember, and seeing it weaken was profoundly painful on a primal level in a way I had never experienced before, both physically, and emotionally. It felt as if the dying light was a direct manifestation of my very soul, and regardless of my brain rejecting such a nonsensical notion, it's slow death was bringing with it a sense of loss and doom that reverberated throughout my whole sense of self.
Naturally, such feelings were not appreciated, saddening me further at having to see myself die a second time, once again without being allowed to do anything about it, almost making me wish I had a body, if only to cry in my last moments and unburden myself from the emotions and feelings of bitterness and despair I had been cursed to bottle inside until the very end.
I was truly a cursed being if this was the fate the Universe had decided I deserved.
Why was I being tortured so? What had I ever done to find myself in such a position? Life was unfair, I had known that fact from the moment of my very birth, but this was just needlessly cruel, absolutely horrible and decidedly not justified as far as I was concerned.
Why should I have to suffer so much? Why should I be forced to watch myself be extinguished from existence again? What had I ever done to be humiliated so by nature itself?
No.
This was enough. I had been fate's punching bag for too long. I had been a powerless victim for my entire life and had kept being so after my death.
Not anymore.
I was done being a victim.
I did not want to die without a fight. No matter how pointless, or how low the odds in my favor were, I had already paid my dues. I refused to be a casualty of destiny any longer.
I wanted to live.
Channeling every single bit of my rage into it, I pushed my consciousness into the flame, willing it to rebel against the natural order, sharing with it my dearest wishes for it to survive, to grow stronger, relentlessly enhancing it with my despair at my impotent inability to fuel the flame and nurture it, cursing once again the uselessness of my pointless existence.
Surprisingly, my actions, even in my metaphysical ghost-like state had an effect on the outside world, and the ember suddenly grew into a larger flame, glowing slightly brighter, making me suddenly realize I had much more control over my situation than I had originally thought, quickly starting to work on pushing more and more of my energy into the flame. I was determined to never let it be extinguished as long as I still held a consciousness, even as it fluctuated back to its initial weakened state in a moment of surprised inattention from my part.
Focusing all my thoughts and projecting them into the little light source, I infused every bit of my wish for it to grow, to become a strong source of light and warmth in my otherwise desolate environment, closing in especially on how much hope and optimism finally having something to do in this purgatory made me feel.
As I had dreamed, the little flame responded to my feelings, growing larger and brighter, feeding off my encouragement, though this time, it did not simply explode into one large burst and subside, but rather slowly swelled from the inside and powered up gradually as I poured more of my attention into it, which didn't make sense.
Regular fire did not behave in such a manner.
Of course, fire as I had known it all my life was not classified as a gas; When put in a container, it does not expand or fill the space in the same way any other gas should. Similarly, it does not have a fixed, nor a stable shape, and should anyone try picking it up, it will burn through the hand, rather than keep the same form, which excludes it from being classified as a solid. The fact it does not keep a fixed volume also eliminates liquids from the options. Unfortunately, normal fire does not react to magnets, and it ceases to exist if not constantly fed and while the science I was aware of had not actually defined fire with a hundred percent certainty, it was more often than not considered plasma due to its free roaming electrons, which while not enough to grant me great insight on how it was supposed to behave, was more than enough for me to know that it was certainly not supposed to react to emotions, let alone be controlled by an ethereal bodiless presence such as myself, unless I still held some physical body without my knowledge.
Now, having spent the past thousands of years suffering in solitude due to my lack of body I knew I had died already, and had come to accept the fact that I had been a bodiless consciousness floating in the void for eternities now, and yet, the flame, which I had theorized to be a manifestation of my soul had responded to my feelings.
I had absolutely no evidence to support such a claim, but the only sensible hypothesis I could establish under such circumstances was that I was probably dealing with a higher plane of existence and I had already taken the form of some sort of spiritual energy I had never heard of before.
In all probability, the flame I was interacting with was not a real one, even if it looked and behaved like the real thing, leaking its energy into the ether, even when being fed by my efforts and my pouring of myself into it, the cyan color paled and diminished the further away it went from the center, hemorrhaging it's strength until it was no longer visible nor able to sustain itself any longer.
If anything, I was almost confident I was dealing with some form of pure energy, possibly a spiritual one based entirely around my soul or consciousness, which was somewhat of an exciting prospect, even for a dead man like me.
Either way, the only thing left for me to do was to infuse as much energy as I could into this new celestial body until it could sustain itself autonomously, which was much easier said than done.
It was unfortunate, but I had quickly realized that no matter how much effort I put into my mental encouragements, the results would always be the same in the end, with the flame immediately reverting to its initial state the second I lost focus, seeing as as the flame grew bigger, so did its surface area and the rate at which its energy dissipated into the darkness.
Definitely not wanting my efforts to be in vain, however, and after some thoughts, I jumped onto my next experiment, eager to see if I could control this strange energy in a more involved way than simply making it grow, visualizing as hard as I could the shape of a glowing cube floating in the middle of darkness where the flame stood.
Disappointingly, nothing at all changed, but refusing to be discouraged, I kept trying, changing my visualized form into a pyramid, and while it was slow going, I finally realized my mistake and altered the strategy I was using to go from imagining a new floating shape to visualizing the actual flame growing larger in volume and methodically elongate on all sides until it was of the size I had wanted it to become, and to my great happiness, it actually followed my instructions, becoming much larger, though the brightness of the glow faded somewhat.
Delighted with the quick progress, I concentrated even harder on pushing all my attention on the newly formed azure pyramid, imagining it changing, transforming into a different image, taking a more solid layer, smoothing its edges and giving it a rounder form.
All my geometry classes over the years had beaten into me the knowledge that the three dimensional shape with the smallest amount of surface area was a perfect sphere, which was the form I was aiming for in order to limit the rate at which the little source was leaking energy, and just as I had hoped, the light transformed from a little bonfire it had been growing to become, into a perfect ball, sparkling even brighter than before, though not illuminating as much of the darkness as it had been doing so far, which I considered to be an improvement as it meant less of my soul was being siphoned away at any given time.
Not sitting on my laurels, however, I redoubled my effort in feeding it, praying for the ball to grow brighter, while imagining its size not changing, willing the energy to condense further, imagining it becoming denser and losing its wispy nature in favor of a more tangible form.
Slowly but surely, the ball obeyed my mental commands, and I nurtured it for what could have been days or years, my situation and the uselessness of time not having changed despite the newfound activity, which had afforded me to have something to do, rather than wallow in my misery like I had been doing prior to the sapphire-colored apparition.
Luckily for me, however, it seemed the surprises and new developments were not done yet as my ball, which had started vibrating after being fed almost every bit of emotion I had ever felt as well as all of my life's memories suddenly grew tendrils, similar to a tree's roots going rogue in a random direction.
Panicking at the sudden change, I immediately shifted all my attention onto this newfound appendage, imagining it returning into the ball, before cursing when it kept growing instead, and I changed my approach from restraint, to nurture, making sure it had a more solid body, molding it into a perfect cylindrical tube, rather than the flaming mess and energy sinkhole it had naturally formed into the longer I let it be.
I mentally followed it along as it stretched further and further away from what I had grown to consider the core of my own existence, creating a squiggly circular path until just as suddenly as it had started growing, the root stopped moving and the energy pooled around the extremity, leaking again to be absorbed by the void, until I patched it and molded it into the form of a second ball.
I wasn't sure what exactly was happening, but I was quite pleased with this new set of circumstances, as the further my life force multiplied, the lesser the chances of my ultimate disappearance.
This second ball, despite acting exactly as the first had after my initial modifications of it, was much smaller and glowed more dully, but seeing as it had just been created, I wasn't that worried about it's disappearance, knowing it would grow to the same proportions as the root ball with some efforts and care from myself.
I had watched enough playthroughs of Empire building strategy games to know the cost of improvement for each tier grew exponentially and that if I wanted to see whether it was possible to have even more spheres of energy to hold my soul, I was better off feeding the second ball to the same point as the first, rather than keep growing the initial core until its next stage, the existence of which I hadn't even proved yet.
For that reason, I stopped pumping energy into my core and started instead hollowing out the tendril, making a tube of it, allowing the liquid-like substance filling my original ball into the new extension, nurturing it to grow as large as the first one had become.
As it did not have to build up from scratch and having the previous ball's progress to fan its expansion, it only took a fraction of the time for the new core to reach the same level as the first one, and sure enough, once that milestone was attained, a new tendril exploded from the new core, and just like before I followed it, hollowing it out and giving it a solid shape, in a manner more efficient than before, having gained some experience at the task.
Happy with the discovery that new orbs would be born as I filled the previous ones, and satisfied with having something to do to fend off the premature end of my existence at the hand of fate, I spent the next thousands of years working on growing my system of fail-safes, refining my technique, as well as improving the tubes, and inserting a separator inside, dividing the tubes into multiple channels once I realized the energy was not idle in the system anymore, traveling back and forth between the different bulbs, regardless of my intervention in an inefficient manner, having to fight off the current of incoming energy when trying to go towards a new node in the tree.
It took much longer than I would like to admit for me to realize the orbs were not made at random, but followed a very precise and complex plan, building the shape of a constellation, glowing cobalt with each star linked to the other by tubes feeding energy to each and every one of them.
A great wave of pride hit me when I realized the constellation represented me and my will to live, it was even roughly taking the form of a human body, or at least the respiratory system, looking surprisingly similar to veins.
Of course, any pride I might have built in my own skills shattered when I discovered the growth kept going even when I was distracted by trying to find a name for the constellation, a certain resonance having been established between the nodes, amplifying the levels of energy autonomously and without any input of mine, the creation of additional fuel even overtaking the natural evaporation of force due to the darkness' siphoning.
It was very good news, as it established my safety even more surely, as well as allowed me to spend more time refining the forms and shapes of everything, without having to worry about a loss of energy or rushing to keep up.
Happy with the newfound free time, I spent it by shaking things up and altering the entrances of my nodes into the form of hexagons, before following it up by shaping the tubes linking them into six different triangular channels, reserving three for incoming traffic while the rest were there for the outgoing fuel.
Almost immediately, the improvement and newfound efficiency was astonishing, the speed of the energy's travel between the nodes becoming almost instantaneous while the growth of the orbs became much more uniform, the newest ones catching up in size to even the initial root node.
It truly was a marvelous sight to witness.