His life ended in a pool of his own blood, his heart pierced cleanly by a knife that broke the Geneva Convention. He didn't die in some dark filthy alleyway or in some random street robbery, but died in a brightly lit church right next to what was once a pristine altar now stained red with sprayed blood.
It was like a pleasant dream that became a grim nightmare.
Kael didn't even see his bride pierce his chest with the knife nor the cold dead eyes she had. All he thought was how this would put an end to his own parents' worries of having grandchildren to spoil and he could go back to his boyfriends' bedroom. He loved the three goofballs and their bright energy, but hated how he was forced to marry a woman he couldn't love.
Only feared.
He knew she fell in love with him, but despite many times where he gently declined her feelings, she obsessed over him further. Each denial led her deeper into some weird fantasy where, he assumed, that someone else was forcing him to deny her love like a toxic romance webnovel story. If he had better hindsight, he could have made a far better attempt to break her obsession over him.
Instead, he had let fear take control over his judgement.
The result was his death on his wedding day. After exchanging vows and rings, it was picture perfect for a split moment before the pristine white took on a dark shade of red. The color of his heart blood.
The world he grew up in for over nearly three decades faded to black before his eyes.
He didn't know what happened after his death. He thought it would all end into the pitch black nothing or he'd somehow be talking to Saint John at the pearly gates of Heaven, but the latter wasn't quite possible. He didn't believe in Big G or mainstream religion, but he was not an atheist.
Yet, instead of being greeted with either a peaceful scene above the clouds or a black void, he saw something far beyond anything else.
=={+}==
He woke up on a patch of pitch black grass with a quiet soft sound of water rushing in and out of a nearby sandy shore. The first breath he took, groggy as if waking up from a deep nightmarish slumber, felt too cold. It was like the very atmosphere itself was colder than liquid nitrogen or the dark side of the moon. From that first breath, and each subsequent breath after, it felt like his lungs should be frozen solid yet all it did to him was make it harder to breathe normally.
Then, he opened his eyes. What greeted him was not a peaceful morning sky or the pleasant loving embrace of his three boyfriends, but an endless black sky with blinking starlight.
Each star that blinked far above him felt impossible. To his knowledge, starlight was meant to last for untold eons in the observable night sky, but here, they barely lasted two seconds before fading back into the inky blackness. The sight itself stunned him as his mind tried to process what this meant.
That was when, as his mind tried to process what was going on, his memories returned like an incoming tsunami.
His early childhood, his parents, his formative years, his realization of being gay, and arguably the most important memories of why he was here: the killer bride. He remembered what that bitch had done to him at the altar and why they were even there at the first place.
"Damn that psycho whore!" he thought to himself as he took in another oppressive breath. "I should have listened to Jason and cancelled the wedding. If I had known her fantasies would make her do that, I'd have changed a ton of things."
The anger of his own death somehow helped him take deeper breaths, though that did not help much with the oppressive atmosphere itself. It was like there was no breathable air here or it was so saturated with denser gases that the human body was not built to handle efficiently. In some weird way, it felt like a bone-deep despair that would make others feel full of dread.
As for Jason, that was the name of one of his boyfriends and the first of them. He fell in love with Jason during a low point in his high school life and he went on three dates with this handsome man before formally asking him to be his boyfriend. For the first four years of their relationship, he could see Jason as one of the men he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. When the day of their fifth anniversary came up, Jason told him one of his deepest and precious secrets: Jason was not from his world.
The memory of the revelation made his anger dissipate slightly and light a small spark of hope.
Jason told him everything. He painted a very descriptive and vivid mental picture of a world where humans had advanced into interstellar travel and occupied a multitude of worlds. He spoke of stars of various sizes, shapes, stages of life, and even multiple stars in the same system with various worlds.
Another thing he spoke of was something he called the "Eternal System".
He told him everything he knew about it. How it was a vast and powerful System that outclassed even the so-called "overpowered systems" that most webnovel protagonists or fanfiction protagonists got. While it showed you everything about you in an oversimplified way, its true power laid in the fact it was adaptive.
Jason even explained that some quests, while seemingly standalone, could lead into qualifications for longer storylines.
The memory reminded him of the hours leading up to the wedding ceremony. Jason had ambushed him in the reception area before the main chapel and begged him to not go through with the ceremony. He informed him that, if he went in, he'd not be coming back out alive because the System told him that Charlotte (the bride) had planned to kill him as soon as the vows were exchanged and they were wed.
"I should've listened to him more," he thought to himself as he felt immense grief and regret for that choice. "If I had listened to his warning, I wouldn't be here and Charlotte wouldn't have killed me..."
All that would answer him in this strange depressive and oppressive place was the quiet sound of water nearby and soft breezes against his form. He was left alone with his own thoughts and feeling the true injustice of it all. That measure of grief, regret, and injustice was more than enough to reignite his anger and turn it into a wildfire.
He didn't understand it yet, but in this place between death and the Afterlife, he was the second person from his world to visit. The first one was a fellow native of his world named Nick Jackson.
He may not have woken up on the shoreline of the Sea and deal with the dark water, but he would have his own problems to contend with.
For this soul was now within the Abyssal Sea.
=={Marvel: Universe Core}==
Continued in: Core Formed.
Created: 4/12/26