Remade Immortal Chapter 1

This is a rough draft for one of the ideas I've been working on. A story that asks the question of what kind of person would deliberately choose to go to a Xianxia world. I've got a couple of ideas I'm currently outlining and drafting so I'll be sharing some here as I work on them.

Let me know what you think!

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Basil was working a Saturday night shift when the fabric of reality ripped and left a hole of black nothingness where the dairy section used to be.

His manager cursed and ducked behind the counters, dropping the cell phone she was talking into. The customers who had come in five minutes before closing screamed and scrambled out the automatic doors. Basil was stock still on the edge of reality. The hole stopped right before his feet, slicing off the tips of his sneakers. He had stepped back after stocking the whole milk which most likely saved his life, had he been any closer he would have vanished with his hard work.

He felt an empty pang at the thought of the lost milk. That was an hour of his life he wouldn’t get back.

He curled his now-exposed toes and carefully took a step back. The hole was both tall and down, and extended into a fathomless abyss. At any moment it felt like the portion of existence he stood on would collapse like cloth and pitch him into its depths. He took another step back.

He felt safer now. So it would be okay to gaze into the abyss, right? At the very least he had to take a picture, maybe even a selfie. The soft clicking of the phone camera broke the stillness that had settled over this store.

This was nice, Basil decided. It was too bad it didn’t happen eight hours earlier. The most amazing event in human history and he still couldn’t get a day off from work. He stared into the deep. A sudden, inexplicable urge filled his chest and he stepped forward.

His phone disappeared into the bottomless deep.

It was stupid but he was satisfied. He couldn’t help but feel disappointed though, as interesting as this was, it wasn't really going to change his life. At the very least something could crawl out of the hole. He could befriend it, or fight it. He looked around for potential weapons and rated his odds of beating an eldritch abomination in a fistfight. Something flashed in the corner of his eye. Something flashed in endless black. Shivers raced down his spine and leaned over to spot the light in the darkness.

A small blue dot.

It was so obvious now that he looked at it that he was surprised he didn’t see it before. It was impossible to tell what it was, an impossibly vast distance separated them. Yet just as impossibly he knew what it was. He could feel it in his bones, a long-buried calling opened its eyes once more and screamed in a child’s voice.

A new world.

Basil reached out to grab it and tipped over the edge. The abyss took him and he embraced it, willing himself towards that far-off world.

Unfortunately what lay beyond reality was more reality.

The void in reality became the vacuum of space and the vacuum of space became death. Basil desperately looked for his new world as the air was stolen from his lungs and his saliva boiled in his mouth.

On the verge of unconsciousness, he saw light instead.

One brilliant gold and one silver-gray light locked in mortal combat. Separated by hundreds of miles the two living lights captured his mind and would not let go. They saved him from blacking out, now he would die awake.

At the same moment Basil noticed them, he was noticed in turn.

It had been but a few seconds since he was deposited into the vacuum of space and began to die of exposure. Another second since he noticed the lights. In the second after that the golden light snuffed out the silver light and then swallowed Basil whole.

The world became gold and Basil stopped dying, not because he could breathe again or stopped boiling. The light would not let him die, either from space or itself. He felt it now as it seared him even as it kept him alive. This was a power far beyond him.

In front of him appeared a man. Over seven feet in height and clothed in a yellow robe that shifted like molten gold. A coiling dragon breached from metal waters and defiantly roared before diving once more. Basil could not turn his eyes away, they burned.

“How did you find your way here I wonder?” The golden man mused. He did not speak any language Basil knew of and yet his words echoed through his body and forced him to understand. “Did the aftershocks of our fight extend into another universe?”

Basil did not answer him because he could not. Despite being spoken too there was only room for one voice in this golden world.

“You seem to have fallen through a crack then and found yourself here. Sheer happenstance, truly a twist of fate.” The golden man seemed amused. “Your sudden arrival distracted the Desolate Cicada Lord long enough for this king to land the decisive blow. That means you’ve helped slay an Immortal Emperor.” The golden man laughed and the world of gold shook with his joy. “I dare say you’re the first mortal in history to ever do so. Such an accomplishment deserves a reward. Do not fear I shall return you to your home.”

Basil shook as the golden man’s promise reverberated within him. He would not go back, there was another place he had to go. With exhaustive effort, he pulled his riveted eyes away from the golden man and gazed over his shoulder. Even in this world of golden light, he could feel that far-away blue spot.

“Oh?” Just like that, Basil’s eyes were immediately fastened to the golden man once more. He casually looked over his shoulder as if the world Basil sought was just behind him instead of countless light years away. “You want to go there?”

Basil tried to put all his being into his eyes.

The golden man smiled.

“Even an ant knows to reach for heaven. This is why I have yet to give up on humanity.” He pointed and a drop of liquid gold flowed from his finger and shot into Basil’s forehead and buried itself in his mind. “If you become a Golden Immortal then seek out the Court of Heavenly Triumph, if fortune is kind then we may meet again.”

With another swish of his finger, the golden man wrapped Basil in a cocoon of golden light and sent him hurtling off into space.

Within the golden cocoon, Basil watched the universe stretch and bend as it struggled to keep up with its speed. The longer his eyes stayed riveted on the sight of a lifetime the better he could ignore the golden man’s power scouring his body. It reached into every cell and fiber of his being and destroyed them. That same destructive force then saved him from itself before beginning the cycle anew. He could feel the power’s protectiveness and desire to carry him safely but even an ant would be harmed by a giant’s gentleness, and he was less than an ant when compared to the golden man.

So he burned. He burned through the death of stars and the birth of planets. He burned through the horrors, incomprehensible in scale, that made their home in the dark of space. He burned through the cocoon slamming into a planet and burrowing through its core and out the other end. He burned through light and dark, gravity and time. He burned across a dawn horizon of 100 million suns.

He burned as his prize, that blue marble he had spotted an entire universe away, rose in orbit in front of him. So much like Earth with its blue waters and green continents but so utterly dwarfing his old home in scale. Basil burned as he passed its white crystal moon and the planet-sized tree that grew on its yellow sun. He laughed as he burned and entered its atmosphere and split apart its clouds. The divine power that carried him peeled away in layers and like a dying meteor grew thinner and thinner the closer it got to the surface. Eventually, only a film of golden light remained and it gently set him on the surface with the force that cratered the ground beneath him and sparked an inferno that roared up and swallowed his view of the new world.

Basil blacked out with a smile in a bed of fire and dust.