"Aargh! Fuck!"

  The pain Glenn felt was barely bearable; despite everything, he didn't lose consciousness and remained lucid. The planet was in a deplorable state, a sea of fire covering it even as thousands of molten rocks fluttered about.

  All atmospheric layers had long since exploded, replacing the magnificent blue sky with a jet-black one filled with sparkling dots. It was the first time in his long life that Glenn could see space with such precision.

  He was fascinated, terrified, and in infamous pain all at the same time.

  After a particularly long time, Glenn had left the chaos created by the explosions and looked down at the earth—at least what was left of it, but it was no longer round.

  Glenn had finally left the semblance of a planet that remained; he was now outside this sphere in which he had lived for hundreds of thousands of years. Apart from the sharp pain that pierced his lungs due to the lack of air, he felt nothing in particular; he was now released into space.

  With no hope of ever returning to Earth.

  In addition to the lack of air, frost quickly permeated his body; the cold was no doubt less horrible than the flames he'd faced on Earth but still extremely painful. The pressure exerted on his body was such that he no longer had the will to even try to move.

  Even though it was physically impossible under the circumstances. Worst of all, for a reason he couldn't explain, his body, in addition to being frozen and suffering from a lack of air, was swelling, as if it were expanding into space.

  The sensation of feeling his skin, muscles, organs, and everything else slowly spreading out was both terrifying and extremely painful.

  Time had become a strange phenomenon to him; it seemed so long to Glenn that he couldn't even quantify it. He could still see the Earth where he'd once lived shattering into billions of burning pieces, covering the blackness of space with a subdued orange light.

  Despite everything he thought, he felt a wave of nostalgia invading his heart; every second he'd spent on Earth was tinged with a particular emotion: joy, serenity, but also regret, fear, or even madness.

  Due to less-than-optimal physical conditions, Glenn was unable to react to this sudden surge of emotion. He couldn't move or make the slightest sound. As for the Earth, it slowly finished disintegrating, spinning its billions of pieces around an indistinguishable central point.

  Glenn, on the other hand, simply stood there, drifting gently, very gently, through space, so gently that you'd think he wasn't even moving. Watching his old home, the planets around it, and the stars. In any case, there was nothing else he could do.

  Time went on, and he had spent so much time constantly suffering the effects of the vacuum of space on his body, along with its regeneration. In short, his immortality was making him suffer a lot, even if he had strangely begun to get used to it.

  In the end, even the sight of infinite space became tiresome—always the same stars, always the same void. The only thing that could be described as amusing was the slow reconstruction of the Earth. This allowed Glenn to realize that he'd spent an interminable amount of time drifting through the void of space.

  Every day, he saw the same scene, only noticing a change after an extremely long time. Thousands, even hundreds of thousands he didn't even know how many years had passed; it was impossible to know.

  Over time, Glenn was slowly going insane, the intense pain continually resonating through his body. Can you imagine? To suffer such pain for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.

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  Worst of all, his memory was slowly starting to fade in time; he couldn't remember his childhood and adolescence, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't remember a thing. The only fragment that remained was the memory of the ancient cave where he had become immortal. A memory he could hardly forget.

  Apart from that period, he had only bits and pieces of information left and had great difficulty remembering his family, which consisted of his mother and father, as far as he could recall.

  He continually dreamed of pleasure, and even eating became an obsessive desire, even though it had seemed so simple at one time, a long time ago. He would also philosophize at times, wondering about the reasons for his existence and imagining a world without truth—in short, complicated stuff.

  After an interminable time oscillating between boredom, sleep, madness, and pain, Glenn noticed a change in the solar system; the sun was showing signs of expansion, and it looked... bigger.

  At first, Glenn thought it was getting closer to the sun, but the fact that, apart from the sun, no other planet seemed bigger made him contradict this thought. He had two hypotheses, however: either the sun was getting bigger or the sun was moving.

  Still drifting aimlessly, the sun continued to move rapidly closer, and after a while, it swallowed up what was left of the Earth.

  At any rate, Glenn was now sure of it: the sun was growing and therefore inexorably closing in on him. After a very long time, Glenn too disappeared, like the Earth, into the bowels of the sun.

  'Aargh! Fuck! Holy shit!'

  Glenn was now in the middle of the sun, enduring its heat helplessly. The rest of his life at that moment oscillated between pain and coma, trapped in the sun itself.

  After what seemed like an extremely long time, Glenn finally emerged from inside the sun. Looking around, he could see nothing—no planet, stone, or anything else. All that remained were the distant twinkling stars he'd seen for what seemed like millions of years.

  Everything in the solar system had been swallowed up and reduced to ashes by the sun; everything had been swallowed up, and there was nothing left.

  As time went by, the sun returned to its ordinary size, even shrinking to the size of a shoebox. Then, in total silence…

  The sun exploded.

  The colossal, Dantesque explosion sent Glenn tumbling at terrifying speed, so fast that his head was spinning in all directions that he was barely able to see what was around him.

  Time passed without Glenn ever slowing down as his body was propelled at speeds of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of kilometres per hour. He had lost almost all his memories in the process, remembering only the day he discovered the translucent blue seed.

  He didn't even know if he'd had any family or friends; he couldn't remember a thing. All the while, he flew towards a universe yet unexplored.

  _________________________________________________________________________

  'This is it; I've gone mad, completely mad... '

  Around Glenn, there was nothing, really nothing. In the distance, he could see twinkling stars; sometimes he'd hit a few. More often than not, it was meteorites that diverted him irreparably from his initial trajectory, not that he had a precise destination in mind.

  After spending so much time drifting, well, what can I say? He was bored, really bored, seeing the same cold, gloomy landscape every day, sometimes very hot too.

  As if that wasn't enough, he was in pain—so much pain that he'd gotten used to it—not that it was really good news; for his body, yes, but not for his mind, the pain was perhaps the only thing that brought him even a little closer to his humanity.

  'Bah! It must be a few hundred thousand years since I lost my humanity anyway!'

  Long story short, he'd gone mad. Drifting for so long in space without being able to freely control his body, his body was completely inflated, crushed, and frozen at the same time, without even being able to make the slightest sound.

  How had he ended up there? Hm... Good question. even though he'd forgotten after all this time. Well, no! He'd forgotten everything except that! Except for that stupid day, the day he'd discovered that damn seed, and just thinking about the emotion he'd felt when he'd discovered it…

  A vein appeared on his forehead—well, not really, since the blood wasn't circulating properly. Today, he complained the most. He was alone too, in a sea of emptiness, trying to remember his past. This day, though, was the only thing his brain had forced itself to remember. With a long sigh—well, no, since he couldn't—he sighed, but inwardly this time.

  Obviously, he was talking to himself, hoping not to forget even his tongue. In short, it had been a million years since he'd had any fun.

  'Hahaha! Finally!'

  Time passed as slowly as ever, but this was a special day for Glenn: he was no longer in pain. He had definitely lost all pain sensitivity; he could no longer feel it. The mental and physical strain was so great that he could do nothing but think.

  But times had changed, and he felt freer and better than he ever had before. What's more, he had thawed strangely over time and could now move in infinite space without pain either.

  'Hahaha!'

  As a result, he couldn't help laughing. There was a strange kind of energy coursing through his body.