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The emptiness stretched out as far as the eyes could see.
The clan boat gently waded in the void, treading the unending ink with no issues. The heavy mechanical oars automatically rowed them in a direction that couldn’t be named and which no one dared try to.
Xisuma was used to it, it had been this way ever since he was born. The only breaks in the darkness were the dead and dying worlds that they would come across occasionally. The world sat empty of Players and nothing but the degraded code remained.
Of course, that was what they all wanted. That code was their lifeblood, something they could break down into its 1’s and 0’s so that it was easy to reconfigure the code into something more useful than the empty planets. Fuel for their ship, food for their bodies, weapons in their hands and clothes on their backs.
It was a mostly quiet existence—forever moving forward to live. He wouldn’t exactly call it boring; it was just… life. Something he was so used to that it became like another part of himself. He was forever on his boat, never stopping to smell the metaphorical flowers.
Xisuma was fifteen cycles old and he wanted more.
Of course, as the clan elders would tell him and his brother, everyone went through these thoughts, thoughts of wandering into the alive worlds, active servers and existing alongside the colourful cooking pot of Players. But it was never to be.
Their lungs, their bones, their hearts. They were made for the Void, too weak to ever truly exist among other Players.
Ex had shouted back at the elders, fueled with a fire Xisuma could never really match. He had just looked down at his gloves, hands hiding his dark purple joints with sorrow.
That sorrow hadn’t lasted, nor had Ex’s anger.
But it did not become the same helpless inaction the elders had claimed he would feel.
It fueled something so much more important.
A drive to create, a drive to prove them wrong.
So here Xisuma watched, waiting for a dead world to come into view. A world whose code he and his brother would shape into something better. Something to let them walk into those servers as free as any other Player.
They would shape their future, one set of code at a time.
Until they could manage the pressure.
Until their hearts wouldn’t burn with the weight of gravity.
Until their bones wouldn’t break under the stress.
Until then.