I’ve walked through the irregular landscape with much difficulty, as the stone ocean was full of sudden slopes, and swirls, and splashes frozen in time, as if the sheer distance between me and the Voting Tower wasn’t enough.

I’ve spent years stumbling forward, struggling against my own constantly decaying body, time in which my kin didn’t stop creating more and more limiting things and branding them in my body.

Each action of mine seemed to weigh a world and left me even more exhausted than I felt when standing still, yet I walked forward. The Voting tower was a whole series of constellations away from me, yet I walked forward.

Just by physically moving through that plan, it would take me millions of years to reach the Creation Pool. But that didn’t seem to be enough for my kin to gather so far away from me.

“[Monsters]”, a loud voice reverberated through the whole plane of existence, and nearby, a new sign was engraved in stone.

Then, from a stone wave before me, a black furry hand crept up. Then another one, and another one, and many more, and then a pillar-like body from which many arms and legs came out. The huge thing jumped from the top of the stone wave right over me, and immediately started to grip onto my limps, and pull them off my torso.

“Aargh!”, I screamed in mind-breaking agony, for all that happened in the fifth world was more real, and therefore more intense, than anywhere else.

However, weakened as I was, I was still one of the creators of reality, limitless, and therefore, concepts like debility were blurry when applied to me: though the monster ripped my limps off, new ones sprouted from the wounded areas immediately after… Only to be ripped off once more immediately.

The pain, humiliation, and terror engraved in my flashed out like more intense than ever, and I could do nothing but squirm and gag on my own blood, try to drag myself away from the monster, just to have my back skin ripped off, and my spine removed while I lived. I tried to get up and run away, but the monster gripped my ankle, and bashed my head open against the rocks surrounding us.

Each second of that seemed to be a whole year. And such a torment went on for decades, the monster unrelenting in its attack, and never tiring, and I was unable to even think straight as I was brutalized time after time.

This went on for centuries, my body being thrown here and there and being torn apart by the vicious monster.

I was lying in a pool of my own blood, as the creature continuously pulled out my guts, which quickly regenerated just to be pulled out again, unable to blink my eyes for decades. No matter how many times I tried to create black holes or supernovas to exterminate the creature, my powers failed me, and the extreme torment I was going through blinded me from all logical thinking. That is, until I got used to it, just like I had got used to the marks in my body which made a mockery of my true nature.

One day, after hundreds of years of being spanked, torn apart, broken, and stomped, I raised my hand towards the pillar-like body of the furry creature, and created a simple spear piercing the being straight through its heart. The monster stopped for a second, surprised by the sudden attack after hundreds of years, and in this meantime, I created a dozen more bone-tipped spears, and pocked the creature all over its body, bathing myself in its blood.

The corpse of the creature fell by my side, and I stood there, breathing hard, encircled by piles of my own decomposing flesh.

Slowly, I got on my trembling arms and legs, gritting my teeth and sweating profusely. Even though I wasn’t being attacked anymore, the very existence of pain was engraved in me, after all. But I got up, and went back to walking.

I turned to the voting tower, and resumed my travel, holding tight to the pebble I carried with me.

I squeezed myself through a hole in the stone while the monster behind me tried to reach in with one of its multiple arms, but before I could reach the other side of the tight tunnel, another furry arm showed up at the exit and scratched my face. I retreated one step and created a knife, with which I sliced off the monster’s arm, and jumped out of the hole, knocking down the multi-armed creature on my way, and proceeding to stab it multiple times in the abdomen with my blade.

Once the monster stopped moving, I heard a thud behind me, and saw the first monster had jumped over the curving rock that made the tunnel which I squeezed through.

I pointed my palm at the creature, and created a lightning which flew straight towards its chest, and set the thing on fire.

“Gluulr!”, the thing made noises as its blood bubbled in its veins, bloating it up, until it exploded in red.

“Argh… Soon… Soon I’ll get there, and all of this will end”, I had no hopes of returning to my most natural state, as a creation could not be undone, but the hope of seeing her again powered me through all the time I had spent, multiple lifetimes of stars, burdened with fragility.

Looking back to the Voting tower, I was but halfway through the stone ocean, the distance between us so unfathomably great that no measuring system would do justice to it.

Every second I spent not walking towards it, however, was a wasted instant, however, so I got back to scaling up curved walls of stone marked with petroglyphs not too dissimilar to the ones in my skin, and sliding down ramps on the other side.

I wouldn’t give up yet. I wouldn’t allow my life to be just misery for all eternity!

Finally, after seven billion years, hundreds of billions of monsters killed, and several hundreds of thousands of times that I had my body torn apart, I finally reached the base of the Voting Tower.

I had my hand against the vertical spiraling wall carved with petroglyphs, and looked up. The structure reached so high into the pink and wrinkly skies that I could see it from billions of years of distance, so I wouldn’t be able to climb it in an instant.

“But I’ll do it anyway…!”, I tightened my hands and gritted my teeth.

Then I started to scale up the Voting Tower.

My fingers started bled, my fingernails were torn off multiple times, my lungs burned all the way up, and creatures were sent from nowhere to pick at my skin and eat me alive. But I continued to climb up that tower.

Up, and up, and up, for years, decades, centuries. How cruel was the creation of time and space, and to take away my ability to wish myself anywhere I wanted? How could they have purposefully turned my existence into one capable of experiencing only the greatest stretches of despair?

I would change that. I would change all of that! For I was almost reaching the top of the voting tower!

I could already see the flat surface at the very peak of the structure! It was just a few centimeters away… and I gripped onto the very edge of the tower!

“[Regress]!”, a thunderous voice shook the world. And at the very next instant, I was back at the very beginning again and with another mark burning in my skin. Just like that, billions of years of effort were unmade in an instant. “[Regret]!”, I gripped my heart over my buck leather clothes, bowing myself until my forehead was almost touching the ground, and thinking about everything that I could have done differently. “[Insanity]!”

“Aaargh!”, I shouted to the skies, breaking out in tears.