История без названия

Your eyes are closed. You are not asleep. No one sleeps in this world anymore. You simply stopped moving months ago. [[Continue existence]]

Today, you simply grew tired of lying down. You slowly pry your body from the filthy wooden floor. Around you is a century’s layer of gray dust. The walls of the apartment close in. [[Get up]]

With slow steps, you drift toward the window. Outside, a ringing, dead silence. The sky above the city is a foggy white. Past your window, one by one, people fall in silence. [[Look down]]

You step onto the windowsill. Below you are endless gray high-rises, sinking into the earth. There is no end. [[Take a step]]

You rise, covered in gray soot. Your legs carry you on pure inertia toward the alley exit, onto a wide street. Between two houses leaning toward each other, a crowd drifts sluggishly. [[Walk through the crowd]]

In the center of the street, people stand in a straight line. In loud unison, they chant gargled, broken words, slamming their heads against a concrete wall. With every simultaneous impact, the ground beneath your feet shudders. They are emotionless. [[Squeeze past them]]

You approach a solid iron door at the end of the street. There is nowhere left to go. The path is blocked. At the threshold, a mountain of lifeless human shells is growing. People from above continue to drop straight into it, expanding the mass. The rate of falls accelerates. The thuds become deafening. [[Freeze]]

The interval narrows. The falls merge into one continuous roar. You are knocked off your feet. A mountain of living corpses buries you, pinning you down. Your legs sink into endless gray silhouettes. The air runs out. Suffocation sets in. [[Scream]]

You fall. Just waiting for the impact, feeling neither fear nor sadness. [[Impact]]

You land face-first onto a concrete curb with a sickening crunch. Everything goes dark. Your immortal body is contorted, but you feel nothing. Neither physically nor mentally. As always. You lie in a dark alley. Time has lost its meaning. Days pass, weeks, perhaps years... [[Stand up]]

Suddenly... everything stops. The roar cuts out. An absolute, ringing silence sets in. Something is wrong with you. For the first time in your life, everything is right. [[Open your eyes]]

You began to understand and to feel. You went insane, but in reverse. From hopelessness and this fierce emotional agony, you collapse to the ground and begin to sob, eyes closed. The first real tears stream down your ordinary face. For the first time, you feel joy, and for the first time, you feel pain. Around you, people continue to land. Some stand up, some remain still. To them, it all means nothing. But for you, this is only the beginning. [[Move forward]]

Overcoming the emotional agony, you rise to your feet. Around you is the same silence. The city street behind you is frozen, littered with bodies that do not care. You take your first conscious, heavy step away from this district, moving through the gray megacity. [[Forward]]

You walk along the road. A street lantern stands before you. The moment you pull even with it, its light dies with a quiet click, but the next one flares up ahead. You approach the second - it goes out, but a third ignites.The world seems to lazily point the way out. [[Forward ]]

You take another step; the lantern dies, but the next one ahead fails to ignite. Twilight sets in. You turn around and see an endless, silent cemetery of dead lanterns in the middle of the empty street. You drift toward the cemetery. [[Forward ]]

The asphalt beneath your feet invisibly shifts into dry, stony earth. Leaving the cemetery, you enter a small forest. There are no falling bodies here. For the first time, you feel at peace. The trees stand motionless, their roots cutting deep into the gray soil.You believe that here, everything is different. [[Leave the forest]]

Passing through the forest, you step onto a wide, barren plain. In the middle of this emptiness stands a solitary wooden house. Real smoke drifts from its chimney. You draw closer and peer through the window: a warm fireplace burns inside, and an old man sits quietly in a chair by the fire. [[Enter the house]]

You open the door and step inside. The interior smells of dry firewood. You approach the old man, hoping to see even a spark of emotion on his face, a sign that he is alive - but the old man stares blankly into the flames. His eyes are dead and empty. Indulging in this counterfeit comfort, he remains the exact same hollow shell as everyone else. [[...]]

A primal, blind rage ignites within you. Your soul tears apart from the pain: even here, far from the gray, soulless megacity, there are no real people. Everything around you is a lie. Giving in to this fury, you seize a burning log from the fireplace and hurl it at the wall, thinking this hollow puppet will not care anyway. The flames instantly wrap around the dry logs of the cabin. [[Fire]]

The house catches like a matchstick. You stumble out into the open, looking back through the thick smoke at the scorched, smoldering wreckage. And suddenly, through the crackle of embers, you catch a faint, raspy, genuinely human cry of agony. You rush toward the debris and freeze in horror: the old man in the chair was no immortal, emotionless puppet - he was alive, merely passing his remaining days in the quiet of the woods. And you have just murdered a rare, living soul. [[Realization]]

A savage guilt for what you have done drives you away from the fire.You run until you stumble into a dead, gray park, buried in the black ash of the cabin. A girl sits on a bench beneath the falling soot. She is not lying on the ground; her head is raised, and her gaze is fixed right on you. She is staring straight into your soul... [[Mountains]]

You look at each other in silence amidst the ash. Two feeling humans in a world of hollow mannequins. Without a word, she rises from the bench and points toward the distant, cold cliffs.She shows you the path to the mountains - the only way to escape this nightmare and try to forget what you have done.The two of you set out together. [[Climbing]]

The stony earth of the outskirts slips from beneath your feet. You begin a long, grueling ascent up steep cliffs. You physically feel how heavily your body struggles to overcome this path. But you persistently claw your way up, hoping that there, beyond the peaks, this dead gray world will finally end. [[The peak]]

You reach the very peak and sit on the cold, stony edge of the cliff. There is nowhere higher to climb. The dense white fog, which had hidden the horizon all this time, begins to slowly and lazily dissolve into the void. You freeze, staring into the unfolding expanse. [[And you see...]]

The entire planet opens before your eyes. And inside you, everything finally breaks. There is no other life beyond the mountains. To the very edge of the earth, in every direction, sprawls the exact same gray, endless city. There is no escaping it, because nothing else exists beyond these peaks. All your hope for salvation crumbles into dust. [[Despair]]

A savage disappointment and helplessness paralyze your body. You lower your head, unable to take another single step. The girl sees your shatter. She speaks no empty words. She simply sits closer in silence and convulsively squeezes your cold palm, trying to keep you from falling into this freezing abyss. You share this grim realization between the two of you. [[Move on]]

Time passes. Your despair is replaced by a dull numbness. You rise and silently continue your route along the mountain peaks, simply so as not to stand still. Ahead, among the shattered gray rocks, you find an old, decaying temple. A strange, unnatural noise echoes from its broken doors. [[The temple]]

You step inside. A massive crowd has gathered here. These are emotionless people, the exact same hollow shells from the city. They invented this religion not for true faith or worship. To them, this fake place is nothing but a warped amusement, a way to kill eternity. [[Watch further]]

You watch their rituals in horror. In groups of two, they act out other people's human tragedies. One collapses onto the stone floor, mimicking death, while the second stares down with dry, glassy eyes, loudly chanting fake, rote prayers, attempting to act out grief. It is a hideous, empty distraction. Your mind, exhausted by the guilt of the burned old man and the sight of the endless city, begins to rapidly fade. [[Leave them]]

You can no longer bear this fake spectacle. You and the girl leave the frenzied cultists below and begin to ascend a crumbling spiral staircase to the very top of the temple. With every step upward, the roar of the crowd fades, giving way to an icy wind. You feel strength completely drains from your soul. [[Roof]]

You step onto the open observation deck at the very top of the highest cathedral. Around you is the abyss. And at that exact moment, from beneath the white fog below, the gray concrete houses of the city begin to rise slowly, one by one. The megapolis seems to lift from the depths of the earth to take you back. [[You gave up]]

Your mind finally breaks from this unbearable emotional weight. Being alive here is too painful. Your face slowly smoothes out. All the pain, fear, and recent tears vanish, giving way to a dead numbness.Real human feelings fade forever. An expression of total, glassy indifference freezes on your face once more. You have become an emotionless andimmortal shell again. [[Take a step ]]

You take a sluggish, mechanical step toward the very edge of the roof. You no longer have thoughts of salvation or death. You do it simply because it is what is done. But the girl is still alive. She does not understand that your mind has perished. Out of her blind trust and the wild terror of being left alone in this void, she clutches onto your cold hand with a death grip.She jumps after you. [[The final]]

You plummet down together, tightly holding hands. But this flight is different for each of you. There is fear in her eyes, and vacancy in yours. Right in mid-air, you crash violently onto the gray concrete at the base of the temple. [[....]]

A dull thud echoes. The girl does not survive. Her fragile, mortal human body remains motionless, lying in a pool of blood on the asphalt. But you... you are immortal. You slowly rise to your feet, indifferently brushing the dust and someone else's blood off your jacket. You don't even remember who was lying next to you a second ago. Your gaze is vacant again. You turn and sluggishly walk forward down the endless gray street, fading into the exact same faceless crowd. And silence falls once more.