Subconscious Parasite [English]

The very first drop landed on my tongue.

Just one drop of liquid. A microscopic event. In the massive, sprawling timeline of the universe, one tiny drop falling is completely meaningless. But inside my body, that single drop reacted like a full-blown nuclear explosion.

Do you know how taste actually works? We eat so much every day fast food, biryani, coffee, cake. If you knew the actual mechanism of how our brain processes these flavors, it would blow your mind. You have thousands of tiny bumps all over your tongue. In anatomy, they are called papillae. Inside those bumps are your taste buds, which are basically highly sensitive chemical sensors. When you eat or drink something, the chemical molecules from that food mix with your saliva. Those molecules then travel to the receptors in your taste buds and unlock them, exactly like turning a perfectly shaped key inside a lock. The moment that key turns, an electrical signal is born. That signal travels up your facial and cranial nerves, shooting straight into the gustatory cortex of your brain. That is the exact moment your brain tells you whether you are eating something sweet, sour, or bitter.

Your food doesn't actually have any taste of its own. Taste is a concept manufactured entirely inside your brain.

At its core, our brain is just a hyper-powerful prediction machine. When you look at a glass of water, your brain calculates what it will taste like in a fraction of a second. It accesses a memory bank containing data from every single glass of water you’ve ever had in your life. You logically know pure water doesn't have a strong taste. You expect it to have a certain temperature and density. Your brain preps your throat muscles based on that exact data.

But the nightmare begins when your brain’s prediction doesn’t match reality at all. Imagine closing your eyes, mentally preparing to drink a glass of orange juice, but someone feeds you a glass of milk instead. For a few seconds, your brain will completely short-circuit. Your reflex might even make you gag. Milk isn’t toxic, but your brain just wasn't expecting it. That sudden, violent mismatch throws your nervous system into a state of extreme panic.

Right now, my brain was undergoing a massive cyber-attack of that exact nature. My hypothalamus was expecting a simple glass of H2O that familiar, life-saving combo of two hydrogens and one oxygen. But the liquid sitting on my tongue was breaking every known rule of physics and chemistry.

The taste was impossibly metallic. Have you ever licked an old, rusty coin? Or tasted your own blood after a cut? Blood has a metallic taste because it's packed with iron. But this strange liquid wasn't just iron. It was so intense, so raw, so completely unfiltered that the nerve endings on my tongue shriveled up in absolute agony. It tasted like I was drinking battery acid a deadly, chemical cocktail of lithium, copper, and unknown heavy metals. In nature, things that taste this intensely metallic are usually fatal to our biological systems. Our brains are hardwired to reject signals like this instantly. My amygdala was flashing red alarms like crazy, sending direct commands to my throat muscles to vomit and expel the liquid immediately.

But my body was no longer answering to me. I stood there, completely paralyzed.

The next terrifying sensation was the temperature. Cold. You are probably thinking of ice cubes from a freezer, or the chill of an AC room. You are completely wrong. The cold we experience in our daily lives on Earth is just a relative concept. Water freezes at zero degrees Celsius. But the universe's ultimate concept of cold is Absolute Zero. Minus 273 degrees Celsius. At this extreme temperature, the kinetic movement of atoms stops forever. Electrons stop spinning in their orbits around the nucleus. Matter loses its physical existence and slips into a quantum state.

The temperature of the liquid on my tongue belonged to that impossible level. It wasn't physical cold. It was the absolute, complete absence of heat. When it touched my tissue, it sucked away all the heat energy from that spot like a microscopic black hole. By all medical logic, that part of my tongue should have suffered instant frostbite. The tissue should have died at the cellular level and turned into gangrene.

But the most horrifying part? There was no physical damage. Instead, it felt like the liquid was merging with my cellular DNA. It was rewriting my human biology in real time.

As modern humans, we are so disconnected from our biological origins that you couldn't even calmly process it if you tried. We wake up and eat artificial cereals loaded with processed sugar. We swallow fast food packed with chemical preservatives for lunch. At night, we chug artificially flavored commercial energy drinks in a fake attempt to recharge. Our taste buds are damaged and completely numb. We have forgotten what real, natural food tastes like. We are a cursed generation, literally living a synthetic life wrapped in plastic. Even our emotions are plastic now. We cry by sending a screen emoji. We laugh by typing LOL. We don't feel true physical pain. We don't feel a real, deadly thirst. Our entire existence is just a well-designed synthetic simulation.

But standing in this dark, silent kitchen, holding a glass of impossible metallic liquid, I was feeling something real for the first time in my life. This liquid was melting away all the synthetic social layers built up in my brain like acid. It was forcing me to face my pure, primal existence. My deepest, oldest survival instincts were waking up.

The liquid began to slide down toward my throat in extreme slow motion. I didn't want to swallow. My conscious mind was screaming at me to throw the glass away. But the swallowing mechanism is controlled by the autonomic nervous system. When a liquid hits the back of your throat, the swallowing reflex triggers automatically. It’s an involuntary muscle action; no amount of willpower can stop it.

The liquid started crawling down my esophagus. I could vividly feel its movement across every single millimeter of my nervous system. It felt like a snake made of liquid nitrogen was coiling its way down inside me. Wherever it touched, it left behind an uncanny numbness. No physical pain. Just infinite emptiness. It felt as if my vital organs were being powered off, one by one.

When it reached my stomach, the liquid showed its true nature. The human stomach contains highly concentrated hydrochloric acid. The pH level of this gastric acid is so extreme it can easily dissolve a metal razor blade. Normally, when food enters the stomach, it reacts with this powerful acid and breaks down. But this metallic liquid was playing by a completely different set of rules. It didn't mix with the acid at all. Instead, it phased right through the biological walls of my stomach via osmosis, entering directly into my bloodstream.

I could physically feel a freezing, blue electric current rushing through my veins. My heart rate suddenly plummeted to a deadly level. From 75 beats per minute, it dropped straight to 40. Then 30. Then 15. The oxygen supply to my brain was drastically cutting out. The edges of my vision slowly faded into black. Tunnel vision. This is the exact experience humans go through right before clinical death. When the brain senses a critical lack of oxygen, it cuts power to the peripheral organs, focusing only on the central nervous system in a desperate final attempt to save itself.

Was I dying? What actually is death? We spend our whole lives terrified of this one inevitable fact. We buy life insurance policies. We do routine health checkups. We buckle our seatbelts in the car. We are so desperate to live just a little bit longer. But none of us actually know the philosophy of living. We just exist. We work like corporate slaves from nine to five.

Then we fight through traffic, get home, and numb our tired brains by scrolling through reels. We are never satisfied with our current lives. We constantly crave the fake lives of others we see on social media the colorful life of a travel influencer on Instagram, the status of a young billionaire. We are trapped in an invisible social matrix.

And this metallic liquid was forcefully unplugging me from that matrix.

It was completely altering the neurotransmitter balance in my brain. Dopamine, serotonin, endorphins all their levels crashed to zero. It felt like someone had cracked open my skull and exposed my soft brain directly to the freezing vacuum of deep space. My logical thought process became unbelievably fast. I was seeing patterns that are entirely invisible to the normal human eye.

I looked down at the glass in my hand. My grip was loosening. But the strangest thing was... the glass didn't fall to the floor. Gravity the most fundamental law of physics seemed to have lost its power in this specific area. The glass slipped from my hand and just floated in mid-air. I could clearly see the remaining dark liquid inside gather into a perfect, floating sphere. Exactly like how water acts due to surface tension when astronauts release it in zero gravity on the International Space Station. The Earth's gravitational pull simply wasn't working inside my kitchen anymore.

I could track the speed of my own blinking in real-time. A normal human blink takes about 400 milliseconds. But to me, it felt like my eyelid had been closing for hours. Einstein's theory of relativity wasn't just a textbook theory anymore; it was a reality playing out right in front of my eyes. Time is not a fixed, absolute concept. It is completely relative and manipulatable. When space and gravity change, time stretches out like rubber. This dark kitchen was no longer just a regular apartment in Dhaka. It was a fault line in the spacetime continuum. A glitch in the matrix.

Suddenly, the tinnitus ringing in my ears stopped entirely. Absolute silence. That maddening silence of the anechoic chamber.

And then, I heard a new sound. It wasn't coming from any external source. It was coming from exactly inside me. It was the microscopic sound of my cellular structure changing. Have you ever heard the tiny, invisible sound of a spider weaving its web? Or the low-frequency groan of a massive glacier cracking apart? Every bone, every muscle fiber, every DNA helix in my body was vibrating at a bizarre, alien frequency. I could hear my red blood cells fusing with the metallic liquid, creating an entirely new, unknown type of matter. My existence was being rewritten line by line. Whoever owned the source code of the 3D reality I had been living in was deleting it, installing a hardcore, completely new operating system in its place.

The shapes of familiar objects around me began to change drastically. The ceramic tiles on the kitchen wall were melting like wax. Just like the famous melting clocks in Salvador Dalí's surrealist paintings, the very structure of my reality was dripping away. The metallic body of my giant refrigerator stretched out like rubber, pulling away into an infinite distance. That weak light from the streetlamp filtering through the half-open window? It broke apart like it hit a prism, splitting into seven solid, distinct colors that floated through the room like solid laser beams.

I was watching the basic laws of physics shatter like a house of cards. Thermodynamics, Newtonian mechanics, quantum entanglement everything was collapsing all at once. My feet were no longer touching the floor. I was floating in a void. I had no physical weight. No social identity. No name. I was existing purely as a state of naked consciousness.

The greatest psychological fear a human has is the fear of losing control. We love gripping the steering wheel of our daily routines. We obsessively plan what we'll wear tomorrow, where we'll go for the weekend, where our careers will be in five years. We suffer from the illusion of control. But when the dimensions around you shift, when the laws of physics simply stop working, control doesn't exist anymore. You become nothing more than a speck of dust standing before the vastness of the universe.

I realized I was rapidly being pulled into the singularity of a black hole.

This metallic liquid was never just a drink. It was a key. A cosmic key that had unlocked the boundaries of my limited 3D reality. I have no idea where I am going. My old world is crumbling to dust right in front of my eyes, breaking apart like pixel art.

I opened my mouth with all the strength I had left to scream. But no sound waves came out of my throat. Because in this new dimension, there is no space for sound to travel. Reality here has its own grammar, and in that grammar, I simply do not exist.

I ordered my facial muscles to scream with every ounce of strength I had left. But I didn't have a face anymore. I had no vocal cords. The biological pumps we call lungs simply did not exist inside me. I was falling through an endless, infinite void at an unbelievable speed.

But this wasn't a normal, physical fall. When you jump off a roof or drop down a steep rollercoaster, you get that weird, ticklish feeling in your stomach. Gravity pulls your internal organs up just a little bit. But right now, I have no organs. I had no physical body at all. I was traveling through this absolute emptiness purely as naked consciousness.

Have you ever heard of a sensory deprivation tank? High-level biohackers and Special Forces soldiers use them. It’s a pitch-black, entirely soundproof pod filled with body-temperature water and a heavy amount of Epsom salt. When you float inside it, your brain receives zero light from your eyes, zero sound from your ears, and zero touch or temperature signals from your skin. Within fifteen minutes, your mind literally begins to break down. The human brain simply cannot handle emptiness. When it is completely cut off from outside data, it panics and starts manufacturing its own. People experience extreme hallucinations. Old, buried memories start playing out in real-time right in front of them.

My current state was billions of times more terrifying than that tank. My brain couldn't even comfort me with fake, hallucinated signals. I was a completely blind, deaf, and untouchable entity.

Think about it. You go to the gym to build muscle. You follow a strict skincare routine to look flawless. You wear expensive brand-name clothes to build a social identity. You truly believe this fragile cage of bone and meat is who you really are. But when this cage is suddenly deleted from existence, you finally realize how utterly helpless you are.

In neurology, there is a term called proprioception. It’s essentially your sixth sense. Even if you close your eyes, you know exactly where your right hand is floating, or whether your knees are bent or straight. Your brain is constantly collecting data from your muscles and joints to maintain a real-time 3D map of your body. Right now, my proprioception system is completely offline. I had absolutely no data on where I was, what size I was, or if I was expanding or shrinking. I was just a microscopic dot zooming blindly through some unknown dimension.

The famous French philosopher René Descartes once said something incredibly brilliant: I think, therefore I am. Right now, that single theory was my only lifeline. I didn't have a body, but I could still think. I could analyze. I could feel sheer terror. The very fact that I was so afraid was the ultimate proof that I hadn't been completely erased yet. My consciousness was going to land somewhere. But where?

Suddenly, a massive shock like a brutal electric surge rocked my entire existence.

There was no physical crash against the surface. Something much scarier happened. My information processing system rebooted. I suddenly got my body back. But this didn't feel anything like my old, familiar carbon-based human body. It felt like someone had forcefully downloaded me into brand-new, alien hardware.

I opened my eyes.

The very first sight that hit my optic nerves almost burned out my brain's visual cortex entirely. I had no idea where I was standing. There was no solid dirt or floor under my feet. There was no sky above my head. The space you are sitting in right now to read this follows strict geometric rules. It's called Euclidean geometry. The angles of a triangle will always add up to 180 degrees. Parallel lines will never, ever cross. But the space I had just crashed into did not care about the physics or geometry of our universe.

This was a non-Euclidean dimension. The space around me was constantly folding and unfolding into itself. Have you ever seen a zoom-in video of the Mandelbrot set? Those endless, mesmerizing, computer-generated fractal patterns? No matter how deep you zoom in, the patterns keep changing but never actually end. My surroundings were acting exactly like a living, breathing fractal. I was standing on a massive floating structure that looked like blocks of glass, but it was constantly shifting its shape like a liquid.

The most terrifying part, however, was the colors. The human eye can only see a tiny, pathetic slice of the rainbow spectrum. We have receptors for exactly three colors: red, green, and blue. We mix those three basic colors to see everything in our world. But in this dimension, I was looking at colors that simply do not exist in the database of human civilization. My brain had never even imagined that there could be so many hidden shades outside our spectrum. These unknown colors were so intense and so vibrant that they caused literal, burning pain inside my eyes. It felt like someone was firing direct laser beams straight into my retinas. As modern humans, we are used to information overload. We constantly juggle multiple glowing screens. But this visual overload wasn't coming from a technological gadget. It was blasting directly from the source code of reality itself.

I tried to take a breath.

When you breathe on Earth, you never subconsciously worry about the oxygen percentage in the air. Your brain automatically controls your diaphragm muscle for you. But here, the second my lungs expanded, I was hit with a brutal shock. There was zero gaseous matter in this space. As soon as I tried to pull in air, a thick, heavy blob of liquid metal shoved its way into my throat. My airway was completely blocked.

Panic.

When the human brain thinks it is suffocating, its survival mechanism shifts into absolute hyperdrive. You are no longer a smart, logical person; you become a desperate, wild animal. I tried to cough. I clawed at my own throat with my hands. But that bizarre, heavy substance stuck inside my windpipe wouldn't budge.

The harder and faster I panicked to suck in air, the harder and more solid the block became inside my throat. I had to calm down. I had to control my rapidly spiking heartbeat.

I forced my eyes shut. Box breathing. Special Forces snipers use this exact technique to cool down their nervous systems before taking a critical shot. Breathe in for four seconds. Hold for four seconds. Exhale for four seconds. I forced my panic-stricken brain to execute this command. Very, very slowly, in extreme slow motion, I expanded my lungs.

Magic.

The very second I dropped my physical movement and internal panic down to absolute zero, that solid block turned into a smooth, icy gel and slid right into my lungs. It had no taste, but it instantly injected a high-voltage surge of pure energy straight into my cells. I realized a very crucial rule: I was in a place where brute physical force was useless. If you want to survive here, you have to establish absolute, unbreakable control over your own mind.

I opened my eyes and tried to stand up straight.

And that is when the most horrifying rule of this dimension became crystal clear to me. On Earth, you grow up fighting gravity your whole life. According to Newton's law, the Earth has a massive center that constantly pulls you downward. But here? There was no universal concept of "up" or "down."

When I glanced at a floating black cube to my right, my gravitational vector suddenly snapped. The glass surface beneath my feet just let me go. I started falling at a terrifying speed straight toward that black cube. Whatever my eyes focused on instantly became my new center of gravity. I screamed, flailing my arms and legs wildly to balance myself. I whipped my head around and stared blindly into the empty space on my left. Instantly, my falling direction violently shifted. I slammed hard into an invisible wall and bounced off.

Physics in this place operates entirely based on your observation. There is a very famous experiment in quantum mechanics called the Double-Slit Experiment. If you observe an electron, it acts like a solid particle. But if you look away, it acts like a flowing wave. The observer's gaze literally changes the reality of the entire system. The core operating system of this bizarre world was that exact quantum observer effect.

Wherever I looked, space rapidly rebuilt itself to match my gaze.

I locked my eyes hard onto the glass-like surface right below me. Instantly, I dropped and landed heavily on it. My heart was hammering against my chest like a machine gun. My entire body was drenched in cold sweat. I had lost control for just a few seconds, and it almost cost me my life in deep space.

I dropped to my knees, panting heavily.

Do you know what the biggest curse of our modern life actually is? Overthinking. We spend our entire days building fake, stressful realities inside our heads. We lose sleep at night worrying about what our boss might say in tomorrow's meeting. We destroy perfectly good relationships obsessing over whether our partner will leave us. We don't control our thoughts; our thoughts completely control us. On Earth, overthinking just gives you psychological damage. Your stress hormones spike. Your blood pressure shoots up. But in this bizarre dimension? Overthinking was a direct, instant death sentence.

As I sat there catching my breath, a desperate thought popped into my mind. Thirst. My extreme, cellular thirst had never actually gone away after drinking that metallic liquid back in my kitchen. My subconscious mind just craved one simple, refreshing glass of normal cold water.

Reality responded instantly.

Just ten feet away from me, the floating fractal structure in the space suddenly began to melt. I watched in absolute awe as liters of pure water generated out of thin air. It formed a perfect, crystal-clear floating sphere. In a complete trance, I reached my hand out toward it. My thoughts were literally converting into physical matter. Whatever I imagined, this world was rendering it in real-time.

But my happiness lasted for only a few microseconds.

You see, the human brain is incapable of generating just one single, pure thought. When you think of water, your brain instantly processes every memory and emotion you have ever tied to it. When I looked at that beautiful sphere of water, my subconscious mind accidentally triggered the fresh, horrifying memory of that metallic liquid's taste. A tiny spark of sheer terror flashed inside my mind.

That microscopic pollution in my thought impacted reality violently.

In a fraction of a second, the floating water sphere mutated its chemical structure. It wasn't clear water anymore. It turned pitch black, morphing right back into that deadly metallic liquid. And it didn't stop there. The surface tension snapped, and dozens of razor-sharp metallic spikes shot out of the sphere like blades. It turned into a living weapon and rocketed straight at my face.

Pure reflex took over. I dived hard to the right. One of the metallic spikes sliced right past my left shoulder. I felt sharp, physical pain. A piece of my space suit or my new synthetic skin tore open, and a glowing blue energy began leaking out of the cut.

I rolled quickly across the floor to create distance. The metallic sphere smashed into a wall, spun around, and locked right back onto me.

This wasn't magic. This was an extreme, weaponized version of neuroplasticity. Your own mind is your ultimate enemy here. I realized that the absolute only way to survive this world was to slip into a pure Zen state. You have to completely and utterly shut down your inner monologue. You cannot feel fear. You cannot hold onto hope. If you think about anger, this dimension will physically manifest your anger and butcher you with it. If you think about running away, it will build infinite, unscalable walls in front of you.

I laid flat on the floor and closed my eyes.

The metallic sphere was roaring toward me like a deadly cyclone. I could feel its heavy, destructive vibrations shaking the floor beneath me.

I tried to manually switch off my brain's Default Mode Network. That is the specific part of your brain that keeps you self-aware. It is the architect of your ego. I had to murder my ego right here, right now. I had to truly believe that I did not exist. I have no fear. I have no identity. This metallic sphere is just a cheap illusion my own broken brain created.

I wiped my mind completely blank, turning it into a perfect, pristine white canvas.

The roaring sound stopped exactly one inch from my ear.

I refused to open my eyes. I know the rules now. If I looked at it, I would observe it, and quantum mechanics would drag it kicking and screaming back into reality. I flatlined my heart rate. I slowly, silently exhaled the bizarre air from my lungs.

A few painfully long seconds later, I felt the density of the space around me return to normal. The metallic sphere had been permanently deleted. I let out a slow, shaking breath. I had barely survived the very first test of this cybernetic reality. I finally understood how this sick game was played.

But my relief was brutally short-lived.

When I finally opened my eyes and stood back up, I felt the temperature of the entire space suddenly plummet. The tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. The human brain has a highly evolved, built-in alarm system that warns you when a predator is staring at you. Even if you are standing in a massive, noisy crowd, you can always pinpoint when someone’s eyes are locked onto you.

I slowly looked around at the impossible, shifting geometric structures wrapping around me.

There were no physical creatures in sight. But I could clearly sense them. Hidden deep behind the fractal walls and tucked tightly inside the impossible folds of space, multiple consciousnesses were lurking. They were quietly scanning my every single thought, tracking my every single heartbeat.

They were not human. Their observation patterns felt incredibly intelligent, heavily calculating, and ruthlessly cold.

I suddenly realized that fighting my own brain was just a basic warm-up tutorial. The real game was only just beginning. I was not alone in this dimension. And whoever was out there watching me from the dark folds of space was not entirely happy about my foolish, uninvited arrival into their world.

My subconscious mind flashed one final, chilling warning.

They are coming.

I could feel it in my bones: I wasn't alone in this bizarre dimension. Someone or something was watching me with intense, terrifying curiosity.

Have you ever walked down an empty street and suddenly felt eyes burning into the back of your head? You know that creepy, crawling sensation? The human brain actually has a dedicated circuit just for this a built-in radar specifically designed to scan if we are being watched. But the gaze I felt resting on my skin right now wasn't human. Not even close. There was zero emotion in it. No anger. No hatred. Just a cold, calculating, icy perfection.

Imagine how you look at a tiny bacterium wriggling under a microscope. You don't hate the germ; you just analyze it. From deep within the non-Euclidean folds of this impossible space, an army of icy intellects was analyzing me.

I forced my eyes to focus on the floating, fractal structures around me.

Patches of space were slowly turning black. But this wasn't your everyday, ordinary Earth-black. The black you know is just a lack of light or a simple chemical trick. This space-black was like Vantablack that man-made material that eats 99.99% of all light. If you look at a 3D object coated in Vantablack, your brain literally crashes trying to process it; it just looks like a flat, two-dimensional hole dropped into the universe. That’s exactly what was happening here. Countless 2D holes were tearing open in the space around me. And the most terrifying part? Those empty holes were starting to take a shape.

They looked exactly like humans.

They had heads. They had arms. They had legs. But they weren't human. My nervous system was screaming at me to run. Back in 1970, a Japanese robotics professor named Masahiro Mori came up with a wild concept called the "Uncanny Valley." When you see a cartoon, you like it. When you see a clunky metal robot, you think it's cool. But when you see a robot or an animation that looks almost perfectly human, but is just a tiny bit off, your brain hits the panic button. You feel a deep, sickening dread. Your instincts scream that something is horribly wrong.

These shadow-men standing before me were the ultimate, terrifying bosses of that Uncanny Valley. They had no faces. No skin texture. They were just human silhouettes cut out of an absolute, light-eating void. And they weren't walking. They were glitching through space. You know when you play an old, laggy video game and the frame rate drops, making characters teleport erratically across the screen? That’s exactly how these shadows moved. They completely ignored the rules of physical space. One second, a shadow was fifty feet away. The next second, without moving a single muscle, it was twenty feet away. They were using quantum tunneling! Just like tiny sub-atomic particles magically skip through solid barriers, these monsters were using quantum physics on a massive, real-world scale.

My breath grew heavy. I tried to back away, but the glassy floor beneath my feet felt like superglue. I couldn't move an inch.

Have you ever heard astrophysicists talk about the Fermi Paradox? It’s a famous question: The universe is so impossibly huge, packed with trillions of galaxies and planets, so why haven't we heard from any aliens yet? Where is everybody? A brilliant Chinese sci-fi writer named Liu Cixin gave a terrifyingly dark answer to this. He called it the "Dark Forest Theory." Picture the entire universe as a massive, pitch-black forest. Every alien civilization is a heavily armed hunter creeping silently through the trees. There is only one rule to survive in this forest: Stay dead silent. If you make a sound, or light a fire, every other hunter instantly knows where you are and blasts you into dust. Because resources are limited, and nobody trusts anyone.

Now, think about what us foolish humans have been doing for the last hundred years. We’ve been blasting radio waves into deep space, screaming our existence to the stars! We put golden records on Voyager spacecrafts, basically handing out our home address to the cosmos. We thought the universe was a friendly neighborhood. We thought aliens would show up to shake our hands.

We were so, so horribly wrong. There are nightmarish predators hiding in the Dark Forest. And they caught our signal. But they didn't fly here in shiny metal spaceships. They are way too advanced for that. They simply hacked our space-time continuum. They found a backdoor entry into the source code of our dimension.

The shadow-men had now formed a perfect, inescapable circle around me. They made no sound. They didn't even have vocal cords. But suddenly ZAP! I felt a brutal electric shock blast right inside my skull. A high-voltage data stream was being injected directly into my brain's synapses. It wasn't a language. It wasn't English or Bengali. It was pure, raw concept. A chaotic binary cocktail of high-level math and raw emotion. My brain literally felt like it was catching on fire trying to process the download. Imagine someone shoving a massive fire hose into a tiny vein in your arm and turning the water on full blast.

I collapsed to my knees in agony, grabbing my ears. But it was useless. The noise wasn't coming from the outside; it was generating straight out of my own neurons.

I somehow managed to decode their message.

They were telling me, "You are not an accident. We selected you."

Boom. An explosion of realization went off in my head. Suddenly, the whole puzzle clicked. Waking up at 3:00 AM, that unnatural, maddening thirst, the weird metallic liquid flowing from my kitchen tap... it was all a meticulously designed trap! In the world of cyber security, there is a trick called a "Phishing Attack." A hacker sends you an email that looks exactly like a message from your bank. You click the link, type your password, and boom you lose all access. These interdimensional freaks had just pulled off a cosmic-level phishing attack on my biological system! They hacked my body. They remotely controlled my brain's hypothalamus to trigger a fake thirst. They manipulated the physics of my kitchen to create that metallic liquid. That drink was a Trojan Horse a biological malware that I willingly installed into my own body!

But why? What did they want from me?

They pushed another wave of data. This time, a hyper-real movie played right in front of my eyes. It was my own life's memories. But they weren't playing in a normal, linear order like a normal movie. These creatures had flattened the timeline of my brain. I saw a memory from when I was five, one from when I was fifteen, and one from right now all playing at the exact same time! I saw myself crying over a failed math test in fifth grade. I saw myself wandering the streets, crushed after being rejected for my first job. I saw myself lying awake at night, overthinking in the dark. Every single trauma, every heartbreak, every drop of frustration I had ever felt... they were scanning it all.

Do you know what human emotions really are? We like to think of them as poetic. We write songs and novels about love and sadness. But on a quantum physics level, emotion is a state of hyper-dense energy. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the universe is always getting messier. Everything is slowly marching toward chaos and death (entropy). But life living, breathing creatures we are the only things that fight back against this decay. We eat food to build our bodies. We create order through thought. We are "negentropy engines." And out of all human emotions, the most powerful, highly concentrated energy sources are pain and fear. When you're happy, your brain is relaxed. But when you are terrified or heartbroken, your brain's neurons fire at absolute maximum capacity. Your body turns into a roaring, high-voltage power plant.

Finally, I understood the horrific truth. I figured out their ultimate goal.

These shadow-men consume energy to survive in this bizarre dimension. But they don't run on solar or nuclear power. Their fuel is human consciousness. Their food is our intense emotion and raw terror. They have built an interdimensional farm! They randomly pluck people from Earth, drag them into this void, and milk their memories and emotions dry. Imagine squeezing every drop of juice out of an orange and tossing the empty peel into the trash. That’s what they do. They extract every ounce of psychological energy from a human mind and then throw the empty, hollow shell of consciousness out into the void to float forever.

Ancient myths say that the 'Jinn' race was created from smokeless fire. There is a terrifyingly accurate connection here to modern plasma physics. Plasma is the fourth state of matter. When you heat a gas to insanely high temperatures, its electrons break free from the nucleus, turning into an ionized, highly electromagnetic cloud. It has no fixed shape. It looks exactly like fire, but it produces absolutely no smoke. These shadow-men swarming me were pure, plasma-based lifeforms! They weren't made of carbon like us. They had no biological limits. They laughed at the rules of 3D space. They existed entirely outside the boundaries of our logic.

The agony in my skull was growing exponentially.

They were hacking into my core identity, dragging my deepest, darkest, most hidden traumas to the surface. You know what the biggest weakness of modern humans is? We never actually fix our past traumas. We just zip them up into a hidden, dark folder in our brains. We upload photos with fake, bright smiles on social media to trick ourselves into thinking we're fine. But those unsolved traumas are always running in the background of our subconscious minds, eating up our energy. And these monsters were targeting those exact background processes!

Right there, projected in high-definition onto the glassy walls of space around me, were my biggest life failures. I was reliving the exact days I felt like the most worthless speck of dust on Earth. I felt the cold loneliness of the nights I cried silently, wishing someone was there to comfort me. My internal defense systems were completely collapsing. I was losing total control. My heart rate skyrocketed. Hot tears streamed down my face.

And right at that moment, I noticed something absolutely sickening. The more emotional I got, the more fear and heartbreak I felt... the more solid the shadow-men became! A dark, glowing purple aura began to radiate from their Vantablack bodies. They were literally drinking my emotional radiation. They were charging their batteries with my pain!

I had become an interdimensional battery.

I had to stop. If I didn't cut off their fuel supply right now, they would consume me entirely. But how on earth do you just switch off your emotions? How do you force a living, biological creature to turn into cold, unfeeling stone?

When a human being faces extreme, unbearable physical or psychological torture, and the brain realizes the pain is too much to survive, it does a neat little trick. It automatically detaches your consciousness from your body. You start watching yourself from a third-person view. You feel no physical pain. You have zero emotional response. You temporarily turn into a robot.

I needed to manually trigger that exact dissociative state right now.

I slammed my eyes shut. I focused purely on the mechanical rhythm of my heartbeat. I aggressively ignored the terrifying nightmare reels playing around me. I started blasting my brain with cold, hard logic: These memories are not me. They are just chemical data saved on my biological hard drive. My past is not my identity. My pain is not my reality. I am pure consciousness. I have no past. I have no future. I tried to forcefully reboot my brain's limbic system and shut it down entirely.

Do you know how incredibly difficult it is to feel absolutely nothing? Every single second, we feel something. Even when we think we feel nothing, we feel bored. Boredom is an emotion too! But I needed to reach absolute zero. I had to build the mindset of a flawless psychopath a mind with zero empathy, zero fear, and zero regret.

I took a breath. In for four seconds. Hold for four seconds. Exhale for four seconds.

I built a massive, impenetrable wall of solid steel inside my mind, and I locked every single emotion behind it. My heart rate began to plummet. One hundred twenty. Down to ninety. Down to seventy. Down to fifty.

My mind became as still as a frozen, glass-like lake. Not a single ripple. Not a single vibration.

I opened my eyes.

My sudden emotional blackout caused a massive glitch in the shadow-men's algorithm. They were totally confused. Their data stream dropped to dead zero. They took a hesitant step toward me. I could see a restless vibration rippling across their surfaces. They fully expected me to lose my mind in terror. They expected me to surrender to my darkest traumas. Instead, I had just completely cut off their fuel supply.

The largest shadow-man in the center stepped right up to me, stopping only inches from my face. I stared right into his faceless void with absolutely dead, expressionless eyes. I didn't blink. My breathing was impossibly flat. I was giving him exactly zero data.

But I underestimated the terrifying intelligence of these entities.

When they realized their routine psychological torture wasn't working, they instantly flipped their strategy. They realized that tossing random bad memories at me wasn't going to break my steel wall. To break me, they needed a precision strike. They needed to hit the one microscopic crack in my armor where my steel wall was the weakest.

The towering, Vantablack shadow standing inches from my face began to change its shape.

Beautiful, horrifying details began to render over its faceless head. Like a 3D printer perfectly layering material to build an object, a nose, two eyes, and a pair of lips formed out of the void. The absolute darkness melted away, generating real skin color.

My chest violently lurched. My absolute zen state, my perfect emotional blackout it all shattered into a million pieces in a fraction of a second.

Because the thing standing in front of me was no longer a faceless alien entity. It had hacked into the deepest, most fiercely guarded vault in my brain and pulled out the one face I was completely unprepared to see.

Standing right in front of me was someone I had lost many years ago. Someone whose death I had witnessed with my own eyes. Someone I had buried with my own two hands.

That exact person was now looking at me, smiling that familiar, gentle smile from the old days. The same deep affection was glowing in their eyes. The same familiar crease rested at the corner of their lips.

Slowly, they reached their right hand out toward me.

And then, for the first time in this dimension, a real sound wave was generated. A familiar, impossibly nostalgic voice whispered right next to my ear: "Are you really going to leave me here all alone?"

Every single security protocol in my brain crashed all at once. The very last thread of reality violently snapped.

Dead people never come back.

We live our entire lives accepting this brutal truth. We bury them, we pray, we mourn, and then eventually, we forget and go right back to our daily routines. But when the biggest loss of your life takes a physical shape and stands right in front of you in some impossible dimension, all the logic gates in your brain crash at the exact same time.

There is a specific spot in the human brain called the fusiform face area. Its only job is to scan faces and cross-check them with your memory database to tell you if someone is a friend or a stranger. Right now, my fusiform face area was screaming like crazy. Every single pixel of that entity standing before me, the exact curve of its smile, the familiar depth in its eyes it was a perfect match. My logical brain was yelling at me, telling me this was a trap. It wasn’t human. It was an interdimensional parasite that had hacked my most vulnerable memory to create a 3D visual projection.

But emotions don't give a damn about logic.

Do you know what grief actually is? Grief is just leftover love with nowhere to go. When you love someone, your brain builds a specific neural pathway just for them. When they die, their existence is wiped from physical reality, sure, but that neural pathway in your brain stays fully active. Your brain constantly waits for a signal from that person. And when it gets absolutely nothing, it generates a blinding, agonizing pain. These entities were feeding a fake signal into that hungry neural pathway of mine.

I was completely hypnotized.

My psychopathic zen state, that emotional blackout, evaporated in a second. When that familiar face standing in front of me reached out its right hand, I lost all control over my own body. My right hand moved up automatically to hold its hand.

The temperature of space suddenly dropped to near absolute zero.

The exact second my fingertips touched its hand, a cosmic-level explosion went off. But it didn't create a fireball. It created a data tornado. I could physically feel my memories being extracted live, right out of my brain. Folder after folder of data unzipped, shooting out of my body as a glowing blue stream of energy and entering its body.

And right in that exact moment, the most terrifying truth of the universe became crystal clear to me. They hadn't brought me here just to drink my emotional energy. They weren't using me as a battery. Their plan was a thousand times darker and deeply psychoactive.

They were stealing my identity.

Have you ever heard of the Ship of Theseus paradox? In ancient Greek mythology, there was a hero named Theseus who had a famous ship. Over the years, the wooden planks of that ship started to rot, and people replaced them one by one with new planks. Eventually, every single piece of wood on the ship was replaced. Philosophers ask this: is the ship built from totally new wood still the original Ship of Theseus? If not, when did the original ship actually lose its identity? When the very first plank was swapped, or the very last?

Human existence is exactly like the Ship of Theseus. Your identity doesn't live in your muscles or your bones. Every single cell in your body replaces itself completely every seven years. Your true existence hides inside your memories. Inside your experiences. Inside the specific wiring of the neurons in your brain. Who are you? You are nothing but the sum total of all the memories in your life.

These shadow-beings were copying that core source code. They were downloading my memories, my emotions, my childhood trauma, every single "first" experience of my life right into their hard drives. They were scanning the physics and rules of my 3D reality straight from my mind.

They wanted to enter Earth.

But there is a brutally strict rule in quantum mechanics called the no-cloning theorem. You can never create a perfect, identical copy of an unknown quantum state. If you want to copy quantum information, you have to destroy the original source. According to information theory, data is never duplicated; data is transferred.

Which meant, the more this entity downloaded my memories, the more my existence in the real world was being erased.

I could literally see my memories getting corrupted. I couldn't remember my mother's face anymore. My own name felt like some strange, unknown spelling. The color of my school building was permanently deleted from my memory bank. The moment this download hit 100%, I wouldn't just die in this dimension. My entire existence in the real world would be wiped out, traveling backward through time. Just like in those time-travel movies where changing the past makes people fade away from the future, my existence would be deleted from the universe's database. The things in my bedroom would belong to someone else. My face would vanish from my friends' memories. A brand new reality would be born where I never even existed.

Panic paralyzes you, but only up to a certain limit. When panic crosses its maximum threshold, it transforms into a deadly survival force.

I stared at that fake face of my loved one standing before me. It was still smiling. But now, there was a metallic, robotic vibe to that smile. Because it had already started processing my memories.

The primal amygdala inside my brain suddenly flipped its strategy. It realized fear wasn't going to work. Faking emptiness wasn't going to work either. To defeat these interdimensional parasites, I had to produce an energy they simply couldn't consume.

There's a concept in advanced chemistry. When you mix a strong acid with a strong base, you get a violent reaction that generates a massive amount of heat. These entities were used to drinking my fear and my grief. But what if I force-fed them pure, unadulterated, toxic rage?

Human anger is the most destructive emotion in the universe. When you get completely, blindly furious, your brain's prefrontal cortex goes offline. A flood of adrenaline and norepinephrine rushes through your blood. You aren't human anymore; you become a natural disaster.

I manually opened the darkest folders of my memory bank.

I dragged up the memories where I was humiliated. Where I was used. Where I was betrayed by the people I loved. I mixed all my regrets, all my frustrations, and all the raw malice I had against the world, rolling it all together into a high-voltage psychological fireball.

Do you know how a DDoS attack works in cybersecurity? Hackers send so many data requests to a specific server all at once that the server can't handle the load and crashes. I launched a psychological DDoS attack straight into the consciousness of this shadow-being.

I gripped its hand even tighter.

I screamed. But this scream had no physical sound. It was a telepathic shockwave.

"You want my memories? Take them. Take it all."

I forcefully started pushing all the toxic data from my brain into its neural network. These non-carbon entities had absolutely no idea how grotesque the dark side of a human mind could be. They were used to clean, logical systems. They had never handled the sadistic, self-destructive, and chaotic energy hiding inside a human brain.

Right before my eyes, the source code of reality began to break. That familiar, magical face suddenly started glitching. There were no bones under its skin, just static noise and binary code. Under the heavy overload of my toxic emotions, its data processing center was literally overheating.

Its smile twisted into a deformed shriek. The pupils of its eyes burst open, and pitch-black Vantablack liquid started pouring out. It let go of my hand and desperately tried to throw itself backward.

But I didn't let it go.

I fully understood the rules of this dimension now. Here, physics operates based on your observation and your willpower. Space will obey the rules of whoever dominates it.

I locked my gaze onto those empty holes in its eyes. Using the sheer weight of my entire existence, I shifted the gravity of the space toward myself. It was now just a tiny, helpless satellite trapped inside my gravitational pull.

The fake human texture of its skin started melting and dripping off like hot wax. I could clearly see its true, original plasma form thrashing around inside. The other shadow-beings who had formed a circle around me began to panic and back away. They finally realized they had hacked the mind of the wrong human.

I shoved my right hand straight into the middle of its chest, right where the heart should be.

There was no physical resistance. Just the feeling of extremely cold plasma.

I grabbed its core data center.

"Give me my memories back."

I started a reverse osmosis process. Not only did I extract my own stolen memories from its system, but I also downloaded some of its specific memories and data straight into my own brain.

How these entities tunnel from one dimension to another. How they fold the fabric of reality. How they find the glitches in space-time. All this unknown cosmic information began installing into my neurons. My brain's capacity was on the verge of burning out while processing this massive amount of data. Hot blood started shooting out of my nose like a fountain. For the first time in this dimension, I saw my own physical fluid. My blood was floating in the space like tiny red spheres.

I pulled my hand out with all the strength I had left.

Instantly, the shadow-being's body blew apart in a silent explosion, its pieces fading away into the dark vacuum of space.

Everything suddenly went dead silent. I was panting. My heart rate had crossed two hundred. I landed floating on an invisible floor in space. My body was shaking. But this shaking wasn't from fear. This was the vibration of a nuclear reactor core going into overdrive.

I looked around at the fractal geometric structures surrounding me. The other shadow-beings weren't looking at me anymore. Their cold observation was gone. They were now trying to hide themselves in the dark corners of space. They were terrified of me.

I had hacked their system. I had deleted one of their soldiers.

But I had absolutely no time left.

My consciousness started processing the data I had downloaded from the core of that entity. I was looking at a deadly piece of information.

The space-time of this dimension was not synced with our Earth. Time doesn't move linearly here. I might have spent only a few hours here, but in Earth's timeline, years had probably already passed. Einstein's relativity was working here in its most extreme form.

If I couldn't create a portal to escape this dimension right now, my physical body on Earth would die of dehydration and starvation. I would be trapped forever in this void as a digital ghost.

My stolen data told me there was only one way out of this non-Euclidean space. I had to entangle my brain's frequency with the quantum signature of a specific physical object back on Earth. Quantum entanglement is a magical process where two particles, even if they are on opposite ends of the universe, can share information instantly.

I needed to think of an object on Earth with which I had the strongest emotional connection. I had to render its molecular structure in real-time inside my brain.

I closed my eyes.

I tried to think of my bedroom. My digital clock. My laundry bag. But no, I didn't have any deep connection with those things. Those were just dead matters.

I thought of my kitchen. That sink. That filter tap.

Suddenly, I remembered that very first moment. When I was standing in that kitchen, I was going crazy from thirst. When my hand was trembling before I drank that metallic liquid.

I recalled that thirst. That absolute, primal, and deadly feeling of dehydration. I fired the exact physical sensation of a glass of pure water into every single neuron of my brain.

I imagined the perfect equation of water: two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen. I pictured the surface tension of the water. That transparent liquid that had given birth to life on Earth.

I focused all my willpower and all my psychological energy onto one single point.

Standing right in the middle of this cosmic void, I commanded the physics of Earth to pull me back.

A sharp, high-pitched frequency started ringing near my ears. It felt as if someone had wrapped a massive metallic chain around my spinal cord and violently yanked me backward.

Those floating glass structures of space, that Vantablack darkness, the terrifying presence of the shadow-beings everything shrunk down into a single pixel.

Then, a blackout.

Absolute nothingness.

I crashed onto a cold, hard, and incredibly familiar surface.

My lungs sucked in a massive amount of air with a terrifying gasp. I coughed violently. A metallic taste threw up from my throat and spilled onto the floor.

I opened my eyes.

I was lying on my kitchen floor. The weak light from the street lamp post was falling on my face through the half-open window. The glass tumbler I had in my hand was shattered into pieces on the floor.

Have I returned?

I looked at my hands. My fingers were trembling. My skin color was normal. I could feel the liquid-nitrogen-like cold sensation of the floor tiles. I could hear my own heartbeat.

Holding onto the wall, I slowly stood up.

I looked at my smartwatch. The screen wasn't blank. Time was floating there in neon green. 3:04.

Wait... does that mean I had fainted in this room just a minute ago? That whole event in the other dimension, the shadow-beings, the psychological warfare was all of that just an extreme hallucination born from my dehydrated brain?

I let out a deep sigh. My nervous system began to relax. I started walking towards my bedroom. I needed some sleep. My brain had just survived a massive trauma.

But as I was crossing the hallway, I suddenly froze.

The amygdala in my brain started flashing red alerts all over again.

I looked at the mirror placed in the right corner of my hallway. I could see my reflection in the street lamp's light. My face, my hair, my clothes everything was perfect.

But one thing was wrong.

I raised my right hand.

The reflection inside the mirror did not raise its right hand. It stood perfectly still, looking at me with its faceless mouth, and gave a slight, chilling smile.

I hadn't returned.

Or maybe, I didn't return alone.

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