Two Million Years Until the End

“Why did you choose me? I'm sure there are countless people better than I am.”

“Maybe. There are plenty who are better than you. But there's no one quite like you.”

Van was just an ordinary man until a strange old man stopped time in the middle of a rainstorm and entrusted him with a mission he didn't even fully understand.

From that moment on, his lifespan became frozen. Yet the strange part wasn't that he had been chosen. It was that he was the one person who should never have possessed any power at all. A blank canvas that always returned to pure white, no matter how many times it was painted.

The power he wielded was never truly his own. Van could only learn, borrow, and master the abilities of others, while his own soul never fully belonged to any path.

He would be sent two million years into the past, long before the world even knew its own name, to retrieve something from the ruins of a fallen meteor, an object that would one day determine the fate of countless worlds.

He was also tasked with guarding a gate that must never be opened, and preparing for something even the old man himself could not describe. It had only one name: the Great Event.

But before all of that, there was time to learn through countless lives and experiences alongside people who would come and go. Time to lose again and again to his eccentric mentor. Time to sit by the sea, eating potato chips and laughing at how utterly absurd everything had become.

Because before he became a legend known by countless names, a baker, a supreme commander, even a god...

...he was simply a man trying to become someone, starting with less than anyone else ever had.