The Multiversal Tourist: 2 (Patreon)

Five hundred and thirty-three attempts. Each one a lesson in restraint I didn't possess yet.

I learned a lot about what doesn't work when you're an infinite reservoir trying to fit into a finite container. Turns out, almost everything falls into that category.

The Early Disasters (Attempts 1-50)

Reality #1: A generic Earth (Suburban Neighborhood)

The first few were... embarrassing, if I'm being honest.

Reality #1 was just a normal Earth. Suburban neighborhood, autumn evening, a cat on a fence. I tried to manifest as nothing more than a presence. No body, just as energy in existence.

Then, I leaked. A fraction of a fraction of my energy escaped containment like the way a human exhaled a breath.

The cat, the fence, the house, the street, and approximately forty-seven square kilometers of crust converted to light and heat in 0.0004 seconds.

I blinked back into the Void, staring at nothing.

"Okay. Too much. Be gentler next time."

Reality #8: A High-Fantasy Realm (The Great Forest)

Reality #8 was a high-fantasy world thick with ambient mana. I thought maybe a universe with its own internal energy could handle mine. Like adding water to water, right?

Wrong.

The moment my energy touched their mana, it was like dropping a lit match into a swimming pool made of gasoline. The magic of that world acted as a conductor, carrying my presence like a lightning strike to every living soul connected to the world's ley lines.

An ancient dragon that had lived for millennia turned to ash mid-roar. Mountains became craters. Oceans boiled.

I retreated before the planet's core went critical.

"Note to self: Magic is volatile. Avoid."

By attempt #50, I'd destroyed a zombie apocalypse world (tried to possess a corpse, accidentally created a miniature sun).

Reality #65: Steampunk world.

Well what do you know. I actually ran into Chuthlu.

The Third Hour: The "Possession" Experiments

Reality #118: A Cyberpunk Dystopia (Mega-City)

I was getting frustrated. I found a fresh corpse in a dark alley—a chrome-enhanced street thug. Sturdy, I thought. Metal and carbon.

I slid in.

For half a second, I felt the cold rain on skin. It was glorious. Then, I tried to move a finger.

The electrical signals in the nervous system met my raw energy and underwent a "total system failure." The cybernetics short-circuit and achieved cold fusion. The resulting explosion leveled the city block.

I was back in the dark, staring at nothing.

"Too fragile," I muttered.

Reality #145: A Dead Space (Post-Apocalyptic)

A world already ruined. No one to hurt.

I found a skeleton. Just bone. I tried to knit energy around the calcium to create a shell.

The problem with having infinite energy is that "small" doesn't exist in my vocabulary yet. I tried to make a spark to jumpstart the cells; I accidentally birthed a localized sun. The planet’s atmosphere stripped away in seconds, turning the rock into a molten marble.

This was starting to get annoying.

The Sixth Hour: The "Conceptual" Failures

Reality #205: A 2D Cartoon Plane

I thought maybe a world with "rubber physics" would be more forgiving. So I descended and tried to manifest as a silhouette.

The laws of physics there were based on intent and humor.

Unfortunately, I had no sense of humor yet.

The sheer "seriousness" of my existence acted like a vacuum. I accidentally "drank" the color out of the universe. Then I drank the sound. Then the 2D characters started stretching toward me like spaghetti entering a black hole.

I pulled out before the whole reality turned into a single, infinitely dense point of ink.

Reality #206: I tried possessing a living person.

A random merchant in a market square. Healthy, alive, no complications.

The moment I tried to override his consciousness, his soul pushed back.

That resistance. That tiny spark of self created a feedback loop. My infinite energy met his finite will and the resulting clash erased him. Then it erased everyone within visual range. Then it erased the concept of "merchant" from that world's collective memory.

I pulled out as reality itself started to unravel.

"Living beings are worse. Their consciousness is a hard border. Don't cross it."

Reality #289: A Minor Galactic Empire

I decided to get creative, and tried to inhabit a star. If a human body was a bottle, a star was at least a bucket.

Following which, I merged with a Red Giant. For a full minute, it held. I felt the roar of fusion, the weight of gravity. It was comfortable.

Then, I had a thought. A single, wandering thought about movement.

The star went supernova instantly. The shockwave obliterated four neighboring solar systems and created a nebula that would birth new stars in a million years.

Poetic, maybe. But still a failure.

Reality #312: I found a dead Viltrumite.

Floating in space, fist-sized hole in his chest, but otherwise intact. Viltrumites have cellular density like compressed diamonds. Smart Atoms that adapt and strengthen under stress.

I thought, "Finally. Something durable."

I slid in and released as little a thread of energy as I could to try to charge up the corpse in an attempt to jumpstart the body's regeneration. It worked, and I felt like I had succeeded .... For three seconds.

Then I tried to fly.

The Viltrumite body is designed to push against gravity. When I tried to do the same, let's just say the results were less than ideal.

I became a localized tear in the fabric of space-time. The "Smart Atoms" of the Viltrumite biology tried to compensate, but they were like paper dams against a supernova.

The body didn't explode—it simply ceased to be, converted into a burst of neutrinos that scoured the nearby planet of all life.

Incompatible. The biology is too rigid.

The Kryptonian Attempt (Reality #401)

Next, I sought out a dead Kryptonian floating in the debris of a shattered Argo City. I thought the solar-cell structure of the skin might act as a natural regulator. If they could store yellow sun radiation, perhaps they could store Me.

I was catastrophically wrong.

As soon as I entered the cells, I realized Kryptonian physiology is a sponge. It didn't hold me back; it tried to drink all of me. The body acted as a vacuum, pulling more and more energy it clearly couldn't contain.

Within seconds, the corpse became a living star. Then a singularity. Then an actual black hole that swallowed the entire star system before I managed to sever the connection and retreat.

Incompatible. The biology is too hungry.

The Shift: Rebirth (Attempts 401-533)

By attempt #401, the pattern was undeniable.

Possession doesn't work. You can't put the ocean in a pre-made bottle without shattering the glass.

My hypothesis was that I needed to become the bottle.

Grow with it. Let the universe's laws bake into me from the moment of conception.

Rebirth.

Reality #402: I tried incarnating as a fetus in a normal human pregnancy.

The moment my consciousness touched the developing cells, they couldn't handle the load. Instant miscarriage. The mother survived. I didn't stay to see her reaction.

Reality #425: Alien species. Six-armed, crystalline biology, naturally resistant to energy.

I made it to the third trimester before the mother's body started breaking down. She gave birth to something that looked like a miniature star wrapped in flesh. It lived for four seconds before collapsing into a micro-singularity.

Reality #444: I tried to be born as an AI.

I failed. The hardware melted before the first line of code could execute.

Reality #467: I tried a world where newborns were naturally magical. Thought maybe the universe's laws would adapt me as I grew.

I was born. For five seconds, I was a crying infant.

Then my magical core activated.

I accidentally cast "existence erasure" on a continental scale.

By attempt #500, I was exhausted. Not really though.

More like contemplative. Clearly this was much much harder than I initially anticipated. It was exceeding clear that to gain physical form, I needed a way to unconsciously contain my power without my own conscious effort at minimum.

Then a way to prevent the physical form from breaking down just from having me inhabit it.

Reality #534: Jujutsu Kaisen.

A world where humans are born with Cursed Techniques. Innate abilities tied to their soul, designed to channel cursed energy.

I felt the weight of the world before I felt the touch of skin. This reality was different. It was heavy, caked in the grime of human emotion. "Cursed Energy," they called it.

A chaotic, swirling mess, but hopefully, it was exactly the buffer I needed.

As I felt the transition, the agonizing squeeze of being pushed into the physical realm, my infinite presence began to flood the tiny, fragile vessel of a newborn.

The walls of the hospital began to vibrate. Reality started to thin, the air turning into ozone as the first leak of my essence threatened to turn Tokyo into a memory. 'Well, here we go again.'

Just as I was about to pull out before destroying yet another world, it actually fought back.

Not surprising as I had gone against a few worlds that pushed back against my presence before.

However, not like this.

As my energy surged, searching for a way out, the laws of Jujutsu snapped onto my soul like a series of iron shackles. It wasn't my conscious mind doing it; it was the body’s own desperate attempt at survival, manifesting a "Technique" to act as a dam.

'Cursed Technique, Infinite Boundary ...'

The infant body convulsed once, twice, and then went still. The air pressure normalized. The walls stopped shaking. The doctor holding me let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.

I opened my eyes, pitch black rises glowing faintly in the fluorescent light before dimming back to normal—and blinked at the ceiling.

For the first time in five hundred and thirty-four attempts, I felt a warmth that didn't come from me incinerating everything.

Every infinitesimal spark of energy trying to "Exit" my soul into the world was met by a boundary that redefined its path. Then disappeared only to reappear again, right at the exact same coordinate as its "Entrance Point."

Trapping it in a perfect, closed loop—leaking out of the Void and instantly manifesting back into the Void.

A perpetual motion machine of cosmic proportions, contained within a geometric cage of my own making.

Following which, I felt the soft fabric of a towel and the exhaustion of a physical brain trying to process the concept of 'light' and 'sound.'

The doctor wrapped me in a blanket and handed me to a woman with tired eyes and black hair. My mother, presumably.

She looked down at me with a mix of exhaustion and relief.

"He's beautiful," she whispered.

I didn't cry. Didn't make a sound. Just stared back at her with eyes that held far too much awareness for a newborn.

She didn't seem to notice. Or maybe she was too tired to care.

The nurse wrote something on a clipboard. "Name?"

My mother hesitated, then smiled softly.

"Haruto," she said. "Haruto Amari."