Some year, some month, some day.
Some hour, some minute, some second.
The world below carried on as always, the observable area was clear, windless, with thin clouds.
Wayne silently gazed down at the distant earth from an absolute bird's-eye perspective, silently contemplating life, after all, there was nothing else he could do.
He could no longer remember how many years and months he had maintained this state, nor did he know what he actually looked like now. Although he could roughly judge the passage of time based on the alternation of day and night, to be honest, after hundreds of thousands of such alternations, he'd given up counting.
So this counted as transmigration, right?
Honestly, Wayne was pretty open-minded about the whole "transmigration" thing. It wasn't that he had some profound enlightenment that let him treat life and death as trivial, it was that when his plane had gone down in his previous life, he'd already come to terms with the fact that fate was fickle and death was in God's hands.
After all, in a situation where death was certain, having the chance to transmigrate was better than truly splatting on the ground. What he couldn't come to terms with was why, after transmigrating, he ended up floating in the sky...
And had been floating for god-knows-how-many tens of thousands of years.
Wayne had no idea what state he was currently in. He couldn't shift his viewpoint, nor could he feel the existence of a body. In fact, aside from vision, he had completely lost all ability to perceive the external environment, so he couldn't even be sure whether he was now a lingering wisp of a soul or a space-drifting corpse in orbit.
But one thing was certain.
He was absolutely not floating here in the form of a normal human.
Because he was sure that no normal human's mental structure could possibly keep its thoughts clear and memories intact after floating alone in the sky for tens of thousands of years, and still have the spare time to sit here contemplating life.
A normal person would have gone insane long ago.
But he hadn't gone insane. Not only had he not gone insane, his memory was exceptional.
The passage of tens of thousands of years hadn't affected Wayne's memory in the slightest. To this day, he could still clearly recall everything he'd experienced in the final moments of his previous life, the piercing screams, the alarms, the violently shaking cabin, the sky and ground tumbling endlessly outside the window, the oxygen mask his seatmate absolutely could not get on, and the tremendous boom when the plane disintegrated in midair.
Everything was as vivid as if it had happened yesterday, and he could clearly remember the sheer shock he'd felt when, after that tremendous boom, he opened his eyes again only to find himself floating above an unfamiliar planet.
From the moment he reopened his eyes, he knew that what he was gazing at was not the lands and oceans of Earth. So he spent a little time deducing and accepting the fact that he had come to another world, then spent even longer trying to figure out how to stop himself from continuing to float like this.
Unfortunately, the second endeavor was unsuccessful.
He discovered that he was "fixed" in place, or perhaps his current form simply had no capacity for movement at all. He had become a "fixed viewpoint" overlooking the earth, locked rigidly into his current position. He could gaze at the land, but that was all he could do. He could only gaze at a restricted area of land, an irregularly shaped continent, with a ring of ocean visible around it, but his field of vision couldn't see anything beyond that.
He couldn't turn his gaze left or right, so he also couldn't determine whether there were other continents beyond that ocean, and for the same reason, to this day he still hadn't been able to get a single look at what the starry sky of this world looked like.
He wasn't even sure other celestial bodies existed in this world, for all he knew, if he turned his viewpoint around, he'd see some white-bearded God holding up a spotlight, shining down upon all creation.
Dammit, he really wanted to float on his back...
Even if all he could see after flipping over was an old man with a white beard holding a spotlight and shining it on everything, that would be fine.
But it was all wishful thinking. This earth-gazing viewpoint simply could not change direction.
However, after a long period of effort, Wayne did find one slightly controllable aspect of this viewpoint, although he couldn't move left or right, he could zoom in and out within this field of vision, pulling his perspective closer or pushing it farther away.
After discovering this, he was genuinely happy for quite a long time. He began experimenting with zooming his view in and out in various ways. Though even at maximum zoom-out he still couldn't see anything beyond that ring of ocean, at least he could choose to zoom in and take a look at what exactly was on that continent.
It was lush and teeming with life, clearly, living things existed there.
If he could watch the daily lives of people from another world, that would be something, wouldn't it? Even though he could only float here, at least observing the customs and culture of an alien world would help alleviate some of the boredom, right?
So he zoomed his view in as close as it would go, close enough to clearly observe every blade of grass and every tree on the land below.
That day, he made a despairing discovery. the mammals on the surface...
Hadn't yet evolved to walk upright.
But that was fine. Wayne was very patient, perhaps when he was alive as a human, his patience had been limited, but after transmigrating into a fixed overhead viewpoint, he found that he truly possessed immense patience.
He actually waited until the day those apes learned to walk upright.
Then many more years passed, and he personally witnessed the moment the first man-made fire was born.
It was fire struck from flint.
Change, real change, began after that first flame was born.
Wayne didn't know what happened, but after the first fire was kindled on the earth below, he felt that everything suddenly "sped up", or rather, his own perception of time's passage had developed a problem. Events on the surface began to unfold at breakneck speed, like a video fast-forwarded countless times over. He watched those humanoid races rapidly construct primitive tribes, then those tribes became early city-states. He watched those humanoid races master extraordinary abilities and use what appeared to be magic techniques to conquer and expand their territories. But before he could even make sense of what was happening on the surface, those early kingdoms crumbled into ruins one after another, and then new humanoid beings sprang up again from every corner of the rubble...
Humans and various other races began competing for living space on the continent. They established all manner of kingdoms, all manner of faiths, crying out the names of various gods as they waged war against one another, and then vanished just as quickly.
The process kept accelerating. Wayne gradually found himself unable to process the massive amount of information he was seeing. He saw creatures that looked like giant dragons suddenly burst into his field of vision, though he couldn't tell whether these "dragons" had evolved on the continent or had come from beyond the ocean.
He saw wars erupt, with the fires of battle nearly scorching the entire land to ashes, yet in the blink of an eye, new civilizations rose in their place.
It was only after a very long time that he realized the events on the surface hadn't actually accelerated, rather, he had "skipped" vast amounts of information.
His "observation" was becoming intermittent. What had started as continuous observation had degraded to recording only a few images every several years or even decades, and when these images, spanning enormous gaps in time, were strung together, they created the illusion of acceleration.
The reason he hadn't been able to realize this before was that during the intervals when his observational viewpoint went offline, his own thoughts were also frozen.
And when the observational viewpoint restarted, his thoughts would resume as if seamlessly continuing from where they'd left off.
So he simply couldn't perceive what was happening to himself.
This is bad.
These three words flashed through Wayne's mind like lightning, but in reality, this lightning-fast thought had probably consumed several hundred years.
Because he could clearly see the seas turning to mulberry fields on the land below, in the same moment those three words surfaced in his mind, yet another kingdom had already risen to its peak and crumbled to ruins.
Wayne didn't know what was behind all of this, but he knew it definitely wasn't normal. From those constantly flickering images, each spanning years, he realized that his consciousness was, in truth, already on the verge of disappearing.
Every hundred years, the total time he could actually think probably amounted to less than a single second.
And his "thought blackout periods" were still growing longer.
He knew this because the jumps between events on the surface had reached an incomprehensible scale. Those "slideshow" images flashing past like fleeting glimpses had become almost entirely incomprehensible.
At this rate, perhaps after some instant, the mind known as "Wayne" would completely dissipate in this inexplicable place. He would fall into eternal sleep in that instant, never to reboot again.
For the first time in who-knew-how-many tens of thousands of years, Wayne felt a sense of urgency. He began frantically driving his thoughts, trying to break free from this predicament. He felt his mind racing at incredible speed (assuming he still had the organ for it), with countless ideas erupting like a geyser. Yet watching the ever-changing "slideshow" on the surface, he knew his thoughts had actually slowed to the pace of one frame per millennium.
That was a bit of an exaggeration, of course, but the reality wasn't much better.
Break free from this situation, break free from this situation, break free from this situation, break free from this situation...
No matter by what means, no matter in what form, he had to break free from this situation. Even if it meant returning to that plane moments before it crashed, he could not die in this inexplicable way, in this inexplicable place!
Wayne felt his thoughts growing murky, his consciousness gradually blurring. Even the previously "seamless" continuity of his thoughts seemed to be breaking down. He thought furiously, with every ounce of his being, but having transmigrated into a fixed viewpoint, no amount of furious thinking could change his circumstances.
But just at the instant he felt his consciousness was about to fully dissipate or freeze, a voice suddenly came from somewhere unknown.
[Energy failure. Main unit restart unsuccessful. Escape protocol initiated.]
In the next instant, that fixed viewpoint vanished, everything before Wayne's eyes went black.
But his thoughts did not stop.
For the first time in countless years, he was still thinking even with his "eyes closed."
He didn't know how long he drifted in that darkness. He felt as if he were tumbling, plummeting, entering someplace cold and cramped. All manner of sensations, long since foreign, flooded in from his limbs and bones, throwing his mind into chaos.
And amid that chaos, he faintly heard a young woman's voice, sounding quite panicked.
"Wait... don't kill me yet! More importantly, the lid on your ancestor's coffin is about to fly off!"