He was a man who seemed ordinary, the kind one might find anywhere.
If he had any distinguishing trait, it was a sharp intellect that surpassed those around him.
He excelled academically and possessed a quick wit; thanks to this brilliance, he secured a place on the so-called Elite Track.
However, there was a darker side to his nature: his emotions were nearly impossible to stir.
Joy, sorrow, surprise, anger—his own heart remained still, and he often struggled to decipher the feelings of others.
Because of these deficiencies, he felt a persistent sense of hollow dissatisfaction even as he climbed the ranks, while those around him naturally kept their distance.
It wasn’t that he was lonely or in pain. As previously mentioned, he could not properly process his own emotions, so such sentiments never took root. There was simply a vague, lingering emptiness in his heart, and he drifted through life listlessly carrying that weight.
The man's life changed forever because of a single incident.
Company orders sent him on a business trip to a distant land, and he boarded a ship for the voyage. That vessel, carrying a multitude of passengers, sank to the bottom of the sea.
It was a catastrophic accident, made worse by terrible timing and an isolated location. In a stroke of truly horrific luck, nearly an entire week passed between the disaster and the arrival of rescue teams.
During that long wait for salvation, the surviving passengers were paralyzed with Fear.
The ship remained structurally intact for the time being, but no one knew if they would be pulled to the surface alive. In fact, the odds of survival were overwhelmingly low. Yet, humans are creatures that cling to hope even when they understand the futility of it.
Or rather, it would be more accurate to say they are creatures terrified of death.
Everyone harbored a Fear of the end and a desperate obsession with life. While those trapped in the wreck prayed from the depths of their souls to crawl out from this abyss, someone spoke.
"If this many people keep breathing in here, the oxygen will be gone before we know it."
Those words changed everything.
Driven by a primal urge to survive, the passengers began to act without regard for ethics or the law.
First, they decided the crew should be held responsible for the accident. Fueling their rage with the agony of their situation, the passengers swarmed the sailors and slaughtered every last one of them.
Next, the consensus turned toward the elderly; they were deemed expendable since they had so little time left anyway. Some accepted their fate and surrendered to death, but the majority fought to live, only to be murdered by their fellow passengers.
Some of the elderly were killed by their own kin. Having already crossed the line into inhumanity, the survivors began to murder others to secure their own breath as if possessed by a manic fever.
Children, the infirm, the poor, the wealthy—any excuse would do. As long as they could find a reason to eliminate someone else, it was enough.
One by one, people were murdered. The pile of corpses grew, and madness filled the space where air used to be. Lovers who had been inseparable just the day before turned on each other; families collapsed into bloody ruin; those who could not stomach the insanity took their own lives.
There, at the bottom of the ocean and severed from the world above, a Banquet of Madness unfolded.
Swept up in the middle of this carnage, the man gasped as his emotions were violently shaken for the first time in his life.
He felt neither Fear nor Despair. Instead, he was overcome with ecstasy and excitement.
For it was he who had uttered the words that catalyzed the slaughter; it was he who had first mentioned the dwindling oxygen.
With a single sentence, he had goaded the people into killing one another. He had forced them to expose their hideous true selves, baring their desperate obsession with life.
It was a thrill unlike anything he had ever known. He felt a rapturous joy in the realization that he could manipulate others, orchestrate their ruin, and control the entire scene.
He continued to incite the survivors, manufacturing plausible excuses to keep the chaos accelerating. As he watched the body count rise, he was filled with delight and a new, dark desire.
He wanted to see more. He wanted to draw out more. He wanted to build a Stage with his own hands that would manifest the ugliest depths of the human soul, and he wanted to savor the sight of people and worlds falling into ruin.
In the microscopic world of that sunken ship, this became his singular focus. He held onto that thought until the very end, eventually dying alongside the rest of the passengers.
However, his wish was granted after death.
Reborn in another world, the man discarded his old identity and christened himself the Conductor.
To ensure he never forgot the day his soul was finally stirred—to ensure he could always feel the rapture he tasted on that Stage which served as his first masterpiece—he took the name of that very setting for his own.
Thus, the Monster of Madness who crawled out from the abyss obtained a new name and the role of a Conductor who orchestrates all. Since then, he has transformed numerous worlds into his personal theaters and brought them to ruin.
And now, his infamy reaching its zenith, he prepares to take up the baton for the Final Chapter of his Next Performance.
He will drag everything down into the Abyss Named Destruction.