"Haah... Haah... Haah."
A sound—no, a pant.
I felt... strange. But this wasn't the first time I'd felt like this.
In truth, I'd grown all too familiar with it—this sensation of...
Absolute awareness.
A clarity so vast, so consuming, it made one vulnerable to the hollow ache buried deep within all human souls. It magnified that emptiness, stretched it until the weight of it began to erode your very sense of self. Slowly, piece by piece, you forgot who you were. You forgot your past.
This state wasn't accidental—it was necessary. Every soul had to be stripped clean before entering the cycle of reincarnation.
But here's the problem— I had been through this too many damn times.
So many lifetimes that the effect dulled. I'd become resistant. Immune, almost.
I still felt clarity though.
But instead of numbing me, it did the opposite.
It sharpened everything.
Made me painfully, brutally aware—
Aware of just how miserable, how utterly wretched my life had been in every single variation.
Every misstep.
Every regret.
Stacked and pressing down on me like a burden.
Crushing. Relentless. Unforgiving.
"You can no longer atone through the device of fate. You will now be damned to the Nether Realm for torment till a time eternal, when all your karmic debts have been cleansed."
A voice. A voice so full of authority it reverberated through the space around me.
"No! PLEASE, I BEG YOU! SEND ME BACK ONCE MORE! ANYTHING! I WILL DO ANYTHING! I DON'T CARE WHAT I BECOME THIS TIME—EVEN AN ANIMAL! IT DOESN'T MATTER, JUST PLEASE, SEND ME BACK ONE LAST TIME!"
A plea.
A soul-piercing scream of torment.
"You had your chance. Be gone."
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"
A soul-scattering scream.
And then… silence.
Whoever that was, he was gone.
And he was going to be gone for a long time.
Now, clarity began returning to my vision.
The cosmos.
That was what met me.
It was the same as always—a place suspended in a certain part of reality where all souls bearing immense karmic debt had to pass through.
But…
Something felt different this time.
It looked similar. A bit.
But something was wrong.
Very wrong.
I looked ahead.
I saw something.
It was a formless mass of energy.
Souls.
I had become used to this sight.
That's how I knew instantly—
This was probably where I was.
The problem was, once one becomes a soul, they lose all form of control.
The cycle of reincarnation instantly kicks in, and all souls find themselves at various points of the GATES they must pass to get a chance at rebirth.
But it doesn't always work that way.
Sometimes… souls just get damned for all eternity.
That's what I had been fighting against all this time.
I didn't want to be trapped in endless torment—I didn't.
So I took on the path of retribution through the devices of fate, becoming an unfortunate tool in the grand scripts of fate every single time.
But—
Every single time, I only dug a deeper hole, accumulating even more karmic depts.
At this point in time, I had my doubts I would even qualify for a rebirth.
Perhaps I would have no different fate from whoever that soul was—the one just damned to the Nether Realm.
Fuck.
AHAHAHAHA!
This is just fucking hilarious.
A thousand lifetimes.
I can't even remember what started it all.
I can't even remember much of my previous lives anymore.
In fact, the more I died, reincarnated, died, reincarnated—and continued that monotonous cycle—the less human I felt.
What made it worse was my inability to forget that I had a life before.
Most people remember their previous life. Some remember two, maybe three.
But me?
I remember living so many that at this point, I've lost my identity.
I'm starting to forget what I am anymore.
What even started this cycle?
I can't even remember.
I'm pretty sure it was a certain lifetime where I accumulated a huge amount of karmic debt.
The KEEPER warned me.
The fates and even the Will had grown to hate me.
I had to clear the karmic debt before it became too late for my soul.
Hahaha!
I only made it worse.
I fucked up my life.
"But why?"
A question I still can't answer, even now.
Why did nothing ever work out how I planned it?
The bastard told me the fastest way to rid myself of that karmic burden was to become a loser—
To let fate have at me, to let destiny torment me as it pleased.
Only then would the hate they held for my soul begin to ease.
But…
I kept fucking myself over, and over, and over through multiple lifetimes.
A villain.
A side character.
An extra.
That was all I ever was.
NEVER meant to be happy.
But I didn't care about happiness.
I just wanted to die in the most pathetic way possible.
But no.
No fucking no.
Things just kept going against my plan at every point in time.
Trying to get the protagonist to kill me—
I end up burning down the house his sister lived in to piss him off enough to do it.
But then I realize—she was actually in the building.
She wasn't anywhere else like I had predicted.
She was in the building.
And I ended up racking even more karmic points because, of course, she was a blessed child.
Or—
I end up killing a bunch of kids even after I'd accounted for all possible variables to make sure no one would die.
Or—
I end up indirectly causing a genocide.
Like that time I got some guys to do a bank robbery just to get a police officer—who was a blessed child—to kill me.
But no.
No fucking no.
It's like they lose their plot armor the moment I start praying endlessly for them not to kick the stupid bucket.
But it kept happening.
That time, one of the robbers I hired actually shot the guy.
And he died.
Then, from a crossfire, hundreds of hostages died.
In fact, it led to a chain event that caused the biggest genocide ever known.
And it kept happening.
Happening and happening.
I could never die the way I wanted.
Something always got in the way.
Take for instance that time I tried to kill a heroine but did it in a way the protagonist should've been able to stop me—
If he'd just fucking shot me.
I had a dagger to her neck, and just as I was taunting the bastard—
She impaled herself.
And it just kept getting worse.
Even this last one.
I wanted to record a video to make it seem like I was raping Anny.
But it turned out—
She was the one who ended up raping me.
She had spiked my drink.
She knew I'd spiked hers, so she found a way to replace her drink while I wasn't looking.
She fucking molested me so much I actually got scared of her.
She wasn't as innocent as she seemed.
She was just a horny bitch.
But it didn't make sense.
If she wanted to get laid that bad, why not just fuck the bastard in the first place?
Why did she have to wait for him to be away, then show that side of her I never even knew existed?
But I did send the video nonetheless—to the bastard.
What else could I do?
I was pretty sure I'd stacked up an astronomical amount of karmic debt.
The least I could do was die a pathetic death.
But even then.
Even then something just had to mess it up.
At this point, I'm tired.
Sighs.
Suddenly, I felt a strange sensation.
I knew this sensation all too well.
I felt this drag.
From all directions.
My balance was thrown into chaos.
I didn't know if I was moving forward or back, standing up or down.
Then I felt something.
I opened my eyes.
And I saw…
HIM.
"You have returned more pitiful than before. You were given a chance, and you have wasted them all. You have lost all chances."