"Haah... Haah... Haah…"
A sound—no, not just a sound. A pant.
Ragged. Desperate.
It was strange, yet not unfamiliar. I had felt this before. Time and time again, I had become accustomed—no, resigned—to this peculiar sensation.
The sensation of absolute awareness.
A clarity so profound, so all-consuming, that it stripped away the noise of existence and laid bare the core of what it meant to be. It was clarity that didn't liberate—it exposed. It made one painfully susceptible to the hollow emptiness that every human soul carries deep within. And when amplified, that emptiness had a cruel tendency to unravel you.
Piece by piece, you forgot who you once were.
Drifting.
Falling.
You forgot your name. Your face. Your past. Everything you once clung to. And that… was by design. A soul had to be cleansed—utterly purified—before it could re-enter the cycle of reincarnation.
But therein lay the problem.
I had passed through this process too many damn times.
Lifetime after lifetime, I endured it. I became resistant to the numbness, immune to the fading. The clarity didn't wipe me clean anymore—it sharpened me. It made me more aware. Hyperaware of every broken thread I'd left behind.
Every mistake.
Every betrayal.
Every moment of cowardice.
The weight of my regrets had long since stopped being metaphorical. It pressed down on me like a collapsing world, a burden I couldn't shake.
"You can no longer atone through the devices of fate," a voice declared—solemn, thunderous. It reverberated through the void around me, impossible to ignore. "You shall now be condemned to the Nether Realm, tormented until time itself forgets your name. Only then will your karmic debts be cleansed."
"No! PLEASE! I BEG YOU!" The cry ripped through the emptiness like a blade. "Send me back—just one more time! Anything! I don't care what I become this time! A beast, a crawling worm—it doesn't matter! Just one more chance! Please!"
A silence.
Then: "You had your chance. Be gone."
"AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH—!"
A scream. Soul-scattering. Then nothing.
Silence.
Whoever that was… they were gone.
And they would be gone for a long, long time.
That was the price.
Slowly, the fog began to lift from my vision. Shapes emerged. Reality began to reform.
And what greeted me was... the cosmos.
A place suspended between everything and nothing. This was the Realm Between—where souls burdened by immense karmic debt drifted, awaiting judgment.
I had been here before.
And yet… something was different.
Familiar, yes. But not quite right.
I looked ahead.
There it was—a formless mass of energy, writhing, pulsing. Souls.
I recognized it instantly. You don't forget that sight. Not after so many cycles.
This was likely the boundary I now stood before.
The problem was… once you entered that state—once you became a soul—you lost all control. The cycle of reincarnation activated on its own. You were pulled into the current and guided to one of the Gates, where your fate would be decided.
Rebirth… or damnation.
But the system was flawed. It didn't always work as intended. Some souls slipped through the cracks. Some fell too far.
Some… were damned forever.
That was the fate I had resisted for so long.
I clawed my way back, over and over again. Endured punishment, betrayal, pain—all in pursuit of one thing:
Redemption.
I didn't want to disappear into that eternal torment. I never did. So instead, I allowed myself to be used. Again and again. A pawn in the cosmic machinery, a tool of fate, dancing on the edge of oblivion with every new life.
But—
Every single time, I only dug myself into a deeper hole—accumulating even more karmic debt with each foolish step.
At this point, I doubted I'd even qualify for reincarnation anymore. Perhaps my fate was no different from that damned soul I'd just seen dragged into the Nether Realm.
Fuck.
AHAHAHAHA!
This is hilarious.
A thousand lifetimes.
I can't even remember what started it all. Hell, I can barely remember much of my previous lives anymore.
In fact, the more I died, reincarnated, died again, and continued that monotonous cycle, the less human I became.
And the worst part? I couldn't forget.
I couldn't forget that I once had a life before all this. Most people are lucky—or cursed—enough to recall one, maybe two past lives. Three, at most. But me? I've lived so many, I've lost count. I've lost myself.
I'm starting to forget who I even am.
What was the beginning of this cursed cycle?
I wish I knew.
I'm fairly certain it began in a particular lifetime—one where I amassed such a monumental karmic debt that even the KEEPER himself warned me. The Fates grew weary of me. The Will itself turned against me.
I was told I had to clear that debt.
Before it became too late.
Hah.
And what did I do?
I made it worse. I destroyed my chances. I ruined my soul.
But why?
That question still haunts me.
Why did nothing ever go the way I planned?
The Keeper told me the fastest way to rid myself of my karmic burden was to lose. To surrender. To let Fate and Destiny do as they pleased with me—grind me down until the hatred they held for my soul finally ebbed away.
But no.
I couldn't even lose properly.
Lifetime after lifetime, I kept sabotaging myself. Over and over. Again and again. A villain. A side character. An expendable extra. That's all I ever was.
Never meant to be happy.
But I didn't care about happiness.
All I wanted was to die in the most pathetic way imaginable.
And even that was denied me.
No fucking way.
Every single plan backfired. Every attempt to get a protagonist to end my life would spiral into disaster.
Once, I tried to provoke one by burning down a house—his sister's house. I thought she wouldn't be there. I was sure she wouldn't be there.
But she was.
And she died.
A blessed child, of course.
And the karmic points? They stacked higher.
Another time, I orchestrated a bank robbery just to draw out a heroic cop—another blessed soul—hoping he'd kill me in the crossfire.
Instead?
One of the robbers I hired shot him.
He died.
And that wasn't the end of it.
The chaos that followed led to a massacre. Hundreds of hostages perished.
It sparked a chain of events that culminated in one of the largest genocides recorded across any known timeline.
And it kept happening.
Again. And again.
Every plan, no matter how carefully calculated, crumbled beneath me. Every time I tried to die, someone else did instead. Someone precious. Someone protected.
Their plot armor seemed to flicker out only when I desperately prayed for it to hold.
And still... it never did.
It just kept happening.
And I... I kept living.
I could never die the way I wanted. Something always got in the way.
Take, for instance, the time I tried to kill a heroine. I planned it so the protagonist could've saved her—if he'd just fucking shot me. I had a dagger to her throat, was still taunting the bastard, dragging it out, and then—she impaled herself. On her own. Just like that.
And somehow, it only got worse from there.
Even the last time... I tried to record a video, make it look like I was molesting Anny—to enrage that bastard so he could kill. But as usual, thing never went as planned, She was the one who ended up molesting me.
She had spiked my drink. She knew I'd drugged hers and managed to swap it out while I wasn't looking.
I can't even remember anything from that night.
But from the hidden camera I had planted before it all happen.
I realized one thing.
She wasn't innocent. Far from it. Just a horny little bitch hiding under that sweet exterior. But it didn't make sense—if she wanted to get laid that bad, why not go for him? Why wait until he was gone? Why save that side of her for me?
Still, I sent the video to the bastard. What else could I do?
I figured I'd already stacked up an astronomical karmic debt. The least I could offer was a pathetic, disgraceful end. But even that was too much to ask. Even then, something had to fuck it all up.
At this point… I'm tired.
Sigh.
And then—I felt it.
A strange sensation. Too familiar.
That pull.
From everywhere and nowhere, dragging me. My balance shattered—I couldn't tell if I was falling or rising, moving forward or back, standing upright or upside down.
And then… something touched me.
I opened my eyes.
And I saw—
HIM.
"You've returned, more pitiful than before. You were given chances—plenty of them. And you wasted every single one. You've lost it all."