"You can no longer atone through the device of fate."
The words didn't just echo—they sliced through the void.
"You are now condemned to the Nether Realm, to suffer torment beyond time itself. You will remain there until every ounce of your karmic debt has been cleansed."
A broken laugh escaped from somewhere in the darkness before me. A soul realizing its doom.
"No! Please! I beg you!"
The scream tore through the silence, primal and desperate—the sound of someone facing oblivion.
"Send me back—just once more!" His voice cracked, fractured with terror. "I'll do anything! I don't care what I become! Even if I return as a beast, or an insect—anything with breath! Just... please! Let me go back!"
A pause hung in the air.
"You had your chance." The divine voice carried no emotion, just cold certainty. "Be gone."
"No—NOOOOOOOO—!"
The scream twisted into something inhuman before vanishing completely, as if someone had simply switched off a light.
Gone. Just like that.
And in that silence, I felt it—the terrifying truth that soon, that could be me.
The cosmos swam back into focus around me, an ocean of stars suspended in inky blackness. This place existed outside of everything—a realm between heartbeats where souls heavy with sin faced their final judgment. I'd been here before. Many, many times.
But something was different now. Wrong.
The familiar endless expanse still stretched in all directions, but it felt... altered. Like walking into your childhood home to find all the furniture moved six inches to the left—recognizable but unsettling in ways you can't quite name.
My attention pulled forward to a massive cloud of light, pulsing and shifting like a living thing. Souls. Thousands of them, drifting together in a river of consciousness, waiting to be sorted and sent back through the great wheel of reincarnation.
I should be among them—formless, mindless, without memory or self. Once death claims you, your awareness is supposed to dissolve, your identity scattered like ash in the wind as you're pulled through the Gates that offer passage back to life.
Yet here I was. Still me. Still thinking. Still remembering.
And that meant something had gone terribly wrong.
Not everyone makes it through the Gates. Some souls get yanked from the stream. Judged. Condemned.
Some are simply damned. Forever.
That endless torment was what I'd spent a thousand lifetimes trying to avoid. I'd surrendered myself to fate's cruel games, lifetime after lifetime. I'd been the villain, the victim, the fool—whatever role would keep me moving through the cycle.
Each time I died, I thought: Maybe this time I've paid enough.
But with each new life, I only sank deeper. The stains on my soul grew darker, the weight of karma heavier. By now, I wasn't even sure I still qualified for the cycle. Maybe I was no different from that poor bastard who just got his one-way ticket to eternal suffering.
A bitter laugh bubbled up from nowhere and everywhere inside me.
A thousand lifetimes. A thousand chances. And I couldn't even remember what started it all. My previous lives had become jumbled fragments, like trying to remember a dream while falling into another. The more I cycled through death and rebirth, the less human I felt. The less me I remained.
But the universe's cruelest joke? I still remembered that I had lived before.
Most souls might keep fleeting images of their past life—a face, a feeling, a moment of joy or pain. The rare ones remember two lives, maybe three. But me? I'd lived so many times that my identity had fractured like light through a shattered prism.
What damned me to this endless cycle? I think it began with one catastrophic lifetime where I committed such atrocities, piled up such overwhelming karmic debt, that the KEEPER himself appeared to me. His warning still burns in my memory: The Fates had turned their gaze upon me. The Will of the Universe itself had grown to hate me.
"Clear your karmic debt," he'd said, eyes like distant stars, "before it's too late."
I didn't listen. I made it worse. So much worse.
Everything I touched crumbled to dust. Everything I built collapsed into ruin. Everything I loved withered and died. And to this day, I still don't understand why.
"Why?" The question has haunted me across centuries. Why did every choice I made lead to disaster? Why did every path I walked end in blood and ashes?
There was a Seer once—blind eyes that somehow saw everything—who told me the fastest way to cleanse my karmic burden was to surrender completely. To lose. To let fate tear me apart over and over again. To suffer until the universe's hatred finally began to fade.
So I did exactly that.
Life after life, I became the loser. The side character. The villain. The pathetic extra with no purpose but to suffer and die. I never sought happiness—I just wanted to die badly enough, painfully enough, that it might wash away some small part of my debt.
But fate is a cruel mistress with a twisted sense of humor.
Every time I arranged my own tragic end, something catastrophic would happen instead. Something far worse than I'd planned.
I tried to provoke a hero into killing me by burning down a house—his sister was never supposed to be there. The story always had her somewhere else. But this time? She was inside. A blessed child marked for greatness. Another soul on my cosmic tab.
Then there was the staged robbery meant to make a heroic officer gun me down. I'd accounted for everything—no deaths, no injuries beyond my own. But one of the idiots I hired panicked and shot the officer through the heart.
What followed was a nightmare. Crossfire. Hostages caught in the middle. Bodies falling. Blood pooling on marble floors. That single moment of chaos sparked riots in the streets, then war between districts, culminating in one of the worst genocides that world had ever seen.
All because I was trying to get myself killed.
I tried. Gods know I tried. But every attempt to clear my ledger only added more red to the pages, and my karmic debt grew heavier with each failure.
Even my most recent plan—my last life—ended in disaster. I'd arranged to fake an assault on Anny, make it look like I was violating her—just shocking enough to get her boyfriend to put a bullet in my skull. Clean. Simple. One death—mine—and nothing more.
But she turned the tables. She'd figured out I'd drugged her drink and switched our glasses when I wasn't looking. The hunter became the hunted.
I remember nothing from that night. Only the footage from the hidden camera I'd planted caught the truth. She wasn't the innocent flower she pretended to be—just another manipulator with secrets darker than mine. It made no sense. If she wanted him so badly, why the elaborate game? Why wait until he was gone to reveal what lurked beneath her perfect mask?
I sent him the footage anyway. By then, what did it matter? My karmic debt already crushed me like a mountain. The least I could do was die a pathetic death at his hands. But even that simple mercy was denied me.
I'm tired. Bone-deep, soul-deep tired of failing. Tired of making everything worse no matter how hard I try to make it better.
Then I felt it—that familiar sensation of being stretched in a thousand directions at once, reality tearing away like wet paper. My sense of up and down vanished. I couldn't tell if I was falling through space or if space was falling through me. Everything warped and twisted, inside becoming outside.
I opened my eyes.
And there HE was.
The KEEPER.
Not human. Not even close. A being of pure cosmic authority draped in the semblance of form, watching me with eyes that had witnessed the birth and death of universes.
"You've returned more pitiful than ever," he said.
"You were given chances. Again and again. And you wasted them all."
"There are no chances left."