"You can no longer atone through the device of fate."
A voice.
Not just a voice—a decree.
It resonated through the space around me, rippling like thunder through silence.
"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."
"No! Please! I beg you!"
A scream tore through the void. Raw, desperate.
"Send me back—just once more! I'll do anything! I don't care what I become! Even if I return as a beast, or an insect, it doesn't matter! Just—please! Let me go back!"
A soul laid bare in its final plea.
"You had your chance. Be gone."
"No—NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO—!"
A soul-shattering scream echoed into eternity…
And then—
Silence.
He was gone.
And he would remain gone—for a very, very long time.
Slowly, clarity began to return to my vision.
The cosmos unfolded before me.
An endless, suspended realm—outside time, outside space. It was the same as always. A realm between realities where souls bearing immense karmic debt were judged.
But something was… off.
It looked familiar—yes.
But it felt different.
Wrong.
Very wrong.
I turned my gaze ahead.
There—something was shifting.
A formless mass of swirling energy.
Souls.
I'd seen it enough times to recognize it instantly. A collective drift of disembodied consciousness, waiting to be processed through the divine mechanism of reincarnation.
This—this was likely the phase I was in.
And yet…
Once a being became a soul, they lost all control. Their form, their identity, their will—gone. The cycle of reincarnation kicked in almost instantly. Souls were pulled into the predetermined flow, funneled through the Gates—transitional points that offered passage back to life.
But… not everyone made it through.
Some souls were diverted.
Judged.
Condemned.
Some… were simply damned.
Forever.
That was what I had been fighting against all this time.
I didn't want to disappear into the endless torment. I refused it. So, I surrendered to the mechanisms of fate—chose to become a tool, an unfortunate pawn in the grand script of destiny, life after life.
Every single time.
But…
Every single time, I only dug myself deeper.
Deeper into the pit of karmic debt, accumulating more stains on my soul with each so-called lifetime. At this point, I wasn't even sure I qualified for reincarnation anymore. Maybe I would end up no different from that poor bastard who just got damned to the Nether Realm.
Fuck.
AHAHAHAHAHA!
It's hilarious, really. Absolutely, fucking hilarious.
A thousand lifetimes.
And I can't even remember what started it all. Not clearly.
Hell, I can barely recall most of my previous lives anymore. They're like fragmented dreams—echoes in a cracked mirror. The more I died, reincarnated, died again, and repeated that same goddamn cycle… the less human I felt. The less me I became.
But the worst part?
I still remembered that I had lived before.
Most souls retain flashes of their past life. A handful remember two, maybe three. But me?
I've lived so many that my identity has become a blur. I don't even know what I am anymore.
What even started all of this?
I can't say. I think it began in a particular lifetime—a pivotal one—where I committed so many atrocities, racked up such a staggering karmic debt, that the KEEPER himself warned me. The Fates had turned their eyes on me. Even the Will of the Universe had grown to hate me.
He told me—clear your karmic debt, before it's too late.
But I didn't.
No—I made it worse. So much worse.
I ruined everything.
And to this day, I still don't understand why.
"Why?"
A question I've asked myself for centuries. Why did everything I try fall apart? Why did every path I walk end in ruin?
There was this bastard once—called himself a Seer. He told me the fastest way to cleanse the karmic burden was to surrender. To lose. To let fate tear me apart over and over again. To suffer, to crawl, to bleed. Only then would their hatred begin to fade.
So I did exactly that.
Lifetime after lifetime, I became the loser. The side character. The villain. The background extra with no purpose but to suffer.
I never sought happiness. I didn't care about it. I just wanted to die—miserably, pathetically, and hopefully, cleanse something in the process.
But no.
No fucking no.
Fate wouldn't let me go that easily.
Every time I set things up for a proper, tragic end, something went wrong. Always.
I tried to provoke a protagonist into killing me by burning down the house his sister was supposed to not be in. She was always supposed to be elsewhere—that was the plan. But this time? Of course, this time, she was actually inside. And of course, she was a blessed child. Another karmic stain.
Or that time I tried to fake a robbery to get a heroic officer to kill me. I accounted for every variable. No deaths. No risks. But somehow, one of the idiots I hired panicked and actually shot the guy. He died on the spot.
And then?
Crossfire.
Dozens of hostages.
Dead.
And it didn't stop there. That single event snowballed into chaos, into riots, into war. It led to one of the worst genocides in known history.
All because I was trying to get myself killed.
I tried to die. I really did. But every time, every single time, it spiraled out of control.
And the karmic debt?
It kept growing.
And growing.
And growing.
I could never die the way I wanted. Something always got in the way.
Take that one time I tried to kill the heroine. I did it in such a way that the protagonist should have been able to stop me—if he'd just shot me. I had a dagger to her throat, taunting him, giving him the chance. But instead of doing anything, she ended up impaling herself. I didn't even get to finish what I started, and things only spiraled further out of control from there.
Even the most recent attempt was a disaster. I wanted to fake a scene—make it look like I was violating Anny, just for shock, for impact. But it completely backfired. Turned out she was the one who ended up using me. She'd spiked my drink after figuring out I'd done the same to hers. While I wasn't paying attention, she must have switched the glasses.
I don't remember anything from that night.
But the hidden camera I planted before it all went down caught everything. She wasn't as innocent as she pretended to be. Just another manipulative, insatiable little liar. And still—it didn't make sense. If she was that desperate to get laid, why not just go for him from the beginning? Why wait until he was gone, then unleash a side of herself I'd never seen?
Still, I sent him the footage. What else was I supposed to do? My karmic debt was astronomical at that point. The least I could do was die a pathetic death. But even that—even that—didn't go according to plan.
I'm tired now. So tired.
Sigh.
And then… I felt something.
A strange sensation.
One I knew all too well.
Like something pulling at me from every direction—ripping me out of reality. My balance vanished. I couldn't tell if I was falling, floating, or standing at all. Everything was warped, inside out.
Then I felt it.
I opened my eyes.
And there he was.
HIM.
"You've returned more pitiful than ever," he said, voice like smoke and steel.
"You were given chances. Again and again. And you wasted them all.
There are no chances left."