By the time I turned twenty, I had carried the question for so long that it no longer sounded like a question.
What is the point in living?
At first, it scared me. Back then, the thought still arrived with enough force to make me sit up in the dark and stare at the ceiling, suddenly aware of my own breathing, my own heartbeat, and the strange fact that I was expected to keep doing this for decades. It felt dramatic in the worst possible way, like something I should be embarrassed for thinking and terrified for understanding.
Eventually, though, even fear got tired.
The question sank too deep for the edge to stay sharp. It became part of the background noise of living, like the dull headache after pulling an all-nighter, or the quiet pressure of ignoring a pile of emails for a week while pretending that tomorrow would somehow be the day I became a responsible person. It stopped interrupting my life because it had become part of the way I moved through it.
I could still get out of bed and talk to people. I could finish assignments, answer messages, eat whatever resembled a meal, and force a laugh when the situation demanded a normal human response. I did all the small tasks that made a person appear functional from a distance, and apparently I did them well enough that nobody ever stopped to ask if I was actually okay.
That was the strange part.
I was not collapsing. I was not screaming. I was not wandering through the rain in a tragic black coat, announcing to the world that my soul had become too heavy for ordinary life. Most days, I just looked tired. Maybe a little distracted. Maybe like I needed more sleep, less caffeine, and a personality that did not treat unopened notifications as a hostile military occupation.
So nobody asked.
I could not really blame them for that.
There was nothing noble about my exhaustion. I was not some tragic figure separated from the world by a private and beautiful suffering. Millions of people carried the same quiet heaviness, and most of them handled it with far more grace than I ever managed.
They went to work. They called their families. They folded their laundry. They paid rent. They remembered birthdays. They bought groceries before the refrigerator became a philosophical statement about emptiness.
They just lived.
For a long time, I assumed everyone else had discovered some grand secret I had somehow missed. I thought there had to be a reason hidden somewhere, some clean answer that made all of this feel justified. Maybe other people woke up with conviction already sitting in their chest. Maybe they understood something about love, ambition, faith, or purpose that I could only imitate from the outside.
Later, I began to suspect the truth was much smaller.
A parent would cry.
A friend would worry.
A shift started tomorrow morning.
A meal still had to be cooked, or a dog was waiting by the door, or the laundry had been sitting wet for too long.
Life kept placing tiny, relentless obligations at my feet. None of them were grand enough to answer the question, but all of them were inconvenient enough to postpone it. Staying alive only required enduring one more day, and then, once that day ended, doing the same thing again with slightly worse posture and a new reason to be tired.
I hated that logic for years.
It felt cheap. I wanted a grand purpose, something heavy enough to justify the effort of existing. I wanted the labor to feel proportionate. If waking up, continuing, caring, failing, trying again, and dragging myself through another year required this much strength, then surely the reason should have been magnificent.
Instead, most reasons were small.
Embarrassingly small.
A message I had not answered. A chapter I still wanted to read. A joke I wanted to send to someone. A bowl of instant noodles at two in the morning. The vague fear that if I disappeared, someone else would have to clean my room and discover how many tabs I had left open.
There was no dignity in that.
There was, however, a kind of honesty.
If I am being completely honest, there was only one thing in my life I still cared about with anything resembling love.
It was a story.
I know how pathetic that sounds when said out loud. I knew it even then. A person probably should not reach twenty and realize that the most stable emotional attachment in his life is a web novel about madness, secret organizations, and gods.
But I had spent enough nights alone to stop lying to myself.
Lord of the Mysteries had stopped being just a book I liked a long time ago.
I reread it far too many times to call it a casual hobby. I hunted down endless online discussions about pathways, rituals, hidden organizations, honorific names, and complex cosmology. I poured the kind of intense focus into it that normal people saved for their careers or their relationships.
I even taught myself Chinese just so I could dive deeper into the text. I wanted the original names, the natural rhythm beneath the translation, and the hidden meanings that always slipped through the cracks when one language was forced into another.
Later, for reasons that would sound completely unhinged to a normal person, I actually learned Hermes and Ancient Hermes. It was a ridiculous amount of effort to dedicate to a fictional universe, and I knew that. Any sane person would have been mortified to admit it.
But by then, I didn't have enough energy left to feel ashamed of the few things that actually gave me joy.
Eventually, the story stopped feeling like fiction at all. It became a sanctuary I retreated to whenever my own life felt too fragile to support me.
That world was cruel, secretive, and full of horrors that could destroy a person for learning the wrong truth, but it had weight. Curiosity actually meant something there. Knowledge held genuine power. History had real weight. Even despair felt like it belonged to a design much larger than my own boring misery.
The world could crush you.
Somehow, that still felt better than emptiness.
The night I died, rain tapped steadily against my bedroom window, and my laptop screen was still the brightest thing in the room.
That detail bothered me later, in the brief and impossible space where I still had enough of myself left to be bothered by anything. The last light I saw should have been something meaningful, or at least something less stupid than a browser tab full of people arguing about how they would survive a fictional apocalypse.
Instead, my room smelled faintly of stale coffee, my desk was covered in scattered notes I had promised myself I would organize, and my laptop was displaying a forum thread about pathways, lore, and outer deities.
In other words, a completely normal night.
The thread had started as an actual lore discussion before collapsing, as all serious online discussions eventually do, into transmigration survival theories.
People were arguing about what they would do if they woke up in the Lord of the Mysteries world, and the confidence on display was so absurd that I had kept reading out of a mix of amusement, secondhand embarrassment, and the awful knowledge that I probably would have clicked on the thread even if I had known it would waste the next hour of my life.
One comment chain caught my attention because it annoyed me by being completely right.
[TheFoolishOne]: bro if I wake up in lotm I'm speedrunning safety. pray to The Fool, be super respectful, get invited to the Tarot Club, let Miss Justice bankroll my broke ass, never touch a monocle. easy.
[PraiseTheSun]: "easy" he says, 12 minutes before saying the wrong honorific name and exploding into mushrooms
[TheFoolishOne]: skill issue. I simply would not explode.
[PraiseTheSun]: You're all so brave online. You'd wake up, see one red moon, and immediately start crying in the mirror.
[JustAnOrdinaryRaven]: nah the real horror is waking up and realizing you're wearing a monocle on your right eye 🧐
[TheFoolishOne]: banned. blocked. reported. sealed artifact behavior.
[Big-Stress-99]: This entire thread is people confusing wiki knowledge with actual survival ability. Knowing the potion formulas doesn't mean you can digest one. Knowing about corruption doesn't mean your brain can tank it. You guys would get folded by the first normal Loen landlord asking for rent.
[PraiseTheSun]: real. half this sub dies to "walk outside during a thunderstorm" and the other half joins the Aurora Order because some guy with good cheekbones said god loves them.
I stared at the glowing screen for several seconds and felt the deeply unpleasant experience of having no good counterargument.
The worst part was that I wanted the easy version to be true. Of course I did. Everyone who loved that story had imagined it at least once. Wake up with perfect knowledge, avoid every trap, collect the right formulas, impress the right people, and somehow turn terror into advantage because you had read ahead.
It was the same childish logic that made people believe they would stay calm during an emergency simply because they had watched enough videos about what to do.
I knew the pathways. I knew the Sequence formulas, the hidden factions, the ritual mechanics, and far too many names no ordinary person in that universe should ever know. I understood enough of the dangerous cosmic structure to get myself killed several different ways before lunch if any of it were real. That should have felt impressive. At some point in my life, maybe it had.
That night, it only felt like evidence against me.
Knowing where the landmines were buried was useful. Actually walking through the minefield while terrified, sleep-deprived, and trying not to think the wrong sacred name was a completely different matter. There was a very large gap between "I have read the book carefully" and "I can survive contact with powers designed to break human minds."
I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my stinging eyes. The rain kept rattling against the glass in that uneven way it does when the wind keeps changing direction. The mug of coffee beside my keyboard had gone cold a long time ago, which felt appropriate. Even the coffee had given up on helping me.
The pain hit so fast that my brain failed to recognize it as pain at first.
My hand jerked violently and knocked into the mug. Coffee spilled across the desk, soaked into my scattered notes, and began dripping into the keyboard with slow, horrible determination. Under normal circumstances, that would have been enough to ruin my night.
For one absurd instant, some tiny functional part of me still tried to be upset about it, as if the real emergency was the keyboard and not the fact that my chest had suddenly decided breathing was optional.
Then the pressure tightened.
It did not feel like a cramp. It did not feel like soreness, stress, or anything my mind could file under a familiar label and deal with later. It was a sudden, crushing wrongness that made the word pain feel too small and too polite, like calling a house fire "a heating issue."
My left arm went numb.
I stared at it for one stupid second as if it belonged to someone else and had decided to resign from my body without giving proper notice.
No.
The thought came out thin and terrified.
No, no, no. Please, not now.
I grabbed the hard edge of the desk and tried to breathe. Almost nothing reached my lungs. The room tilted violently, and the rain against the window became too loud, each tap striking my ears with unreasonable clarity.
My laptop screen was still glowing with that stupid comment chain, and an irrational part of me felt furious about it.
The universe could have closed the tab before killing me. It felt like basic dignity. At minimum, it could have let me delete my search history first.
Then another thought broke through the terror.
What the hell did I even do? Did someone write my name in a Death Note? Seriously?
I tried to hold myself up, but my legs completely failed me.
There was no grand revelation waiting for me on the way down. No final clarity arrived to make the moment meaningful. Dying on a cluttered bedroom floor did not turn me profound. It did not redeem anything. It did not make all the years before it suddenly form a beautiful pattern.
There was only blinding pain and severe dizziness. There was the awful realization that I was actually dying over spilled coffee while reading about fictional gods. And worst of all, the part of me I would have mercilessly mocked in anyone else started fighting back with everything it had.
I had spent years wondering what the point of living even was. I had lived with my own apathy for so long it felt completely normal. Yet the second the end arrived, something deep inside me lost its mind. It clawed backward from the edge with the raw, blind stupidity of an animal begging for one more second.
That was the first truly cruel thing I understood.
I had not wanted life properly until it was being taken away.
I hit the floor hard, but the impact felt distant, as if it had happened to someone in the next room.
For a brief moment, the world still held its shape.
Coffee dripped off the desk. The laptop fan hummed. Rain struck the window. The agony in my chest squeezed so tightly that every breath felt stolen.
For one last second, I still knew where the room ended and where I began.
Then that boundary vanished.
Something snapped inside me. All the obscure, ridiculous knowledge I had crammed into my head over the years surged to the surface at once. It arrived with a clarity so sharp it felt physically impossible.
Pathway names. Sequence titles. Potion formulas. beyonder symbols. Complete vocabularies of Hermes and Ancient Hermes. Half-forgotten forum theories I had read at two in the morning.
All of it came back perfectly whole.
All of it came back entirely clean.
The knowledge organized itself. It took on a distinct shape. It arranged itself inside me with a cold, terrifying precision that made my stomach twist even through the dying pain.
This is wrong.
The thought was tiny, but it was mine.
This is completely wrong.
The lore didn't feel like memories anymore. I don't know how else to explain it. It felt outlined and highly structured. It felt like someone had lifted the information right out of the privacy of my mind and set it on display.
It became something that could be carefully examined.
It became something that could be read.
The exact second I realized that, something turned its attention toward it.
I didn't hear a voice, and I didn't see a face. Calling it a 'presence' gives it way too much humanity. It was much colder than a presence. It was larger than the concept of thought itself, stripped down to a focus so pure that my entire existence felt thin and accidental compared to it.
Something was looking directly at the organized structure of my knowledge.
That was what truly terrified me. Rage would have been easier to process. Malice would have given me an enemy to hate. Hunger would at least have made sense in some primitive, awful way. But this thing carried zero recognizable feeling at all. It regarded me with pure, precise, infinitely patient interest.
For one frantic heartbeat, I wanted to claw every formula and every dangerous secret back into the dark and bury it where nothing could ever find it.
Don't look at me.
It kept looking anyway.
Looking was the only word I had, but it was completely inadequate. Whatever this entity was, it moved across the shape of my knowledge and pressed into it with a pressure worse than physical weight. It traced the names. It lingered heavily over the sequence lists. It paused thoughtfully at the exact spots where that knowledge had no business existing inside a dying human brain.
But deeper than the knowledge, beneath everything it had just laid bare, there was a core part of me it couldn't touch.
I felt that, too.
The knowledge had lit me up like a flare. It had exposed me and drawn this terrifying attention down onto my mind. But it hadn't cracked me completely open.
That realization hit hard enough to make my fear incredibly simple.
This is how I die.
Then another thought ripped through the panic.
No. Worse.
The pressure shifted abruptly. Something cold and unbelievably dense forced itself into my mind, like a heavy metal seal pressing directly over my thoughts. I should have shattered beneath it. My mind should have split completely apart under the sheer weight of what was touching me. I was frantically waiting for the first crack, the exact moment I would finally stop being me.
But the crack never happened.
I was still there.
Barely. I was shaking apart with terror, dying on my floor, listening to the rain and the dripping coffee, but I was still there.
The knowledge stayed perfectly contained. My thoughts held their shape. My identity somehow survived the touch. And that frightened me almost as much as the entity itself, because absolutely nothing about it felt accidental. There was immense control in that touch. There was pure intention. It was a firm decision made over me, through me, and entirely without my input.
Whatever had found me had left something behind in my head.
I didn't know what it was, but I knew exactly how it felt.
A mark.
A claim.
Something cold and deeply distant settled inside me. The thought of tearing it out became completely absurd the second it anchored itself. Keeping my sanity gave me zero comfort. It felt entirely deliberate. It felt administrative, like I was being spared simply because I had been filed away for some massive cosmic purpose I couldn't see.
For one last second, through the sharp pain and the pale glow of the laptop, I knew with a sick certainty that something impossibly vast had reached across the threshold of my death and decided I belonged to it now.
Then the room tilted, the light stretched out, and everything faded to black.