He woke up in his bed once more. Letting out a strangled breath, he lurched toward the toilet, collapsing at its edge as he violently emptied his stomach. The pain was unbearable. The phantom sensation of being eaten alive still rang through his nerves, echoing like a nightmare too vivid to be fake.
But he had no time to wallow in despair. His limbs felt weak, his vision swam—no, not just weak. Sleepy. Unnaturally so.
His body gave out.
He dozed off.
And returned to that world of darkness.
Only this time, it wasn't the same. He didn't regress instantly. No cheerful system message greeted him like before. Just... silence. Cold, gnawing silence.
He waited.
Wallowed.
Agonized.
Still trying to process his death—the brutal, gruesome death that carved itself into his memory. Murky eyes shed tears until they dried, until even pain became numb. It was unclear if he had vented everything or simply broken under the weight. Time felt distorted here—minutes became hours, hours into days. In that darkness, time meant nothing.
He became aware of his body again, or some vague sense of it. Still. Lying down. A rhythmic beeping pulsed through the void, mechanical and faintly mocking.
Was he dead?
No.
He realized—not yet. He had fallen into the Eternal Slumber. Too much mana had flooded his body, far beyond what a normal human could endure. He wasn't dead. But he wasn't alive either. Trapped. In something worse.
A coma. A limbo. A cage of his own mind.
Time passed—or didn't. What felt like hours stretched into days, into months, maybe years. He couldn't take it. He began to scream, to thrash, to claw at the nothingness around him.
And something answered.
A flicker.
A faint, flickering sound—like the crackle of a dying campfire. He looked around wildly, but the void remained. Still... something was different.
A dot.
A tiny, white speck in the endless black.
He began to move. Crawling, staggering, sprinting toward it—desperation pushing him onward. Was it salvation? Or a lie wearing the mask of hope?
He ran. And ran. Yet the light remained infinitesimally far, like the cruel end of an unreachable tunnel.
The beeping sound behind him grew flat, merging into a constant mechanical hum. Maddening. Endless.
Then—
[You have died.]
He gasped awake in bed again, like being punched through the surface of still water. Hands trembling, he grabbed his phone and sent a quick text to his uncle:
"I think I've caught the Slumber."
Then he sat, thinking. Trying to come up with a way out. Before the weight returned. Before sleep stole him again.
He collapsed—face-first onto the bedroom floor, catatonic.
His mind descended once more into the darkness.
But this time, something was waiting.
The dot.
It was there from the beginning. Larger than it had ever been, even after chasing it across lifetimes.
"Fuck... damn it... damn it all."
He cursed, staggering forward.
"Why the hell did I go to that Gate? I knew the risks and still went. But how could I have known the mana would regress with me? Shit. Shit... A painful death and now an eternal death trap. For what? Nothing. All because I wanted to see if a normal human—just slightly enhanced—could fight monsters. All for some regression ability and sharper senses? Hah. Stupid. So fucking stupid."
He slapped himself. Again and again.
Until he heard it.
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
The signal.
He ran.
Faster than ever before, legs burning with imagined strain. The dot grew larger. Clearer. Decades seemed to pass, but it didn't matter. He saw it now.
A flame.
A small, flickering white flame. Each ember hissed like muffled laughter, rising and fading into the black.
"The hell are you laughing at, huh?!"
He fell to his knees.
Despair crashing down as realization hit him.
The flame—the hope—was useless. A lie. A cruel joke.
Just a damned white flame.
He hated it.
He hated it.
He hated it.
He hated it.
The laughter continued, growing louder, until the flame burst outward—consuming the darkness and swallowing Shinka whole.
Inside the flickering light, memories returned. Pain surged. He saw it all again—the anguish, the screaming, his parents' death.
That cursed Gate.
The monsters. Hordes of them. Each radiating white flames from their orifices—mouths, eyes, wounds. Flickering fire erupting from every inch of their bodies.
They had killed.
Tortured.
Burned out as quickly as they appeared—devoured by their own flames, vanishing into ash and nothingness.
And then—
[You have died.]