Darkness had texture here—velvet and acid, silk and shattered glass. Ren drifted through it, consciousness scattered like light through a prism. This wasn't sleep. Sleep was gentle. This was the space between death and whatever came next, and it had opinions.
Am I dying? Again? Does it still count as once if it's the same day?
The void answered by showing him Tokyo.
Not his Tokyo. This one was empty, streets littered with abandoned cars frozen mid-commute. Neon signs flickered their last desperate messages to no one. The convenience store where he'd died stood intact but wrong—windows reflecting purple light from a sun that had given up.
He stood in the intersection where he'd once waited for Yui, back when waiting for someone meant something. Now the traffic lights cycled through colors that shouldn't exist, directing ghosts through a city that had forgotten how to be alive.
"This isn't real," he said, but his voice came out purple too, stained by the mist that hung over everything like a burial shroud.
"Real is negotiable," his own voice answered.
He turned to find himself—another version, standing where Yui should have been. This Ren looked tired, clothes torn, eyes reflecting horrors that hadn't happened yet. Or had happened. Or were happening now. Time worked differently in purple dreams.
"Let me guess," Dream-Ren said, "you're wondering why you? Why survive when everyone else dissolved? What makes you special?"
"I'm not special. I'm a NEET who couldn't even die properly."
"Exactly." Other-Ren smiled, and it was the expression of someone who'd learned terrible truths. "That's why you're perfect. You already knew how to exist outside the system. How to be nothing while everyone else was trying to be something."
The city shifted, buildings flowing like water. Now they stood in his apartment, but the walls breathed and the ceiling showed stars that were eyes that were stars.
"Want to see something fun?" Other-Ren asked, walking to the window.
Outside, a thousand Tokyos died a thousand ways. Purple mist in one, fire in another. In some, the buildings simply forgot how to stand. In others, the people became glass, became smoke, became ideas that no longer held weight.
"Every possible ending," Other-Ren narrated with sick fascination. "Every timeline where humanity fails. And in every single one, you're there at the end. The last witness. The final disappointment."
"Why?" The word scraped out like a confession.
"Because someone has to remember." Other-Ren turned, and his face was cracking like old paint. "Someone has to carry the weight of what was lost. And who better than someone already used to carrying failure?"
The apartment exploded into purple fractals. Ren fell through himself, through time, through possibilities that screamed. He saw:
—himself at seven, white hair already marking him as different, kids circling like predators
—Grandpa's funeral, rain that tasted like endings
—Yui walking away one step at a time, each footfall a small apocalypse
—his parents' disappointed faces multiplied into infinity
—the convenience store clerk's painful smile becoming a death mask
—purple mist taking everyone but leaving him behind, always behind, always alone
"Stop," he pleaded, but the visions came faster. Deaths he hadn't died. Failures he hadn't failed yet. Lives he'd never live.
And through it all, the purple mist watched. Waited. Chose.
"You're not the hero," Other-Ren whispered as reality dissolved. "You're the witness. The record. The last pure human, kept alive not from mercy but from cruelty. Because someone has to remember what was lost."
"I don't want to remember!"
"Then you should have died properly the first time."
The dream shattered like glass made of screams. Ren fell up into consciousness, one word tearing from his throat:
"I'M STILL HERE!"