"Uhh..."
Ren opened his eyes to a pristine white ceiling. The surface was unmarked, clean, and sterile in a way that made his eyes water after the darkness he had been swimming through. Fluorescent lights hummed softly overhead, casting everything in a pale, clinical glow.
"Where the fuck am I?" he muttered, his voice hoarse and unfamiliar to his own ears.
He slowly pushed himself up on the bed beneath him, his muscles protesting the movement as if he hadn't used them in weeks. The mattress was firm but comfortable, covered in crisp white sheets that smelled faintly of antiseptic and laundry detergent.
This seemed to be an infirmary of some sort. The walls were the same sterile white as the ceiling, broken only by a few generic medical posters about hand hygiene and proper nutrition. A small window on the far wall showed gray sky and what looked like the beginning of storm clouds gathering outside. The room had that particular smell of hospitals everywhere, a mixture of cleaning supplies and the subtle underlying scent of human suffering that no amount of sterilization could completely erase.
He began to inspect himself, running his hands over his body with growing confusion. There were no wounds at all. No cuts, no bruises. His skin was unblemished, his limbs moved normally, and even his clothes were clean and properly fitted. He was completely fine, physically at least.
"Why am I here if I'm not hurt?" he wondered aloud, flexing his fingers and rotating his shoulders to test his range of motion.
He tried to piece together what had happened.
"Let me see if I can recall... I was fighting the skin god avatar, and then..."
"EKKK! UGHH!"
Sharp pain suddenly drilled into his head like someone had driven a white-hot metal rod straight through his skull from temple to temple. The agony was so intense it made his vision blur and his stomach lurch with nausea. He doubled over, clutching his head as the memories began to flood back like a heavy torrent breaking through a dam.
The moment he got beheaded by avatar of the skin god.
The moment he transformed into that monstrosity. His body dissolving and reforming, becoming something with three masks and six arms, wielding power that belonged to consumed gods while his human consciousness screamed helplessly inside.
The moment he fought with Lu Changcheng. The clash of cosmic forces, reality bending and breaking around them as his brother tried desperately to reach the human soul buried beneath layers of divine horror.
"Ughh, fuck!" The pain intensified, and his body began to spasm involuntarily.
He realized that he had bitten through his bottom lip hard enough to draw blood. The metallic taste filled his mouth as the memories continued their relentless assault. Each recollection brought fresh waves of agony, as if his mind was rejecting the impossibility of what he had experienced.
When the spasms finally stopped, he lay gasping on the bed, sweat beading on his forehead despite the cool temperature of the room. The taste of blood lingered on his tongue, a reminder that whatever else had happened, his body was still fundamentally human.
"What the fuck was that? What am I? What did I turn into?" The questions tumbled out of him in a desperate whisper.
A sudden sense of despair hit him like a physical weight, pressing down on his chest until it was hard to breathe. The memories of the soul ocean, of the monstrous beings that fed on dissolved humanity, of his own transformation into something that could devour consciousness itself, all of it crashed over him in a wave of existential horror.
"Is that what I turned into after I devoured all those human souls?" he asked the empty room, though he wasn't sure he wanted an answer.
But something didn't add up.
"No, it shouldn't be like that. Even the beings that looked the strongest there weren't even close to that powerful."
The entities in the soul ocean had been terrible, yes, but they were nothing compared to the cosmic force he had become in his battle with Lu Changcheng. They were predators in their environment, but he had been something that could challenge a Mythical rank cultivator and nearly win.
"Then how did I escape that soul ocean? And what was that place? If I die again, will I be thrown back there?"
The thought made his blood run cold. The idea of returning to that realm of dissolved souls, of becoming one of those feeding monsters or worse, dissolving completely into the collective mass of the damned, was more terrifying than any physical pain he had ever experienced.
"No. Fuck." The word came out as both denial and determination.
As if responding to his emotional turmoil, rain began pouring outside. The first drops hit the window with gentle taps, but within moments it had escalated to a steady downpour that drummed against the glass with increasing intensity. The whole room became noticeably darker as storm clouds blocked out what little sunlight had been filtering through.
Ren watched the water stream down the window and felt a kinship with the chaos outside. "Is that place the afterlife?" he wondered, his voice barely audible over the sound of rain.
The implications were staggering. If what he had experienced was truly what awaited everyone after death, then every religion, every belief system, every hope for peaceful rest in the beyond was a lie. There was no heaven or hell as humanity understood them. There was only despair waiting, an ocean of dissolved souls feeding an ecosystem of monsters that had once been human themselves.
"Fuck, why is everything so fucked up?" He stared at the ceiling, raindrops creating shifting patterns of shadow and light across the white surface as they rolled down the window.
The weight of knowledge pressed down on him. He had seen behind the curtain of existence itself and found only horror. Death wasn't an end or a beginning; it was a transformation into something worse than life could ever be. The natural order was a lie, and survival meant becoming a monster.
As he lay there contemplating the cosmic injustice of it all, something caught his attention. In the corner of the room, neatly folded on a small chair, were his clothes.
The Umbral Gentleman attire looked exactly as it had before, the black fabric seeming to absorb light rather than reflect it. Next to it sat the plague doctor mask, its white porcelain surface unmarked by the battles he remembered fighting while wearing it.
"Hah, let me go out for a bit," he said to himself, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.
The floor was cold against his bare feet, sending a shiver up his spine that had nothing to do with temperature. He walked over to the chair and began putting on the suit, each piece of clothing feeling familiar and strange at the same time. The fabric was exactly the right size, fitting him perfectly as if it had been tailored specifically for his body.
When he reached for the mask, he hesitated. The white surface seemed to stare back at him, eyeless but somehow knowing. Instead of putting it on, he opened his inventory system and stored it there. The mask disappeared into whatever extradimensional space the system provided, safely hidden away.
"Fewer people should know about my appearance anyway," he reasoned, though he wasn't entirely sure why that mattered anymore.
The suit felt comfortable, like armor that protected not just his body but his identity. In these clothes, he could be anyone. A gentleman, a doctor, a monster, or just a man trying to figure out what he had become.
He walked to the door of the infirmary, his hand resting on the handle for a moment as he gathered his courage. Whatever lay beyond this room, whatever world he was about to step into, it would be different now. He was different now, marked by experiences that no human should have to endure.
The rain continued to pound against the window behind him as Ren opened the door and stepped out into whatever came next. The hallway beyond was as sterile and white as the room he was leaving, but it represented possibility, movement, a chance to understand what he had become and what that meant for his future.
He had survived death itself, escaped an ocean of dissolved souls, and fought a battle that had torn reality apart. Now he needed to figure out how to live with the knowledge of what lay beyond the veil of mortality, and what it meant to be something that existed in the space between human and monster.
The door clicked shut behind him, and Ren walked down the hallway toward whatever answers awaited him in this strange new chapter of his existence.