That pull led me into another world. When I opened my eyes again, I had been reborn. I was alive, breathing, existing once more. After drifting in that empty void for so long, having a body again felt unreal.
I could feel warmth on my skin, hear voices around me, and sense the world moving. For a long moment, I just lay there, overwhelmed by the simple fact that I still existed.
I was overjoyed. No, overjoyed wasn't enough. I was ecstatic. This was every webnovel reader's dream come true, being reincarnated into another world, given a second chance at life.
I laughed, I cried, and I silently thanked whatever force had dragged me out of nothingness. It felt like I had been given a miracle.
As if that wasn't enough, it turned out I had talent. Great talent. I learned faster than others, advanced quicker, and grasped things that took others years to understand. Teachers praised me. Elders watched me with interest. People spoke my name with admiration. I had a loving family, loyal friends, and a comfortable life. For the first time since my parents had died back on Earth, I felt complete.
I was happy. Truly happy. I thought that maybe, just maybe, this was my reward for everything I had endured.
But oh boy, did that happiness not last.
At first, I noticed strange things. Small things. Things that were easy to ignore. The shifting of events. Some things were going the other way, they never should have.
Everyone brushed it off as coincidence or bad luck, and so did I.
That was one of the greatest mistakes of my life.
As I grew stronger and climbed higher in that world's hierarchy, the cracks became impossible to ignore. The strange incidents increased in frequency. The atmosphere grew tense. Fear spread quietly among the people. And then, one day, everything collapsed at once.
The moment I reached the peak of power in that world, the moment I believed I could finally protect everything important to me, disaster struck. Minor conflicts turned into massive wars. Political struggles became exterminations. Hidden enemies revealed themselves. The balance of the world shattered.
One by one, the people I loved began to die.
My friends fell on battlefields I could not reach in time. My teachers were erased by enemies far stronger than expected. My family was caught in disasters that no one could prevent. I tried to save them.
I really did. I fought with everything I had. I burned through my strength, my lifespan, and my future. But every time I arrived, I was too late.
It was never enough.
Then came the existential war.
It was a war beyond logic and reason, a conflict that involved entire dimensions and civilizations. Hundreds of centillions of beings were wiped out within a single year. Stars collapsed. Continents shattered. Worlds were erased as if they had never existed. The sky burned, space twisted, and time itself began to crack.
I watched it all in silence.
I didn't understand how it had begun. I didn't understand why it had chosen us. I couldn't sense anything wrong with my fate back then. Even now, I still don't know. Everything happened so suddenly, so violently, that there was no room left for questions.
The war lasted for a hundred million years.
When it finally ended, there was nothing left.
Except me.
I was the only survivor.
There was no family waiting for me. No friends calling my name. No cities, no forests, no oceans. Just endless ruins and broken space. My tears had long since dried up. Blood replaced them. My eyes were empty, my heart numb.
I had seen bloodshed before. I had lived through countless battles. But this was different. This was complete annihilation. This was the erasure of everything that had ever mattered to me.
"My family…"
"My friends…"
The words wouldn't come out properly. My voice trembled and broke.
I looked up at the shattered heavens and cursed my accursed fate. I screamed, demanded answers, and begged for an explanation. But there was no reply. No god appeared. No voice answered. No one was listening. There was no listen anyway. They were dead. Long gone.
In the end, I laughed.
A hollow, broken laugh.
At the sheer absurdity of it all.
After everything I had endured, after everything I had sacrificed, this was my ending.
I closed my eyes.
Then I felt it again.
That familiar tug on my soul. The same pull that had dragged me out of the void the first time. Calling me once more. This time, I didn't resist. I didn't try to anchor myself to reality. I didn't struggle to stay.
I was tired.
I had suffered enough.
I just wanted to rest.
My defenses fell. My soul was ripped away from that shattered reality. And once again, I returned to the cold, empty void.
Floating in nothingness, I sighed deeply. For the first time, I didn't hope to escape. I hoped I would be left there forever. Alone. Unnoticed. Forgotten.
I didn't want to experience such a fate again.
I spent what little sense of time I had contemplating my life, its brief joys, its countless sorrows, and its fragile moments of happiness. Sometimes I laughed softly, like a madman remembering a dream.
But no sound ever came out.
Because in that place, even echoes did not exist.
And once again, after what might have been a millennium, I was thrown into another world.
Time had lost its meaning by then. A thousand years, a million years, a moment, it all felt the same inside that endless void. I stopped trying to measure it. All I knew was that, eventually, the pull returned.
And when it did, it showed no mercy.
I was ripped away from nothingness and forced back into existence.
Again.
---
Thus began my eternal torment.
Over and over, without rest or warning, I was either reincarnated into a newborn body or transmigrated into a foreign one. Sometimes I arrived as an infant, helpless and screaming. Other times, I woke up inside an adult's corpse, surrounded by unfamiliar memories and чуж unfamiliar faces. No explanations. No instructions. No choice.
Just another life.
Each reality was unique in its own way.
Some worlds were ruled by intricate and terrifying power systems, where strength was measured through cultivation, divine bloodlines, or abstract laws that only a few could comprehend. Others had no supernatural power at all, relying solely on intelligence, machines, and technological advancement.
Some civilizations worshipped energy as if it were a god. Others treated it as a tool. Some relied on swords and magic. Others on warships and artificial suns.
There were worlds where people flew through the skies on clouds of light.
There were worlds where people never even saw the stars.
I lived in all of them.
Some were beautiful beyond words, filled with wonders that could make even gods weep. Others were nightmares made real, places where suffering was built into the very structure of existence.
But no matter how different they were on the surface, they all shared the same ending.
Loss.
Pain.
Erasure.
No world ever let me stay.
No life ever let me rest.
And so I continued.
From reality to reality.
From birth to death.
From hope to despair.
Carrying everything with me.
Forever.
I was thrown again and again, ripped from one world and hurled into another without warning or mercy. Civilizations rose and collapsed around me like fleeting dreams, and through every single one, I suffered.
Not the romantic kind of suffering people like to write about. Not the kind that turns into legends or inspiring stories. Mine was slow. Grinding. The kind that hollows you out from the inside until there's barely anything left.
The cruelest part was never the pain.
It was the memory.
I remember everything. Every scream. Every final breath. Every expression frozen on the faces of the people I loved as they died. My mind never blurred the edges. Time never softened the blows. Forgetting was never granted to me.
Each life stayed with me in perfect, agonizing clarity, stacked endlessly on top of the last. Memory became a prison with no walls, only weight. No escape. No relief.
Lives began to overlap as I desperately tried to forget.
At first, I believed forgetting was possible. I told myself that if I stopped thinking about the past, if I buried it deep enough, it would eventually fade. That memories, no matter how painful, would weaken with time.
I was wrong.
It never happened.
I forgot entire timelines. I forgot the names of worlds. I forgot faces, cities, histories, and even versions of myself. Some lives vanished so completely that I couldn't tell where they had gone.
But I never forgot the loss.
I never forgot the moment someone I loved stopped breathing.
I never forgot the feeling of holding a dying body in my arms.
I never forgot the silence that followed.
Those memories didn't fade. They didn't blur. They didn't weaken.
They engraved themselves into me.
Not into my mind.
Into my essence.
They became part of what I was.
Part of what I am.
No matter how many times I was reborn, no matter how many bodies I wore, that weight followed me. It slipped through reincarnation. It crossed realities. It survived even death.
I could lose everything else.
My identity.
My history.
My name.
But never that pain.
It was carved too deeply.
And it would follow me forever.
And there was one constant across all those lives, one unchanging rule written into my existence.
Everyone I ever loved died.
Not peacefully. Not meaningfully. They died afraid. Betrayed. Crushed by fate, by circumstance, by powers far beyond their control. Mothers. Fathers. Siblings. Lovers. Children. Faces I had memorized, voices I had learned by heart, only to watch them vanish in blood, fire, or despair.
Each loss carved something out of me. After enough lives, I couldn't even tell what pieces were missing anymore. I only knew that I felt… empty.
Like a shell moving forward because it had no choice.
With every reincarnation, something strange happened. The wounds inside me, the ones that should never heal, the ones even time itself hesitates to touch, would close.
Not gently.
Not kindly.
Forcibly.
As if reality itself refused to let me break completely. As if the universe looked at me and decided I was only allowed to recover enough to suffer again.
Step after step. Life after life.
Some of those lives were cruel beyond words. Years of starvation. Slavery. War. Humiliation. Pain without end. Others were gentle on the surface—wealth, comfort, admiration, power.
But the ending never changed.
No matter how high I rose. No matter how carefully I tried to protect them. No matter how much I prepared.
Fate always came.
And I was always forced to watch.
There was no escaping the moment where everything I cherished was taken from me.
Yet somehow… insanely… I never stayed down.
In every world, in every reality, no matter the rules or the limits imposed on me, I rose. I learned faster than any prodigy. I adapted quicker than any survivor. I endured longer than any immortal.
I clawed my way to the summit of existence again and again. I became a king. A god. A sovereign. A scholar. A weapon. Whatever that world demanded, I became it, except for one.
By now, I was more than a man.
I was a living archive. A walking library filled with the knowledge of vigintillion worlds. Languages that no longer existed. Sciences built on dead laws of reality. Philosophies born and erased across infinite timelines.
All of it lived inside me.
There was nothing left to surprise me.
Nothing left to teach me.
And yet…
Despite the power.
Despite the knowledge.
Despite standing at the absolute peak of existence more times than I could count…
I wanted only one thing.
A normal life.
A quiet one.
A life where I could wake up without dread clawing at my chest. Where I could love without counting down the days until tragedy. Where I wouldn't have to brace myself for the moment fate reached out to tear everything away again.
I didn't want to ascend.
I didn't want to rule.
I didn't want to understand the universe anymore.
I just wanted a break.
A single life where pain wasn't inevitable.
A single world that didn't demand my suffering as payment for existing.
A single chance to rest, truly rest, from this endless cycle of loss.
But after one hundred quintillion lives…
I no longer knew if such a world could exist.
Or if I was even allowed to have it.
Present-
[3rd person pov.]