The transition from the red sky of the apocalypse to the absolute void was the most exquisite sensation he had ever known.
There was no weight to his limbs, no heat from the burning buildings, and no lingering scent of the antiseptic that had defined his first four decades.
In that vast and infinite darkness, the heavy shackles of his existence finally fell away. He was not Subject Zero.
He was not a gore-drenched humanoid monster. He was simply a consciousness drifting in a quiet sea of nothingness.
He stayed there for what felt like an eternity and a heartbeat all at once. He savored the silence, cherishing the lack of a pulse and the absence of thought. For a soul that had been tortured for forty five years, this was the only heaven that mattered.
'Finally...'
He thought, the word echoing softly in the hollow of his mind.
'It is over. No more pain. No more glass. No more breath.'
Then, a flicker appeared.
It was a small and mocking pinprick of light in the distance. At first, he ignored it, assuming it was a lingering hallucination of a dying mind.
But the light grew. It pulsed with an intrusive and unwelcome warmth. It was a predatory glow that began to eat away at his precious darkness. He felt a sudden and frantic surge of alarm.
"!!!"
He tried to turn away, swimming deeper into the shadows, but he had no limbs to move and no voice to scream. The light was relentless. It expanded until it filled his entire vision, dragging him out of the abyss and forcing him back into the realm of the living.
The first thing he felt was the air. It was cold and sharp. The second thing he felt was the weight of a body.
He opened his eyes to see a thatched roof and the flickering glow of a hearth. He was small, his hands tiny and unscarred. He was a child once more, born into a world that smelled of woodsmoke and damp earth.
This was not the world of gates and hunters he had known. It was a place of knights and magic, a realm that felt like a storybook brought to life. He tried to hate it. He tried to reject the parents who looked at him with such overwhelming affection.
But the human heart is a treacherous thing.
Over the years, the ice around his soul began to thaw. He took a name. He grew into a man. He found a woman whose laughter felt like the sun on a winter morning. He held a daughter in his arms and felt a terrifying and wonderful hope that perhaps, just this once, the universe had made a mistake and given him a second chance.
That hope was the cruelest joke of all.
War arrived not with a roar but with a whisper of scouts and the smell of burning crops. His village was not a strategic point, it was simply a place in the way of an advancing army. He watched from the treeline as the soldiers descended.
He saw the flash of steel. He heard the scream of his wife and the silence that followed.
In that moment, something inside him snapped. The peace he had cultivated was a fragile glass sculpture, and the world had shattered it with a single blow.
'I should have known,' he thought, his vision staining red. 'Peace is a lie told to the living.'
He did not reach for a sword. Instead, he reached deep into the core of his being, past the memories of this life and into the dark and bloody reservoir of his first existence.
The hybrid monster power that should have stayed in the grave began to churn. His skin rippled. His bones groaned as they elongated and hardened.
The soldiers did not see a grieving father. They saw a nightmare made flesh.
He did not fight with honor. He fought with the primal and gore drenched efficiency of a predator.
By the time the moon reached its zenith, the village was silent. There were no soldiers left. He stood in the center of the carnage, a monstrous humanoid covered in the blood of his enemies and the ashes of his home. He looked at his claws, then at the bodies of the people he had failed to protect.
"Not again," he whispered, his voice a guttural growl.
With a hollow and rattling breath, he turned his own power inward. He forced his claws into his own chest and tore out the heart that had dared to hope.
He woke up again.
Back in a dark void he once was before he got in a body that isn't his.
But in the next hours again he was sucked by another light.
***
This time, the body was different. He was an elf, a girl born under the sprawling and luminous canopy of the World Tree. The life of an elf was long and slow, a pace that suited his exhausted soul.
He stayed in the village for a century, speaking to no one and doing nothing but watching the leaves change color. He thought that if he remained invisible, the tragedy would forget him.
But the world of heroes and demons was not so kind.
He became a traveler, eventually finding himself part of a party tasked with defeating a rising Demon King. He did not join out of heroism. He joined because he thought that if he saved the world, the world might finally let him leave it.
He fought with a bow and ancient magic, his skills so refined that his companions hailed him as a goddess of the battlefield. They fought for five years. They shared meals by the fire. He almost believed he had found comrades.
When the Demon King finally fell, gasping his last breath on a throne of obsidian, the hero of the party turned to him. There was no gratitude in the eyes of the hero, only a cold and calculating greed.
"You are too powerful to be left alone," the hero said, his voice dripping with false regret. "And your race has far too many secrets."
The betrayal was swift. They did not kill him immediately. They broke his limbs. They dragged his mangled form back to the elven forest, wanting to use him as a key to unlock the power of the World Tree. He watched, bound and powerless, as they put his kin to the sword. He watched as they set the World Tree ablaze, the ancient wood screaming as it burned.
The despair was so thick he could taste it.
'Humans never change,' he thought, watching the embers dance. 'No matter the world, they are the same.'
He did not scream. He simply let the monster out. The hybrid power erupted from his elven frame, a tide of black scales and golden eyes that decimated the hero party in seconds.
He tracked the King who had ordered the purge, tearing through the palace walls like they were made of paper. He left the kingdom in ruins before ending his life for the third time beneath the charred remains of the tree he had loved.
The cycle did not stop. It became a blur of faces and names. He was a dragon, a majestic beast of gold and fire, but he was hunted for his heart and scales until he chose to crash into the sea.
He then became a dwarf.
A slave...
A merchant...
A commoner...
He reincarnated a hundred times.
Each life followed a similar pattern. He would seek peace. The world would demand blood. He would give the world more blood than it could handle. He always jn this stuck up Fantasy world he didn't really know if he can take this life anymore.
Then he would seek the void. His mind began to fray. The memories of a hundred people he met and befriended and a hundred betrayals swirled in his head like a storm. He grew to loathe the light.
In his ninety ninth life, he was a simple librarian in a quiet city. He did nothing. He helped no one. He simply read books and waited for the end. He died in a house fire started by a careless neighbor.
As the flames licked at his skin, he felt a flicker of genuine joy.
'Surely, a hundred lives is enough,' he mused as the ceiling collapsed and the smoke filled his lungs. 'Surely, the universe is finally tired of playing with me.'
But the darkness did not stay.
He felt the familiar and sickening pull of reality. He felt the weight of a soul being shoved into a new container.
His mind screamed in a silent and cosmic tantrum. He had had enough. He did not want a new body. He did not want a new name. He wanted to be forgotten.