Chapter 6:

Volume 1 Chapter 6: "I Get It Now"

Zankoku Na Jinsei : In Another World I Was Suffered Like Hell

"I will never stop them...

I want to see that new, overwhelming power you had before..." Shen said.

His voice was calm... too calm.

Almost amused.

"Is he... psycho?" I whispered.

My mind shattered at his words.

"What the heck is he even talking about...?" I whispered under my breath, my voice barely audible. "I have got no energy left... not after what the tree did to me."

Every muscle in my body felt like lead, my breath ragged, my vision swimming in and out of focus.

And yet... he stood there, eyes fixed on me, demanding a show...

Demanding that I somehow summon more power from before.

"What kind of twisted monster is this...?" I muttered bitterly. "I can't even stand properly...

And he is asking to 'show my power'? What kind of bullshit is he really...?" I whispered.

So show me your power, Shin..." Shen said.

"No, I can't...

"I am not even able to move, so how will I be able to show my power to you?" I asked.

"I will not save you, Shin, Enjoy your suffering forever," Shen said.

"What do I do now?"

He doesn't stopped...

All the insects who were my relatives kept coming near to me...

"Don't come close to me!! I will kill you if you come close to me!! I swear I will!" I screamed.

They didn't stop.

In fact... they kept crawling closer.

Closer... and closer... until I could feel my heart... the buzzing, the twitching, the way their tiny legs scratched against my skin.

Hundreds... no, thousand... of grotesque insects that once wore the faces of my relatives.

They dug into my flesh with their mandibles.

Tiny teeth gnawed into my arms, legs, throat, eyes.

I screamed...

I begged...

I crawled at my own body to rip them off...

but they were already inside.

Inside my mouth...

Inside my ears...

Inside my eyes...

Inside my stomach...

Infact all body...

"Ah... Agh... A-Aaaaaaag-gggggggh-hhhhhh" I scremed.

My own voice turned into a gurgle of blood and chewed muscle.

I wasn't dying quickly.

No... I was being devoured, slowly, alive, piece by piece... as if my suffering was some divine feast.

I couldn't move.

Couldn't think.

Only feel...

And in that agony, I reliazed...

No one would save me.

Next moment...

I died...

But my curse... like always... activated and brought me back to life, regenerating my torn body...

I was regenerated again...

They they didn't stop.

No... they began to eat me again...

Not normally but violently.

Agh...

Ah...

Ngh...

NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH-!!!

Screams didn't mean anything anymore.

Pain didn't mean anything anymore.

But I still screamed.

Because my soul hadn't given up on the idea that someone...

Anymore...

Would hear me.

The insects...

No...

The demons in their skins...

Kept eating me.

Again.

And again.

Not normally but violently...

"AH-AAGGHHHHHHHH!!"

"NGHHHHHH...!!"

"I... I DON'T WANT THIS...!!"

Their fangs dug deeper than before.

This time into my spine.

The next time into my heart.

The next time... into my eyes,

Into my genitals,

Into my brain.

And when I died...

I came back.

I always came back.

Not because I wanted to.

Not because I fought for survival.

But because my curse made it so.

This wasn't rebirth.

It was a sentence.

An enternal punishment.

Every time I regenerated, the pain felt worse.

The insects remembered where I was weakest.

Where the nerves were most sensitive.

Where I twitched the most.

Where I begged the fastest.

And they went for it.

Agh.

Ngh.

NAAAAAAAAAAAA-!!

I screamed until my lungs collapsed.

I screamed until I bit through my tongue.

I screamed until my souls cracked.

And then... it started again.

Hundredth time...

They devourted my stomach.

Thousand time...

They are through my face while I watched in a reflection of blood.

Ten thousand time...

They tore through my lower jaw and chewed the inside of my throat.

Million times...

They climbed into my body through my eye sockets.

Billion times...

I laughed...

Not because it was funny...

Because it was the only sound left that didn't hurt.

But then Shen...

He watched from above...

Arms crossed...

Face expressionless.

Not a god.

Not a demon.

Just a person with no empathy.

"Show me your strength, Shin," he said again.

as if I had any left.

As if there was anything inside me except filth, rot, and agony.

I wanted to respond.

But my tongue had been bitten off...

Again...

So I bled.

And they feed.

And I died.

Again.

And again.

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!"

Was I screaming.?

Was I hallucinating?

Was I even human anymore?

I forgot.

The insects didn't.

They always remembered.

Every time I returned, they smiled wider.

They licked their jaws with their blood soaked tongue.

They celebrated.

Like it was feast.

Like my body was their wedding cake...

Funny, right?

But, for not me...

They celebrate like my pain was their religion.

I didn't begged anymore.

Because I was aware that won't work...

But I screamed...

I offered them my body.

I offered them my memories.

I offered anything... just to stop.

But no one came.

Not God.

Not the devil.

Not Shen.

Not even the damn death.

No one.

Just me.

And them.

And my pain.

Then... suddenly... he raised his hand.

That voice, sharp as steel, cut through my haze.

"You... Why the hell are you not showing your powers, huh?!" Shen asked.

His tone carried anger... real, sharp anger... but his body... his body was still calm or rather.

Controlled...

"What do you mean?

I can't understand it...

Please... explain me," I asked, my voice trembling.

My mind spun in confusion.

"What is he even saying...?

I can't understand it...

What does he mean from that... ?

I mean... he is the one who tore my family.

He is the one who made me suffer.

So why... why is he standing there, throwing this freakin' talk at me like he is some kind of savior?

I whispered under my breath, "This makes no sense... none of it..."

"Shut up"

Shen's voice snapped through the air like a whip.

His eyes glimmered with that same cold amusement.

"Do you want to see your family suffered?!" Shen roared, his words echoing in my skull like the toll of his funeral beel.

"... What the heck... did you just said?

Are you psycho?

At first, you suffered my family infront of me.

You stood there and watched them break.

And now...

You have the nerve to ask if I enjoy seeing them like that?" I asked.

"I knew it from start," I spat. "I was right about you.

You are a freakin' psycho. That's all you are" I said.

The next moment, the insects stopped moving.

Their skittering silence felt heavier than their noise ever did.

Then... slowly... they turned toward Shen, like they were answering his unspoken call.

His lips curved into a thin, chilling smile.

"Let me tell you," Shen said softly, almost kindly.

"Your next suffering will be... that you will live as an insect.

Every year...

Every month...

Every day..."

"W-What do you mean?

Spend year as insect?" I asked.

"E-Every day...?"

My voice cracked.

"W-What do you mean?

Spend... a year as an insect?"

Shen didn't hesitate.

His calm, measured tone made the words worse.

"For now... until twenty thousand years from now," he said.

"Every year... your soul will be reborn inside a new insect,"

The world seemed to tilt under me.

"In simple words," he continued, almost as if he were explaining to a child,

"The first year, your soul will be trapped inside cockroach.

The next year... your soul will be in dragonfly.

And then beetle. And so on."

His smile widened, the kind that didn't reach his eyes.

"This will continue without end, Shin.

Twenty...

Thousand.

Year..." Shen said.

"And don't worry about being dead because every time you die you will heal automatically.

Enjoy Shin, see you later" Shen said.

I felt bile rise in my throat.

My chest tightened.

The thought of crawling in filth...

Tasting rot...

Being crushed under boots...

Over and over again...

Burned itself into my mind.

"Enjoy, Shin," Shen said lightly, turning away as if this were nothing more than a casual farewell.

"See ya."

And then...

Without a warning...

My vision warped.

The world twisted into something alien, suffocating.

When I opened my eyes again... I wasn't me.

I was inside a cockroach...

The reliazation hit me like a knife through skull.

My body...

My skin...

My hands...

All gone.

In their place... thin, jagged legs.

Antennae twitching without my command.

A body I didn't understand, yet couldn't escape.

It was the single most horrifying thing that had happened to me.

Because I have always been terrified of insects.

Behind me...

Beside me...

In front of me...

Everywhere.

Cockroaches...

Their armored bodies scraped against mine.

Their twitching wings brushed my skell.

Their countless black eyes... empty yet aware... stared without a blinking.

Seeing them so close... no one could ever smile again.

I reliazed I was wedged inside some damp, foul-smelling hole in the corner of a washroom.

My new body's instincts twiched at the darkness, but my human mind screamed to get out.

I wanted to cry.

I wanted to scream.

But I couldn't.

Because if I made a sound...

If they knew I was something different...

They do turn on me.

They do something I couldn't even imagine.

So I ran.

I scuttled through the hole, my legs moving with a speed and alien rhythm that wasn't mine.

The stench of rot clung to my senses.

I just needed to find somewhere...

Any where...

Without them.

I made it outside...

For one brief moment, I thought I was safe.

Then a shadow fell over me.

A massive foot came down... fast.

The impact crushed me instantly.

Bones... or whatever counted as my bones... shattered.

My vision went black.

But he didn't stop.

He didn't give me the mercy of one blow.

The foot came again.

And again.

Each time, pain flared before darkness claimed me.

Why?

Because to him... this was nothing.

To him, the scene wasn't a man screaming in another body.

It was just a filthy insect crawling out of a hole.

Like this world works...

...

Ugly things aren't allowed to exist.

Human hate cockroaches and insects like it.

So he killed me.

Just like everyone else did.

"I remember, Shen telling me I will be regenerate right?" I whispered.

...

I was died.

But when I opened my eyes...

I was back in the hole.

Same smell.

Same deep walls.

Same swarm of cockroaches pressing against my body.

For a moment, I thought maybe I had dreamed it.

That's the foot, the crushing pain...

It was just some twisted hallucination.

But then the panic hit me.

I remembered.

Every detail.

The sound of my shell crackling.

The suffocating pressure.

The darkness that swallowed me whole.

And then... reliazation.

Shen lied.

He said I would "regenerate," that I'd live on, year after year, in different insects.

But this...

This wasn't life.

It was a time loop.

The exact same moment.

The exact same death.

Over and over.

I tried running a different way...

The shadow fell over me.

The foot came down.

Crushed.

I tried to hide in the corner...

The shadow fell over me.

The foot came down.

Crushed.

I tried not moving at all...

The shadow fell over me.

The foot came down.

Crushed.

There was no escape.

Seconds...

Minutes...

Hours...

Days...

Years...

Time had no meaning here... only the cycle.

At first, I screamed each time the foot crushed me.

Then I begged.

Then I whispered for help.

Then... I stopped speaking altogether.

Because I reliazed... there was no one to hear me.

Shen's voice returned after I'd died enough times that I no longer feared the foot... only the waiting before it comes.

"Oh," he said casually, as through speaking through the walls of the hole, " I forgot to mention...

I lied about the insects thing, too"

My legs twitched involuntarily,

"What...?"

"It's not a few thousand year, Shin.

It's not even millions."

I felt the swarm around me still, as through they too were listening.

"It's trillion if you didn't die single time and get back to past.

Every time...

You will be a different insects.

No repeats...

Not ever..."

My mind blanked.

"Trillions...? If i didn't die?

If I die...

The years counting depend on how many times I die." I whispered.

Shen's voice became most playful.

"A mosquito... buzzing in the dark, swatted into pulp.

A maggot... wriggle in rot until something eats you alive.

A termite... chewling in the shadows until a shadows until a poison seeps into you.

A dragonfly... your wings torn off by the wind before you can flee.

A wasp... burned in gasoline for sport.

An ant... working endlessly only to be drowned in rain.

And yes... plenty of cockroaches.

Every shape.

Every size.

Every hell you can imagine."

I wanted to vomit, but this body had no throat for it.

"And you will remember," Shen continued.

"Every death.

Every pain.

Every moment of hunger when you eat.

When you swore you never could.

You will remember being eaten alive, piece by piece, knowing you are still concious inside what's left.

You will remember the feel of children shoes crushing you fun.

The poison melting you from the inside.

The cold when your tiny body freezes solid in winter, too slow to move"

I tried to shut my mind, but it didn't work.

His words carved into me, already painting the scenes in perfect detail.

"Enjoy, Shin," he whispered. "Only... what year is it for you now?

Ten?

A hundred?

A billion?

Or...

Still the first?"

The hole went slient.

Then I was a fly... trapped in a spider's web, legs snapping one by one as the silk tightened around me.

Then I was a moth... slamming into a street light's burning glass until my wings caught fire.

Then i was a beetle... crushed between a child's fingers, split open while I was still alive.

Then I was worm... half my body swallowed by a bird, the rest still wriggling as I slid down its throat.

Then I was butterfly... beautiful, just for someone to pluck my wings and laugh at the crawling husk that remained.

Then I was a mantis... my head bitten off by my mate before I'd even finished moving.

And through it all... I remembered.

I remembered the hole.

I remembered the foot.

I remembered Shen's voice.

And the worst part?

I had no idea if I'd even made it past day one.

Oh... I forgot to mention something.

I never had any regenerating.

What I had... was something far worse.

When ever I die, I don't heal.

I don't restart.

Instead... I go back.

Back to the moment my feet first touched the path of that life.

If I was a cockroach, I return to the first second of my cockroach life.

If I was butterfly, I start again from the first flag of my wings.

Death doesn't erase the suffering.

It just drags me back to the very beginning...

... So I can live it all over again.

The years blurred together... no, not years centuries.

Millennia.

Trillion year.

If I add how many time I go to back in time and adding it how much time I have spend then it will be far way than Trillion.

If I count how many times I was thrown back...

How many lives I was forced to replay from the start...

It wasn't just trillion years.

It was something far beyond numbers.

My total deaths?

One hundred million trillion times.

It's not just number to me.

It's not something you can write on paper and feel nothing.

Every time I lived it, I died it.

Every time, I was eaten by someone.

Every time, I was killed by someone.

Every time, I was trapped by someone.

And sometimes... perhaps the cruelest of all...

I was loved by someone... in ways so toxic that even my heart rotted before my body did.

Love... yes.

That's four letter word.

Insects don't understand it, but I did.

Even when I was a crawling thing beneath the soil, something in my mind, something that shouldn't have been there, remembered.

And when spider wrapped me in silk and held me close before sinking its fang in, I almost thought...

This is warmth.

But warmth doesn't last.

It turns cold.

It turns into venom that burns until mind goes white, until your body bursts, until you can't even scream because you don't have lungs anymore.

When I was fly, I knew hunger.

When I was an ant, I knew slavery.

When I was moth, I knew beauty... and how quickly beauty dies when it touches the wrong light.

But time never moved the way it should.

When you have been alive for a trillion years, a single heartbeat feels like an entire century.

When you have been alive for a trillion years, even the sky changes colour in ways it was never meant to.

Sometimes, I thought maybe I'd reached the end.

Sometimes, the teeth were already closing in, the acid already dissolving me...

And I thought, Yes.

Finally.

This one will be the last.

But It never was.

Everytime I died, I opened my eyes somewhere else.

A wet shell.

A soft cocoon.

A dark burrow.

And the first thing I felt was always the same...

Ah... I am still here.

That's when the despair hit.

Not the kind you can cry about.

Not the kind you can scream about.

This was the kind that sits in your souls like a corpse, heavy and slient.

The kind that whispers to you that there's no point resisting anymore.

The gods thought it was funny.

I could feel them, watching from somewhere high above, sipping on my misery like wine.

Even if I bit my tongue off, even if I hurled myself into fire, even if I let myself starve until my own body ate itself from the inside...

They always brought me back.

Some lives were so short, I barely had time to breathe.

Others... others stretched on for centuries.

Do you know what it's like to be a single insect for a hundred human lifetimes?

To crawl the same path of dirt, to smell the same rotting log, to hear the same predators circling above for a hundred years straight?

It's not living...

It's... existing.

Existing just long enough to remember what suffereing feels like before it ends.

And even then, the ending is never the end.

At first, I thought the worst part was dying.

But I was wrong because the worst part was waiting.

That stretch of moments before the end came...

When I could feel the air shift,

When I could sense the shadow creeping over me,

When I could hear the predator's slow approach.

It's in that waiting that the mind starts to break.

The silence becomes a scream.

The seconds become hours.

The dirt beneath your body feels like it's pressing into your skulls, whispering, you are already dead.

I have lived through so many beginnings and ending that they have become the same thing.

Sometimes I'd forget what form I was in.

I'd open my eyes and not know if I had two legs or six, wings or none.

I'd taste rot and not know if It was air...

My own body decaying.

And always, always, I'd remember Shen's voice.

His calm, mocking tone.

The way he spoke "trillion" like it was a joke.

The way he didn't just want me to suffer...

He wanted me to understand it.

To feel every details.

To carry it forward into next life.

I don't know how many times I whispered his name.

Sometimes as a curse.

Sometimes as a plea.

Sometimes just to remind myself that I still remember who he was.

And then...

Light.

No insects.

No dirt.

No shadows.

I was home.

The same room.

The same air.

The same smell.

My legs blucked.

My breath hitched.

It felt wrong.

Too bright.

Too open...

Too...

Human.

For a moment, I thought it was another trick...

Another life, another body, another loop.

But the walls stayed.

The floor stayed.

The quiet stayed.

And I reliazed, with a trembling in my chest...

... I was back.

Suddenly, my this world mother arrive in home with my this world brother and his wife which was once my wife in previous timeline.

Seeing mother tears began to fall really fast...

"Finally I returned thank god" I said.

Then I ran toward mother.

But suddenly a hand raised to cover mother from me.

It was brother or rather...

"Hey, what do you want?

Huh?

We don't know you, right?

So what the hell you was going to do now?

Hug my mother are you crazy?" Brother said.

"What?

You don't know me?"

Suddenly a strange, painful smile tugged at my lips.

Relief...

And agony...

Mixed into soemthing that didn't feel human anymore.

"Thank god" I muttered under my breath, my voice shaking.

"Thank god you don't know me"

I forced a weak laugh.

"By the way...

I am a robber.

I came here to take money.

Sorry for that."

The words were nothing but a mask.

A flimsy lie to cover the cracks.

Before they could say anything, I turned and walked out.

My steps felt light...

But every moment ached.

I kept that same painful smile plastered on my face as I wandered down the road, because if I didn't, tears would come.

After so long...

After living and dying as bugs, being crushed, eaten, frozen, burned... there was no one beside me.

No one waiting for me.

No one who even remembered me.

Or maybe...

Worse than that...

They never knew me at all.

it was as if I had been erased from their lives entirely.

And I would happy to say I am glad this happened.

In this world I was not their younger son, brother anymore.

That place was replaced with someone else...

Someone better...

No...

Someone lonely younger boy which is me now...

He has lost his parents at young age.

He had married two times and loved his wife but hey both died because of sickness.

He is very rich or rather his parents was but after their death all has been transported to him.

Before he was rich than anyone in this city.

But lonely at same time...

He had no one beside him because all of his friends, relatives consider him as some curse.

And most interesting thing his face and body match perfectly to my orignal world face and body.

It is like I am back in my orignal body again.

I know this because I am in his body now so all his memories are in my brain stored.

I think he deserved this kind of family.

I mean they had someone good now.

Someone they could love without regret.

And her...

My past this world brother wife...

I had saved her like before but...

But her memories were not of me.

They were of him... that "younger brother" who didn't exist in my reality, the one whose sister-in-law had married into.

My mind spun through it all...

My orignal life, before the truck hit me.

The maid I loved...

My first love...

Then my butler and his nephew...

The only ones I could call my family...

In this world my past second love...

Elwin...

My wife... who is now wife of someone who was once my brother...

The sick wife who died... because of me.

And then this world past life mother who I was began to consider as my real mother.

All of them suffered because of me...

Only me...

The thought clawed through my chest, leaving nothing but guilt an emptiness so deep.

I thought it might swallow me whole.

And then...

A picture.

Suddenly, an image of some place formed in my mind, vivid and unshakable.

I stared at it inside my head for what felt like an eternity.

Then I blinked.

And in the next moment, I was standing there.

"So... I have my powers again...

Huh?" I muttered under my breath, voice dripping with a strange mix of disbelief and exhaustion.

I turned around.

Behind me...

A wall of mirrors.

Dozens of them.

"What the hell is this?" I frowned. "Did I wander into some mirror shop"

I took a hesitant step closer, the reflections stretching endlessly in every direction.

"Do... I have to touch them?

Is that the point?" I muttered, squinting.

Then I shook my head.

"No...

Bad idea.

They do probably ban me for life if they saw how mental I am right now."

A thin smirk tugged at my lips.

"... Just kidding"

The words slipped out lazily, as if mocking even myself.

My fingers hovered, mere centimeters from the mirror's cold surface, ready to tear through its silver skin and drag out whatever lay beyond.

But before my touch could land, the glass shivered.

A ripple spread across it... slient, yet louder than any scream.

And then... it began to play.

No my reflection.

Not this moment.

But memories of me but not of me.

It wasn't the future.

It wasn't even the present.

It was the past.

A piece of my life... or rather, the corpses of the lives I had already correct.

One by one, scenes I thought happened because of fate was because of me.

I saw them... my mother, my father, the butler, his nephew, Elwin and all of my lived ones... smiling, laughing, living months longer than they ever had in the orignal time.

For a moment, the sight twisted something warm in my chest.

But the warmth froze instantly.

Mother... found drowned in river, the rope burns still fresh on her wrist.

There was not only one mirror of timeline but many...

In other she had died many cruel ways possible.

Not only mother but all had many cruel ways death in many alternative timelines like this.

A maid ready to give her life for his master son while I was whispering.

Father... shot twice in the chest in some filthy alley, his own debt dragging him there.

The butler... found in pieces after refusing an order from men in suits.

The nephew... hanging by belt in his cell, eyes staring at the ceiling as thought waiting for someone to scold him for giving up.

Elwin... ran from the lab then lived happy life for two years then run through with a blade in the dark, clutching at his stomach like a child trying to keep promise.

A boy screaming as I tore his world apart to save it.

They were alive in this version for one or three years... fate had simply been patient.

Kind, almost.

It waited.

It gave them months, years.

And then took everything back in ways far crueller than before.

And deep inside... I understood the meaning of this vision.

If I wanted to save them...

Truly save them...

I couldn't wait for fate to knock.

I would have to cut the threads myself.

End lives... to preserve them.