Volume 2 Chapter 5: Filling the Grave

Vol 1: https://www.honeyfeed.fm/novels/21882

Note; Past shin(Young shin) Future shin (Shin)

Everytime he died, he opened eyes somewhere else.

A wet shell.

A soft cocoon.

A dark burrow.

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

Ah... he am still here.

That's when the despair hit.

Not the kind he can cry about.

Not the kind he can scream about.

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

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

The gods thought it was funny.

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

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

They always brought him 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, he thought the worst part was dying.

But he was wrong because the worst part was waiting.

That stretch of moments before the end came...

When he could feel the air shift,

When he could sense the shadow creeping over him,

When he 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 his body feels like it's pressing into his skulls, whispering, he was already dead.

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

Sometimes I'd forget what form he was in.

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

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

Or

his own body decaying.

And always, always, he'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 to 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." Young shin whispered

Suddenly

Some light appeared

No insects.

No dirt.

No shadows.

he was home.

The same room.

The same air.

The same smell.

his legs blucked.

his breath hitched.

his felt wrong.

Too bright.

Too open...

Too...

Human.

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

Another life, another body, another loop.

But the walls stayed.

The floor stayed.

The quiet stayed.

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

... he was back.

Suddenly, his mother (second mother who he was with after sometihings changed) arrive in home with his brother (second mother who he was with after sometihings changed) and his wife which was once his wife in previous timeline.

Seeing mother tears began to fall really fast...

"Finally I returned thank god" Young shin said.

Then he ran toward mother.

But suddenly a hand raised to cover mother from him.

It was brother or rather...

"Hey, what do you want?

Huh?

We don't know you, right?

So what the hell you was about to do now?

Hug my mother are you crazy?" Brother said.

"What?

You don't know me?"

Suddenly a strange, painful smile tugged at his lips.

Relief...

And agony...

Mixed into soemthing that didn't feel human anymore.

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

"Thank god you don't know me"

he 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, he turned and walked out.

his 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 he didn't, tears would come.

After so long...

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

No one waiting for him.

No one who even remembered him.

Or maybe...

Worse than that...

They never knew him at all.

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

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

That place was replaced with someone else...

Someone better.....

"He had lost his parents at young age.

He had married two times and loved his wife but they 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." Young shin whispered

And then...

A picture.

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

he stared at it inside his head for what felt like an eternity.

Then he blinked.

And in the next moment, he was standing there.

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

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

He 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"

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

"Can i touch them?

Is that alright?" Young shin muttered, squinting.

Then he shook his 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 his lips.

"... Just kidding"

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

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 his touch could land, the glass shivered.

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

And then... it began to play.

No reflection.

Not this moment.

But memories of him but not of him.

It wasn't the future.

It wasn't even the present.

It wasn't the past.

It was everything

A piece of his life... or rather, the corpses of the lives he had already correct.

One by one, scenes he thought happened because of fate was because of him.

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

For a moment, the sight twisted something warm in his 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.

Kill now... so that they would never reach that moment of suffering.

I felt my own lips curl into something that wasn't quite a smile, wasn't quite a grimance.

"...So, this is the truth?" I whispered to the mirror. "To fix a broken timeline... you have to break it worse."

"So, he is now at the stage where i was once

So, now what do i do?" Shin said

Suddenly, he relaized something.......

That, everything he did is for only one thing give peaceful deaths...

But after all things he did and the desire he had about going home was nothing because......

He had no one in home

No one saying "you are home, welcome"

Even not home or something he can call home....

The air in the room grew heavy, thick with the metallic tang of impending doom.

He didn't scream; instead, a low, guttural growl vibrated in his throat—a sound of a man being hollowed out from the inside.

Then, his hands moved.

His fingers, once steady and capable, hooked into his own skin like iron talons.

With a sickening squelch, he began to shred and flay his own features.

The facial flesh—the very mask of his humanity—was no longer sacred.

He clawed at his cheeks until the soft tissue gave way, peeling back in jagged, crimson ribbons that clung to his fingernails.

It was a systematic destruction of the self. Every frantic pull stripped away another layer of his identity, turning his countenance into a mangled heap of raw, quivering meat.

The dermal layers were torn asunder, exposing the white gleam of bone beneath a veil of pulsing veins.

As the mass of his face slumped and tore under the pressure of his own violence, he looked less like a man and more like a nightmare birthed from the abyss.

The danger radiating from him was palpable. Each drop of blood that hit the floor felt like a ticking clock, a sign that whatever was left of his soul had finally been discarded.

He was no longer a person to be saved; he was a shattered vessel, a flayed monster whose very presence promised a similar, agonizing end to anyone brave enough to stay.

"I remember all of thing i have been through all of it but still it feels like something is miss..

I had been died more than quadrillion time..

I killed my family to avoid giving them cruel deaths

I had -------three girls i like and i had.......... on---e wif---e

Maid--.

Elwin---

Yurina---

And i was completely destroyed by the tree and mirrors than an-------ything

i----gu---ess" Shin said, with his head completely ache and blood which was because of his face blood..

(....) said " don't give up...

I am waiting for you"

Chapter 5 ended...

From author Banri Tada: Thank you for reading it.

Volume 2 ended.....

If you like it, then let me know your thoughts in the comments, and also vol 3 chapter 1 on tommorow because of issues i had today

Note; Read the vol 1 to feel and understand the story better it is not too long it has only 6 chapters give it a try