Chapter 1: Death

What is it that causes one to try, even in the face of irrecorigable darkness?

While there are those who give up too easily, there are also those with the tenacity of never giving up- no matter how inconceivable their end goal is.

“Yeah… that’s right… I used to look down on those people- the ones who always quit when things get too hard.. Haha...fool...s-”

“Sorry to have to find out the truth this way. The world..- this world… -someone like me should have never been introduced to it.”

The man who manifested these thoughts lay bare glancing at the open sky. The grass tickled his skin with the peaceful calm breeze blowing past him. Anyone else who would witness this beautiful tranquility would consider it stupid to hate the harmony that the world had just bestowed upon them.

Yet, he did. Just as this mind manifested the vile thoughts of regret, so too did regret manifest a new reality. One influenced by a large tinted glass. Like a layer of light fabric that not only manipulated your sight, but your sense of touch, your sense of smell, your sense of hearing, and your sense of taste.

Layering over this old true reality, this falsetto of perception came over the man. The beautiful, blue, aromatic sky, just now held a shade of red- reminiscent of blood.

The wind’s calm and cool breeze just now felt like the breaths of a devil, struggling to maintain its existence by being acknowledged to all who exist. Even if that existence was an unbearable heat.

The tiny blades of grass that were more duller than the kindest words of honesty, now felt like 1,000 needles that only existed to torture him. With each gust of wind, they changed their angles to savour the torture that their intrusion had caused.

The ground now wreaked. Not of leaves or grass, or flora, or even just soil. It now just smelled only of blood. So thick was the smell, that one could feel the iron shoved forcibly into their nostrils. Luckily, this smell did not bother him- for as soon as he smelled the breadth of it, his brain had shut off that sensation. Yet… that was a smell that one could never forget. -Something equivalent to being shown a new color.

The last piece of this world that had overtaken him, was the sound. This was a sound far worse than anything else. As he lay there, alone, he felt like there were others with him. It was the voice of the whole world, all talking to him at once.

The voices… were strange…- they weren’t truly hateful of his existence. Not to say he wasn’t hated. There was no shortage of voices that hated the man’s existence. But there were also voices of those who felt...sorry for him. There were voices of those who were confused about what had been done to them- who felt hurt, yet did not hate him.

The voices of children who couldn’t understand the question “Why” were the loudest. “Why did you have to do this?”

“Why did you exist?”

“Why did I exist if it were to meet this fate?”

“Why…. me?”

He knew of these questions before. He once pondered them himself when he was a child. In fact, if what he settled upon was true, the question “Why me” was the biggest question. That was the question that set him upon this quest of curses.

His only solace was the fact that the voices were often drowned out. As if multiple individuals trying to be heard no matter the cost, they shouted over each other. Some used their louder voices to shout vitriol at the being who was the source of all of this. Some shouted for dialogue to wonder what kind of person could ever be that cruel, some shamed him.

“I never once believed in devils, but that changed when I had first seen that people can be like you.”

“Why did you do it?! Even my Children…- I never did anything to you?! How can you even call yourself human?”

“Disgusting!!! Disgusting!! I wish I never shared a world with you.”

These were of course made up voices. He could easily ignore these. It was the voices of people he had already heard before that hurt and cut like a blade- as if reliving each situation was his punishment.

“H-how can you be so… vile?”

“Burn… in hell…. You will truly pay for this…”

There was a voice he remembered very well, like it had just occurred. It was one of the first people he had slain when he ventured upon this conquest. “I truly hope… nothing ill upon those who know not what they are doing…- and-...and yet...I hope you face t-these consequences… head on..and surv-ive..past them.”

These were the words of a dying monk, who did not care that he was slain, but rather, that the man who had done it was someone who would reach peace. He foolishly laughed off the stupid notion.

Yet now, those words rang truer than ever. As he lay here under the fiery sky, all alone, he finally realized what those words were.

“Why do people like me exist? Those who push on to achieve the impossible regardless of how outrageous their goals were… .I-....I used to think that I was right about everything… trust in my goal..” How could he not? He had seen something about the world that noone else had. Isn’t that right?

How could he not, as the only person who saw what he saw- how could he not be right, and take the fate of the world into his own hands.

Those were his thoughts in his younger foolish days. And now his thoughts were different. “Why do people like me exist? If this foolish nature of mine never existed, I would never…”

He lay alone on a battlefield with thousands of corpses. The grass that was once green was stained with blood. The world around him was so dark he could barely make sense of anything.

“If someone like me never existed… I would never have to realize how wrong I was…”

In a world where he had achieved the impossible goal of killing everyone, he finally had turned the blade on himself. Yet he couldn’t physically do it. His body refused to follow along the plan of the goal he sought.

There was a drive to live which he should have realized a long time ago. He had robbed countless people of it. Yet, he had never experienced true danger in which his life was at steak. Once he was finally confronted by the only person capable of doing that– himself, he realized the true nature of what he had been doing to everyone.

This was the realization that the man- who had killed every single being in the world, and was so intent on ending himself once he had completed this goal…. Didn’t want to die