BA-THUMP!
A single, violent kick from a ghost. My heart hammered against my ribs as if it had been restarted by jumper cables, raw and protesting. It wasn't a rhythm of life, but the frantic pounding of a prisoner trying to escape a locked chest.
Once. Twice. Thrice.
My eyes blinked open without my permission. No slow fade from darkness. One moment I was nothing, a dissolving thought of regret. The next, I was staring at a seamless, empty white ceiling.
A choked gasp scraped my throat raw. What… what the hell?
The memory was immediate and visceral: the cold mountain road, the warmth of my own blood becoming a chill, the world narrowing to a pinprick of light before winking out. The final, bitter question. Why did I save them?
I lay perfectly still, trying to feel the damage. The agony of the glass shards, the crushing pain in my side from the impact… it was all gone. Not healed, not sore. Absent. As if that body had never existed. But the memory of the pain was etched into my new consciousness, a phantom limb of suffering.
Am I alive??
I was in a white chamber. Not a room. A chamber. It was a perfect cube, maybe ten meters in every direction, with no visible doors, seams, or light sources. Yet it was uniformly, brilliantly illuminated, without shadow. It felt sterile, dimensionless, and profoundly silent. The silence had a weight to it, pressing on my eardrums.
Is this the hospital? No. No hospital was ever this clean, this quiet, this empty. There were no smells—no antiseptic, no bleach, no lingering scent of blood. There was nothing.
Is this a dream? I'd had vivid dreams before, but they were messy, illogical things. This was oppressively coherent in its emptiness. Huh? Where am I?
I pinched the skin on my forearm. The sensation was sharp, clear. I sat up. The movement was fluid, unhindered. I was wearing simple grey clothes—a tunic and trousers of a soft, unfamiliar material. No wounds. No bandages.
Am I hallucinating? A final, dying spark of a brain conjuring comfort? But dying didn't feel like this. Dying felt like… letting go. This felt like being grabbed.
No, but it strangely feels real. It felt more real than the bus, the mountain, the blood. That reality now seemed flimsy, a stage set that had been torn down. This white emptiness had a terrifying permanence.
I moved my hands, flexing the fingers. I stood up, my legs steady beneath me. I walked to one of the walls and pressed a palm against it. It was neither warm nor cool. It had no texture. It simply was.
A hysterical bubble of laughter escaped my lips. It echoed flatly in the sterile space. "Hahahahaha… I am going insane." My own voice sounded alien. "Is this heaven? Or hell?"
Heaven wouldn't feel so much like a waiting room for nothing. Hell wouldn't be so bland. This was something else. A non-place.
"This is crazy," I whispered to the white. "Why is this happening to me?" An average life. An average death. Why did I warrant an aftermath?
Suddenly.
It didn't appear. It manifested. Two meters in front of my face, hanging in the empty air without connection or support, was a transparent blue rectangle. It looked exactly like a game interface from a high-end VR title—clean lines, softly glowing text. But it wasn't in a headset. It was just there, superimposed on reality.
I recoiled so violently I stumbled backward and fell onto my backside, scuttling away like a crab. "Arghh?!" The sound was pure, undignified shock. "Wha—wha?!"
My breath came in short, sharp pants. I stared at the screen, waiting for it to vanish. It didn't. It pulsed gently.
Cautiously, I climbed to my feet. Hmm. What is that?
As I focused on it, text scrolled onto its surface with a soft, almost pleasant chime that was horribly out of place.
[System Initialization Complete.]
[Soul-Data: Kaito Tanaka. Integrity: 87%. Viability: Confirmed.]
[Boundary Transit Detected. Cause: Non-Standard Soul Displacement/Volitional Sacrifice Paradox.]
The words were cold, clinical. Soul-Data? Integrity? Volitional Sacrifice Paradox? My mind, trained on code and narrative logic, tried to parse it. The "sacrifice" part hooked into me. My last thought. Why did I save them? Did… did that mean something here?
More text appeared.
[Primary Directive: Reintegration.]
[Solution: Soul Transmigration to Compatible Adjacent Reality.]
[In layman's terms: YOU WILL BE REVIVED IN ANOTHER UNIVERSE.]
I just stared. My brain stuttered. So… the theory of multiple universes was correct?? All those late-night discussions with Hiroshi over cheap beer, all the sci-fi plots we'd deconstructed… it wasn't theory. It was a logistics report. I was being relocated. Not because I was special, but because my soul was a piece of mis-filed data. The sheer, bureaucratic absurdity of it was more frightening than any demon.
A new message popped up, centered on the screen. It was simpler, crueler.
[Please Select Integration Difficulty.]
[This will govern the baseline parameters of your new existence.]
Below the text, arranged in a vertical list, were the options:
[Easy]
[Normal]
[Medium]
[Hard]
[Extreme]
[Nightmare]
[EXTREME NIGHTMARE]
The last one glowed with a faint, pulsing red light.
My initial fear was momentarily swamped by a sudden, giddy surge of vindication. Is that a difficulty bar? Is this a game? After a lifetime of being overlooked, of my ideas being anonymous memos, of my best work being hidden in code and subtext… something was finally asking for my input. Recognizing that my choices had weight. A wild, desperate laugh bubbled up. My hard work is finally getting recognized!!
"So let's choose one," I said aloud, my voice gaining a thread of shaky confidence. I stepped closer to the screen, my mind racing.
Hmm. I don't want to choose a difficulty that is hard. I thought of the constant pressure, the silent expectations, the financial strain, the grief, the sheer exhausting effort of my average life. My death had been a violent release from that. My life was hard… I don't want to live a hard life again.
My finger, trembling slightly, reached out. It hovered over [Normal]. A safe, middle-of-the-road existence. Maybe a quiet fantasy world. A simple shopkeeper. Something without crushing responsibility or existential danger. I could be normal there, without the weight. I tapped it.
The screen flashed a violent, blinding white.
[ERROR!! ERROR!]
[User Authority Insufficient for Manual Selection.]
[Contradiction Detected: 'Volitional Sacrifice' archetype is incompatible with 'Normal' causality frameworks.]
[Protocol Override Engaged.]
[Difficulty will be randomly assigned.]
"No," I whispered. "No, no, no."
The words on the screen dissolved. A graphical representation of a multi-sided die appeared, spinning wildly in the center of the blue pane.
[Rolling the Difficulty…]
The die slowed. It tumbled once, twice. It came to rest. The face pointing at me was solid black, etched with tiny, screaming faces. The text below it burned itself into my vision.
[THE DIFFICULTY CHOSEN IS .....]
[EXTREME NIGHTMARE!!]
[GOOD LUCK.]
For a full three seconds, my brain refused to process it. It just echoed the words in a numb loop. Extreme. Nightmare.
"Hhhuuh!?!" The sound was a punched-out grunt of pure disbelief. "Are you kidding!!? Isn't that the hardest difficulty!!!?"
The screen remained, impassive. That final, cheerful "GOOD LUCK." was a slap in the face. A cosmic joke. Rage, hot and absolute, erupted from the pit of my stomach. It was the same rage I'd felt on the mountain, but now it had a target.
"You think this is funny?!" I screamed at the blue pane. I stepped forward and swung my fist at it with all my strength. "What do you mean by 'good luck,' you stupid ass game screen??!!"
My fist passed through the interface. There was no impact, no crackling of energy. It was just light. The screen didn't even flicker. My anger met absolute, indifferent nothingness, and the futility of it hollowed me out instantly, leaving only a cold, rising terror.
How am I going to survive??? The thought was a ice-water down my spine. This wasn't a game on a monitor I could reset. This was my existence.
"Shit. Fuck. I am… doomed." The words were a dry rasp. The false confidence, the brief feeling of control, shattered completely. The old, familiar powerlessness clamped down, a thousand times worse. It wasn't about average grades or missed opportunities anymore. It was about survival in a reality designed to be a living hell.
"NO!!" I shouted at the white walls, my voice cracking. "WHY!?? AGAIN!?? WHY DON'T I GET TO CHOOSE WHAT I WANT TO DO???!?" It was the cry of my entire life. The choice of career snatched away. The choice to act. The choice to save myself on that bus. Every major turn had been dictated by circumstance, by duty, by chance. And now, at the moment of supposed rebirth, the dice were loaded against me. "FUCK THIS LIFE!"
As if responding to my outburst, the white chamber began to change. A sound like tearing silk filled the air. Hairline cracks, black as void, spider-webbed across the pristine walls, ceiling, and floor. They spread rapidly, multiplying, merging.
The chamber wasn't just breaking. It was unmaking itself. The solid white planes fractured into millions of geometric fragments, each one peeling away and dissolving into a blinding, featureless white light that swallowed everything—the walls, the floor, the blue screen of my condemnation.
The light wasn't warm or welcoming. It was the white of a blank page, a frozen scream, an erased hard drive. It consumed my vision, my sense of up and down, my very sense of self.
Not again…. I thought, despair a cold stone in my gut. My last coherent feeling was the echo of my own scream, swallowed by the nothing.
Not again!!!!
And then, the white went absolute, and took me with it.
…
…
…