Chapter 3
I must have cried myself to sleep.
When I opened my eyes, I saw an elegant ceiling above me.
I was still in the mansion I had arrived at yesterday.
The softness of the bed and the warmth of the air were exactly the same as before.
Suddenly, it all felt real.
So it wasn’t a dream. Everything really happened.
I drank poison, was betrayed, and… died.
Wait a minute—did I really die?
I got out of bed and looked around.
Not only did I not know where this place was, I couldn’t even tell if I was alive or dead.
With a bit of courage, I stepped outside the room.
The hallway wasn’t too dark. It wasn’t as warm as inside the room, but it wasn’t cold either.
At that moment, I saw a faint figure of a man at the end of the hallway.
Reflexively, I turned away, but just as suddenly, the man vanished around the corner.
“Wait!”
I bolted down the corridor. I didn’t care who it was—I just wanted to find someone to ask where I was.
“Wait!”
As I shouted and rounded the corner, I ran straight into an unfamiliar man.
He looked down at me, surprised.
I studied him closely.
His face was plain. He seemed vaguely familiar, and yet not.
The kind of face you’d forget the moment you looked away.
He, too, looked me over from head to toe. After a long moment of silence, he finally spoke.
“…You’ve awakened.”
“Yes.”
His voice was deeper than I expected.
It was definitely not the same voice I’d heard when I first arrived at the mansion.
I stayed calm and asked him a question.
“Do you live here?”
The man looked at me with a strange expression, then nodded.
“Yes. I’m the owner of this house.”
“What’s your name?”
“I don’t have one.”
“You don’t have a name?”
I frowned in disbelief, but he responded with a calm face, as if he had expected that reaction.
“Yes. It may be hard to believe, but I truly don’t have a name. So just call me whatever you like—‘you,’ ‘sir,’ ‘hey,’ anything is fine.”
It was the first time I’d ever heard such a thing.
How could a person not have a name?
But he offered no further explanation.
“How did you end up here?”
I stood there blankly for a moment, then recounted what had happened as simply as possible.
“…I was lying in bed, and I lost consciousness. When I came to, I was in a forest.
I kept walking until monsters showed up. I ran and ran, and eventually ended up in front of this house.”
As I spoke, the painful memories returned, and I couldn’t go on.
“Thank you for opening the door.
If it hadn’t been for this place, I probably would have died.”
“No.”
He shook his head calmly. I was about to protest, but his next words struck me like an arrow.
“Even if I hadn’t opened the door, you wouldn’t have died.
A person who’s already dead can’t die a second time.”
All the questions I had prepared vanished from my mind.
Shock wrapped around me like a shroud.
“I… died?”
“Yes. This is the Abyss, a place between life and death—a trap where lost souls fall.
It’s where souls who rejected their fate end up.”
The Abyss? A trap for souls? What did that even mean?
I couldn’t understand it—but one thing, I knew for certain, without asking further.
I really did die.
So painfully, so miserably… betrayed by the ones I trusted.
A hollow laugh escaped my lips.
The emptiness and sorrow felt like they would tear me apart. I couldn’t even cry anymore.
“So this place is… the middle of hell?”
I looked at him weakly and asked.
I had no energy left to speak formally.
He shook his head.
“No. Ordinary people don’t come to a place like this, even after death.
They either go straight to hell, or are reborn as someone else.”
After finishing his explanation, he asked carefully:
“Could you… tell me how you died?”
How I died?
Suddenly, the emotions I had been suppressing surged up again.
Grief and injustice boiled in my throat.
I tried my best to stay calm and speak only the facts.
“…I was a king.”
The moment I said it, my voice cracked.
“Because I became king, I had to live my whole life alone without a family.
I had one friend I was close to… and that friend put poison in my food.
The other people I trusted were all in on it.”
That wasn’t everything I had suffered, not even close.
“I see.”
The man asked no further questions.
Strangely, he nodded like a scholar who had reached a conclusion.
“A story worthy of the Abyss. Now I understand why you ended up here.”
“What do you mean?”
“Hmm… Where should I begin…”
He hesitated for a moment, then looked at me directly and asked:
“Do you know about fate?”
“Fate?”
The word felt foreign.
He glanced at my expression and then explained calmly.
“Every human has a destiny assigned by the gods.
Each soul is born with a different fate, and even if they lose their memories and are reborn, that fate continues.”
“You mean like the difference between a noble’s soul and a commoner’s?”
“No. Fate has nothing to do with social status.
Even if two people are born with the same fate, one could be a noble, the other a poor commoner.”
“Then…”
“The fate I speak of is about the path one is meant to walk.
Some are destined to deal with money, others to pursue knowledge, or serve the gods—things like that.”
The idea that the gods decided one’s purpose in life wasn’t new.
It came up often in religious texts.
Though, to be honest, I’d never really believed it.
“Then what was my fate?”
I asked, my voice devoid of strength.
At this point, I felt like I could accept any answer.
But what he said next was something I could not accept.
“Your fate was to become a king.
To be the ruler of the world.”
What?
That lonely life, that miserable throne I had begrudgingly accepted as divine punishment—
was actually… my fate?
“But you cursed that fate.
You rejected the destiny given to you by the gods.
Souls like that end up in this place.”
He pointed toward a faint iron gate visible through the window.
“Countless others have passed through that gate before you.
But you’re the only one who actually succeeded in opening it.”
“Becoming a king… that was the fate chosen for me by the gods?”
He added, matter-of-factly:
“More precisely, to be a leader.
If born a royal, then a king. If born a noble, the head of a house.
If born a commoner, then perhaps a village chief.”
But I couldn’t take in any of it.
The idea that my hardships, the miserable end of my life, were nothing more than pieces on some divine chessboard filled my head.
“So what happens to me now?”
I asked weakly.
He looked at me and asked in return:
“Are you seeking advice?”
“What do you—”
“You can choose now.
To be reborn like other souls…
or remain here, like me, forever.”
The sudden choice stopped my empty laughter.
I could choose what I wanted? Really?
“I…”
The words came out before I could even think.
“I want to go back.
To where I came from.”
“That’s not possible.”
He shook his head firmly.
“You wouldn’t know this, but decades have passed since that day.
Returning to the same time is impossible.”
So much time had passed while I was unconscious?
This place must truly have a different sense of time than the world of the living.
If decades really had passed, then surely everyone I had known was already long dead.
If I couldn’t return—
Where was I supposed to go now?
I stood there, dazed. The man calmly offered advice.
“Why not… just be reborn?”
