We did not go straight home after my status update. That was the plan.
My mother wanted something simple. A small place near the river, nothing fancy, just warm food and a table where we could sit without rushing. My father agreed immediately. Graduation. Updated stats. A day that, to them, marked progress.
To them, this was a beginning.
We walked together, my mother between us, her hand lightly gripping my sleeve like she always did in crowds.
The city felt normal. Loud. Busy. Alive. Traffic flowed. Screens blinked. People laughed too loudly near the street corner.
I remember thinking that everything looked too calm.
We were halfway across the intersection when the air changed.
It was not a sound at first. It was pressure. The kind that makes your ears ring before you understand why. The ground vibrated, subtle enough that my parents did not notice. I did.
I turned my head.
A delivery truck was approaching from the side street. Too fast. Far too fast. Its front lights flickered, then died completely. The driver's door swung open.
No one was behind the wheel.
Time did not slow. It rushed.
The truck slammed into the barrier separating the pedestrian lane from the road. Metal screamed. Concrete shattered. Something inside the vehicle glowed briefly, an ugly pulse that did not belong to any engine I had ever seen.
A crack tore through the air.
Not a gate to other realm. Not fully. A distortion. Like space forgetting its shape for a second.
People screamed.
I reached for my mother. But I did not reach fast enough.
The barrier collapsed inward. The truck followed. Debris exploded outward in a violent wave. I felt myself thrown back, my body hitting the pavement hard enough to knock the air from my lungs.
I heard my father shout my name.Then I heard nothing else from him ever again.
When my vision cleared, the world had turned wrong. Blood drips at the side of my head.
The truck lay on its side, twisted and smoking. The barrier was gone. So was the sidewalk. In its place was a jagged trench, blackened and warped, as if something had bitten into the ground and taken a piece with it.
My parents were there. They were not moving.
My mother lay several meters away, her hand still curled as if she had been holding onto me. My father was closer to the wreckage. I could not see his face.
I stood up amidst my dizziness. My legs shook, but they held.
People were screaming. Someone was crying. Someone else was shouting about a breach. Sirens began to rise in the distance, too slow, far too slow.
I walked to them.
I already knew.
The System did not need to tell me. It stayed silent, as if it understood that this moment did not require confirmation.
I knelt beside my mother. Her eyes were open, unfocused, staring at nothing. I touched her shoulder.
She was still warm but at the same time cold. Death cold.
My chest tightened, but no sound came out. My mind moved faster than my body. Faster than the shock. Faster than the pain.
This had never happened before.
Not once. Not in any life I have retaken.
This street had always been safe. This time of day had always passed quietly. The route, the timing, the choice to eat out. None of it had ever led here.
Something had changed.
I stood up slowly and looked around.
The distortion in the air was fading. The blackened trench was already stabilizing, concrete reforming unnaturally fast under emergency protocols. Whatever had caused it was being erased.
Covered up. By what? By who? I have no answer.
It was contained by something so powerful, I could not even grasp how it can alter the natural flow, the given.
My hands curled into fists. This was wrong. So very wrong. This was not part of my loop.
The thought came immediately, sharp and clear.
If I die now, I can go back.
If I die, I can stop this.
I turned away from the wreckage and walked toward the road.
Cars were slowing, swerving to avoid debris. I stepped forward without hesitation.
A car screeched to a halt inches from me.
Someone grabbed my arm and yanked me back.
"Are you insane?" a stranger shouted.
I wrenched free and moved again.
Another car stopped. Another hand pulled me away. Someone tackled me to the ground. My head struck the pavement.
I did not lose consciousness.
I tried again. I ran toward the smoking wreckage, toward exposed wiring, toward the warped metal still humming with residual energy. A security barrier snapped into place, blocking my path. Emergency drones descended, their lights blinding.
I screamed at them to move.
They did not.
I tried to climb the barrier. My strength failed me. My body refused to cooperate. Every movement felt delayed, dulled, as if something invisible was holding me back.
I needed to die.
I needed to go back.
I needed to fix this.
Minutes passed. Or seconds. It blurred.
Eventually, someone sedated me.
I woke up in a white room. The ceiling was unfamiliar.
I waited for the System. For the rewind.
For the smell of sugar and warm wax. But nothing happened. Because it was already another day.
My wristband chimed softly.
[Checkpoint Updated]
[New Return Point: 04.13]
[Status: Locked]
I stared at the message until my vision blurred. The day after.
Not before.
Not the morning.
Not the moment I could change.
I sat up slowly, my chest hollow, my hands shaking.
Luck minus infinity had finally laughed at me properly.
Death had taken the wrong people.
And for the first time since I could remember, it refused to take me instead.
My loop had moved on. And I was still here.
~~~
The hospital room smelled like disinfectant and quiet.
I lay there staring at the ceiling, counting tiles without really seeing them. Time moved, but I stayed stuck on the street where everything ended. Nurses came and went. Officials asked questions I barely answered. Every word felt heavy, like it had to travel a long distance just to leave my mouth.
When I was finally alone, I checked. I did not want to. I needed to.
The System responded without emotion.
My parents' profiles opened after a few steps through restricted menus. Family access. Emergency disclosure. Clean lines. Clean numbers.
Both of them had used their rebirths.
Once each. Long ago before me.
My father's record showed an industrial accident when he was nineteen. Machinery failure. Closed case.
My mother's record listed a traffic collision at seventeen. Driver error. Closed case.
No remaining allocation. No second chance.
I stared until my eyes burned.
I had known, logically, that most people only ever got one. And that if one of my parent still has allocation for rebirth, I would not be waking up on the hospital the day after. I would be on one of their return point with my memory of the incident intact.
Though, some part of me had hoped. Something irrational. Something childish.
Hope died quietly.
Later, when they moved me to a general ward, I heard the whispers.
Not from doctors. From visitors. From people who thought I was asleep.
They talked about probability. About those rare cursed children. About how my extreme bad luck had finally caught up to someone else.
"Maybe it was bound to happen," one voice said softly. "Living near him for that long."
Another replied, "That kind of luck spreads. Everyone knows that."
I turned my face to the wall.
A few people defended me. Family friends who were visitng, who had known my parents since before I was born. They spoke carefully, choosing their words like they might break.
"This wasn't his fault."
"That accident took more lives than just theirs."
"They said it was a causality collapse."
I clung to that phrase.
Causality collapse.
The news filled in the rest.
The government agency that handled anomalous incidents had taken over the site. Realm-related involvement was suspected. Not confirmed, but close enough to shut everything down. They mentioned a realm name I had only ever heard in textbooks.
The Eryndal Layer.
It had been decades since Eryndal last misbehaved. Back when the connection between worlds was still unstable. Back when people believed disasters were the price of progress.
The report said the distortion was brief. Incomplete. Like something had tried to cross and failed.
The word failed kept coming up.
They showed footage from a distance. Blurred shapes. Glitches carefully edited out. Officials promised answers. They always did.
A few days later, they discharged me.
I signed forms I did not read. A man in a dark suit explained that my parents' remains had been confiscated for investigation. Standard procedure. Public safety. Realm contamination protocols.
"We'll handle the burial," he said. "You don't need to worry about that."
I just nodded.
I could not feel anything at that moment. My mind too was blank.
Home felt smaller than I remembered.
The door closed behind me with a soft click that echoed too loudly. The silence pressed in from every direction. Shoes still by the entrance. A jacket hanging where my father left it. A note on the fridge reminding me to eat properly.
I did not take another step.
My legs gave out and I slid down until I was sitting on the floor, back against the door. My hands covered my face and the sound that came out of me did not feel human.
I cried until my chest hurt.
Until my throat burned.
Until there was nothing left to push out.
I wanted answers. I replayed the street over and over, searching for a mistake. A sign. Something I should have noticed sooner. Something I could have changed.
There was nothing.
I was too small. Too weak. Too unimportant.
The system did not care. The government did not need me. The realm did not know I existed.
I wanted to disappear. Not die.
Disappear.
Fade out of everything. Become a blank space where nothing could be taken anymore.
I curled on the floor and stared at nothing.
My wristband remained silent.
No alerts.
No rewinds.
No mercy.
Something bigger than me had decided I was not allowed to leave.
And as the night stretched on, my tears dried, but the weight stayed.
I did not want to survive anymore.
Yet somehow, against my will, I still did.
~~~
Time did not heal anything, but it loosened its grip.
A week passed. Then another. I stopped waking up on the floor. I started eating again, mostly because forgetting to eat made everything worse. Sleep came in short stretches, shallow and uneven, but it came.
When my hands stopped shaking, I turned to the only thing I had ever trusted.
Information.
I tore through every system terminal I could legally access, then every one I could not. Old school databases. Government mirrors. Academic archives sealed behind credentials I technically still had as a top graduate. I mapped protocols, traced data paths, simulated exploits.
If the System could be rigged, I would find the seam.
There was none.
No code. No server. No hidden layer I could reach with logic alone. The System did not exist inside machines. Machines only reflected it. Recorded it. Obeyed it.
It was anchored deeper.
Not in software, but in reality itself.
In the numinous framework that tied worlds together. In rules older than language. In beings that were not programs and never pretended to be.
Gods. Monsters. Things that did not need belief to exist.
For the first time, my intelligence felt useless.
That realization hurt more than I expected.
But answers came from a different direction.
Late one night, buried in outdated realm records and untranslated contracts, I found it. A clause most people skipped because it was impractical to the point of absurdity.
In the other realm our world was connected to, a place called Aetherfall, there existed a provision.
A reward.
Three lives.
Not rebirths. Not retries. Actual restorations. The kind that pulled a soul back across layers and anchored it to reality again. Transferable. Usable on others.
But only under one condition.
The blessing of a high god.
Not a prayer or a ritual. But a favor.
And favors were never given freely.
To even be noticed by such a being, you had to stand at the peak of the realm. Power, reputation, achievement. Something undeniable. Something that could not be ignored.
The best of the best.
I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling.
I was slow. Weak. Fragile. A liability in every physical sense. Even my luck dragged disaster toward me like a tide.
How was I supposed to reach a god?
How was I supposed to earn anything from a being that watched worlds rise and fall?
The answer came quietly.
I did not need to win.
I needed to persist.
Luck ruined outcomes, but it never erased effort. And if there was one thing I had more experience with than anyone else, it was surviving long enough to try again.
My enthusiasm did not fade with reason. It never had.
If the path to the gods ran through Aetherfall, then I would walk it.
I signed up under the lowest possible classification.
Initiate Crosser Program.
Most people called them something else.
Newbies.
Fresh bodies with hopeful eyes and delusions of glory. Cannon fodder for the realms. The ones veterans warned others about. The ones expected to quit or die before they mattered.
I fit perfectly.
When the confirmation window appeared, I did not hesitate.
[Application Accepted]
[Status: Initiate Crosser]
[Orientation Scheduled]
I closed the screen and let out a slow breath.
I did not know how to become great.
I did not know how to reach a god.
But I knew one thing with absolute certainty.
I would keep going.
There was another reason I could not stop.
Bringing my parents back was not enough.
I needed to know why they died.
Not the official explanation. Not the cleaned reports or the careful words used on the news. I had read those until the lines blurred. Vehicle malfunction. Spatial instability. Possible realm interference. Phrases designed to sound complete while answering nothing.
That intersection had been safe.
I knew its patterns better than most people knew their own neighborhoods. I had crossed it dozens of times across different lives. Morning, noon, night. Rain or sun. Nothing had ever gone wrong there.
Until it did.
Causality does not break without pressure. Events do not collapse into each other for no reason. Something had pushed. Something had slipped through a crack that should not have existed.
And my parents paid for it.
The thought sat in my chest like a weight that never shifted. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the moment before impact. The way the air tightened. The wrongness I noticed too late. The distortion that vanished before anyone could name it.
I wondered if it had been chasing me.
I wondered if my luck had finally reached outward instead of inward. If the world had decided it could not take me and chose something else instead.
That idea terrified me more than death ever had.
If my existence caused that collapse, then bringing my parents back would not be enough. I would only be placing them back into a danger that followed me like a shadow.
I needed answers before hope.
I needed truth before miracles.
The realms were older than our world. Their rules were harsher, but clearer. Gods did not hide behind reports. Monsters did not pretend accidents were random.
If causality had been bent, then something in the other world had touched it first.
So I would go there.
Not just to beg for lives.
But to ask the one question no report would ever answer.
Why them.
Why that moment.
And why I was still alive to remember it.
No matter how many times the realms tried to erase me.
No matter how tired Death eventually became.
This time, I was not running from dying.
I was walking toward something worth living for.