"Again…" he muttered, a sorrowful smile struggling onto his face, as if his features had forgotten how to obey expression.
His voice carried the weight of ninety-nine lives, ninety-nine deaths, and ninety-nine heartbreaks.
It had started with a cold gunshot in his first life, and he awoke in the body of a young master from an aristocratic family.
At first, he was overwhelmed with a sense of pride.
He believed fate had chosen him to be the master of the game, the man before whom the world and wealth would bow.
But the days passed with a deadly slowness, no system to guide him, no supernatural powers to give him the upper hand.
He was utterly alone in a world he gradually realized did not belong to him, but in which he was merely fuel.
He understood the bitter truth everyone else ran from: he was not the hero.
He was the marginal villain, the third-tier villain crushed under the heroes' feet to highlight their nobility.
In the stories of his previous lives, he had read about such characters and felt pity for them. Now, he lived the humiliation firsthand.
He remembered his fiancée…
The woman imposed upon him from birth.
It was not a fleeting insult; it was organized humiliation in front of everyone, hundreds of times,
And for a trivial reason: a stranger had suddenly entered the city—the hero.
He wanted to leave her, to throw away the remnants of his dignity and go,
But his heart clenched with a terrifying, physical pain whenever he tried to distance himself, as if invisible chains bound his life to hers.
He followed her like a shadow, begging for her love,
While watching his dream of power and wealth evaporate, turning to ash beneath her feet.
Yet the greatest betrayal did not come from strangers but from his own flesh and blood.
His family…
His father, who was supposed to be his support, his mother, his siblings…
They all shed the cloak of kinship and donned the garb of loyalty to the hero.
He saw in their eyes the same look of contempt he had seen in his enemies'.
He died that time at the hero's hands, with his family's blessing, surrounded by heroines who were nothing but tools for his humiliation.
He thought death was the end, but the cursed soul moved on once more.
He became a gangster, only to be killed in cold blood by another heroine after a round of humiliation.
Then he became a heroine's brother, and was killed by his sister in a bid to get closer to the hero.
Then he found himself in the body of a man in his forties, trying to harass a heroine in a hotel, only to have his death reduced to a fleeting scene in the hero's justice story.
And at one point, he suffered a new kind of torment…
He became the heroine's husband.
In that life, he felt a glimmer of hope for the first time.
He thought she loved him, returned her feelings with sincerity, opening his heart that had only tasted bitterness.
As soon as he felt secure, she left everything and threw herself into the hero's arms, leaving behind the wreckage of a man who cried until his eyes dried, wishing only for this farce to end.
He wandered from body to body like a vagrant.
He was the killer, the criminal, the businessman, the politician, the teacher, the wayward son—ninety-nine faces of the same coin: suffering.
He became an expert in identifying those heroes and heroines.
No effort was needed; their extraordinary beauty that defied nature, and the events that bent the universe to serve them,
Were enough for him to say to himself: "Here begins the journey of death once again."
This was his ninety-ninth life, a long journey of suffering he had never asked for.
He sat on a couch in his new home, inhabiting a body unfamiliar to him, yet well-acquainted with its feelings.
"Aha… this man was abandoned by his beloved, who went to another man, claiming he didn't respect her decisions, and that she felt safe with the other man. Hahaha. Seems she really is the heroine… hahaha. Damn it, damn it. Hahaha."
He let out a booming, chilling laugh, while his eyes froze, cold as ice.
"Damn you, man. Don't you know the first rule of survival? To live in this hell," he muttered softly, fighting the bitterness lodged in his throat. "Stay away from the heroine… flee… disappear… vanish from her orbit."
But fate mocked him every time.
With each transition, he found himself drawn like a magnet toward the heroine's sphere.
He had never experienced a single life, even once, away from that cursed circle.
This forced repetition had grown in his chest a hatred beyond words.
A black, terrifying hatred, fed on two centuries of humiliation.
He thought: "If someone read this story from the hero's perspective, they would love these heroines, seeing them as gentle and wronged… but when you inhabit the villain's body, the one slaughtered so the hero may ascend, you will know the true meaning of bitterness."
He had spent his life as fuel for others' stories.
He had lived hundreds of years in the same world, tasting the same poison under different names.
No escape, no way out, only a closed loop of death and rebirth.
He rose slowly, his depressed body weighing down his movements, and headed to the bedroom.
He opened the closet, searched among the clothes, and found it.
He sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the weapon in his hands with eyes void of any spark.
He lifted it slowly, placing the muzzle against his head.
"Why can't I kill them while they kill me every time so easily?" he whispered bitterly.
He remembered his previous attempts.
When he was rich, when he was a powerful politician, he had tried to kill, to take revenge, to break the plot…
But the world conspired against him.
Either he was imprisoned, killed, or chance intervened to save the heroine.
He then learned the harsh truth: supporting characters were merely tools, even if they were heads of state, they would always end up beneath the hero's feet.
"Andrew… Andrew… hahaha." He spoke his real name, the name forgotten by all since his first life. "Andrew, why you? Why have you become the world's laughingstock countless times? What did I do to deserve this?"
His laughter escalated into madness, his bloodshot eyes exuding a terrifying chill.
He pressed his hand on the gun, feeling the cold metal pierce his skull.
In all his previous lives, he had awaited death from others, but this time, he decided to write the ending himself.
"I swear I will not walk this cursed plot again… either I kill myself, or no one kills me!"
He prepared to pull the trigger, when at that critical moment, a trembling robotic voice pierced the silence—a voice he had not heard for two centuries.
[Warning! Warning! Wait, Host! You cannot do this! Wait!]
Andrew froze, his finger stuck on the trigger, his eyes reddening further.
The system had finally appeared…
But why now?
And why did its voice tremble like that?
[You, Host, must complete the plot… you must finish it… you cannot die now!]
"As expected…" Andrew muttered, a bitter, sarcastic smile forming as he stared into emptiness. "This is just a play, and I am the fuel… isn't that right?"
[Yes… you cannot do this, you must fulfill the role assigned to you.]
"I don't want to." He said it simply and coldly.
[But…]
"I don't want to!" Andrew shouted, then added with terrifying calm: "You are the one who brings me back every time, aren't you? Tell me… why didn't you appear before? Why did you let me be torn apart every time without helping?"
A brief silence fell, before the system replied in a voice filled with true fear of annihilation: [I… my job is only to oversee the plot… please put the weapon down, Andrew, let's talk… your death means the end of the plot, and my end too.]
Andrew exploded with laughter, laughing so hard he almost fell off the bed.
He laughed at the system, at fate, at himself.
He had finally found the weak point in this cursed world.
"Hahaha… so my life is the price of your existence? Excellent… excellent indeed."