Hypnosis Without Salvation, a Nightmare from Five Years Ago
A chilling sensation pierced through my chest.
“Ugh…!”
Blood surged up my throat in a hot gush.
As my vision collapsed toward the floor, familiar faces swam into view.
The mother who had not given birth to me, yet raised me with more devotion than her own son.
The older sister who had always cherished me, despite sharing not a drop of blood.
The younger sister who would snuggle into my arms and act spoiled, even though we weren’t related by blood.
And the childhood friend I had sworn to spend the rest of my life with.
In each of their hands, they gripped knives dripping with fresh blood.
“Why… why…?”
My body trembled with betrayal.
But something was wrong.
The eyes of the women who had stabbed me held neither life nor focus. They simply stared blankly into empty space, like dolls whose souls had been ripped out entirely.
Thud. Thud.
A man stepped through the pool of blood and approached me.
He was once the person I trusted most in the world—my “best friend.”
The man crouched in front of me with a vile smirk.
“Thanks, you dumb fuck.”
“…Cough! What… did you say?”
“You’ve been sneaking peeks, so you already had a rough idea, right?”
He chuckled and patted my cheek.
“The women around you… they sucked my cock so fucking well.”
My mind went white-hot.
“They all said they didn’t need you anymore.”
“…!”
“So I casually suggested they prove it. Never thought they’d actually stab you to death. Impressive, honestly.”
“You… you bastard… what the hell did you do…!”
“Oh, and I owe you a special thanks, so I figured I’d give you a chance.”
A chance?
Even as my heart stuttered toward death, rage tore through my chest.
I squeezed out the last of my strength and screamed.
“What the fuck could I possibly have to thank you for?! What the hell do you mean by giving me a chance?!”
“Ah, you still don’t know? Well, I guess you wouldn’t.”
The man shrugged.
“Well, the ‘chance’ was basically ‘do you want to die quickly, or die slowly in agony?’”
He grabbed a fistful of my hair and yanked my head up.
“Look straight into my eyes, Peace.”
As if possessed, I lifted my gaze.
In that instant, the man’s left eye began to writhe with an eerie glow.
An eye burning redder than blood itself.
A fragment of an old memory flashed through my mind.
“That eye… it can’t be…”
“Remember? The stories from fairy tales and legends passed down since ancient times.”
“Fairy tales…? Eyes…? You mean one of the Four Mystic Eyes said to exist on the continent?!”
“Bingo.”
He laughed softly.
“That’s right. Those stories were real. The only reason no one knew was because the conditions for awakening each power were different.”
“…”
“But who would’ve guessed… that the legendary Hypnotic Eyes were sealed inside that cheap red bead you gave me five years ago?”
My heart plummeted.
“Nothing happened when I had it…!”
“Are you stupid? You think just carrying it around would do anything? You had to break it.”
The man clutched his stomach and howled with laughter. He looked like he was having the time of his life, tears forming at the corners of his eyes.
“You treasured that thing like an idiot and gave it to me as a birthday present, right? On the inside I was thinking ‘what the fuck is this trash,’ but I pretended to be happy.”
“Kyle…!”
“And after the birthday party, I got pissed and smashed the ‘gift’ you gave me because I thought it was garbage.”
His eye glowed crimson once more.
“Red vapor poured out and rushed straight into my eye. The power flowed through my brain and kindly engraved the instructions directly into my mind.”
He spat on the ground and sneered.
“I almost cried from how grateful I was. Thanks, buddy. Thanks to you, I got to drink every last drop of pussy juice from all your women.”
“AAAAAAAAAAAGH—!!”
A gut-wrenching scream tore from my throat.
Because of the gift I gave him.
Because of my own foolishness, Mother, Sister, my little sister, and my childhood friend had all become toys for a monster.
“Alright, time to die now.”
The moment his cold command fell, my family and childhood friend raised their knives in perfect unison.
Slice—! Slice—!
The merciless blades hacked my body apart simultaneously.
Despair so deep I couldn’t even feel the pain swallowed my entire being.
“Throw him in the lake over there.”
With the man’s final words, my body flew through the air and sank into the cold lake.
Crimson blood spread through the water.
As the surface grew farther away, I shed tears of blood.
‘If… if I ever get one more chance…’
I would tear that bastard’s limbs apart and take back everything that was mine.
Swallowing a vicious curse, I closed my eyes for the last time.
I woke up gasping for air.
“Haah…! Haa, haa…!”
My hands frantically patted my chest.
There was no pain from the stab wounds, no gaping holes pouring blood.
I looked around.
This was neither the cold lake nor the blood-soaked ground.
I was lying on the bed in my own familiar room.
I glanced at the calendar.
The year had changed.
“Twenty-five…?”
Exactly five years before the thirty-year-old me had died.
I had returned to the past, before all the tragedy began.
“Ha… haha… No way. This isn’t really a dream?”
I slapped my own cheek hard.
The sharp sting and the clear sound of flesh hitting flesh rushed in.
It was vivid.
The cold blades of my family as they stabbed me, that bastard’s vile laughter, and even the pain I felt now—everything was real.
I had truly come back to life.
Back to the past, before I suffered all that tragedy.
“…Where is that bastard?”
The first thing that rose in my mind was the face of the son of a bitch who had stolen everything from me.
I wanted to run to him right now and wring his neck, but I barely managed to suppress the boiling murderous intent.
Not yet.
Right now, I was still a powerless, incompetent nobody.
I had to dig through my memories from my previous life.
The moment that bastard obtained the Hypnotic Eyes.
The very trigger that had driven all my relationships to ruin.
“You didn’t even know what it was, treasured it like a fool, and gave it to me as a birthday present… Then red vapor poured out and rushed straight into my eye.”
The bastard’s voice echoed in my ears like a hallucination. I shot up from the bed in shock.
“No way…”
With trembling steps, I approached the desk.
On top of it sat a small box wrapped in luxurious silk.
I swallowed hard and reached out.
When I opened the lid, a single bead glowing with an ethereal, blood-red light appeared inside.
“I… haven’t given it to him yet.”
Not long ago, an old grandmother had stopped by our border village to sell some goods.
She had been carrying luggage that looked far too heavy for her frail body, so I helped carry it for her. In thanks, she had pressed this mysterious red bead into my hand.
At the time, I felt no mana from it and simply thought it was a pretty trinket from the street.
And now, the root of all evil that had started every single one of my tragedies—the birthday present I had given to the person I trusted most in the world—rested in the palm of my hand.
Who on earth had that grandmother been?
A hidden expert wandering the continent? Or a divine revelation from the gods?
It didn’t matter.
What was certain was that the power that had turned that bastard into an omnipotent monster and allowed him to violate everyone I held dear was now firmly in my grasp.
The moment I picked up the bead, a cold sensation traveled up my fingertips.
“So this is where the Hypnotic Eyes were sealed.”
That bastard had said he threw it on the floor and shattered it.
Red vapor had then seeped into his eye and engraved the ability into his brain.
My haggard face was reflected on the bead’s smooth surface.
It was the face of a monster, filled with rage and hatred, looking as if it would shed tears of blood at any moment.
This life would be different.
There was no chance in hell that this bead would ever fall into that bastard’s hands again.
Instead, what if I claimed this power, just like that bastard had in my previous life?
If the Hypnotic Eyes—one of the legendary Four Mystic Eyes, an absolute power capable of twisting cause and effect—became mine?
“…Just wait.”
Strength surged into the hand gripping the bead.
My knuckles turned bone-white with a faint crack.
The despair you gave me. The price for violating my family and laughing at me.
In this life, you will receive every last bit of it.
No—I will tear your limbs apart in the most miserable and horrific way your pathetic imagination could never dream of.
Crack—!
Without hesitation, I slammed the red bead against the corner of the desk.
From the shattered cracks, an ominous yet captivating red vapor rose and poured straight into my left eye.
“UAAAAAAGH!!”
Agony like my entire eyeball was being burned alive exploded through me.
But the pain soon subsided, and a single strange rule was branded deep into my mind like a stigma.
Constraint of Three: Only three uses of hypnosis are permitted per person. Exceeding this limit grants the target complete immunity; hypnosis will no longer work.
“…Only three times per person?”
I still didn’t know the detailed usage methods.
The only information imprinted in my head was the fatal restriction: ‘only three times per individual, and never again after that.’
I would have to figure out the exact activation conditions and proper usage later.
But there was a more urgent matter.
I needed to find out exactly how that bastard had used the Hypnotic Eyes in my previous life to make my women lose focus in their eyes and stab me.
“I have to go to that bastard’s house. Right now…”
The moment I burned with vengeful fury and tried to open the door to leave—
Knock, knock—.
A rough knock echoed through the quiet room.
Before I could even answer, the door swung open with a click.
“Peace, are you awake? You told me to wake you early because you’re going to your friend’s birthday party today…”
The person who entered was none other than my mother.
In an instant, the final memory from my previous life exploded inside my head.
The image of my mother’s cold face, eyes unfocused as she raised a knife and mercilessly carved up my chest, overlapped with the woman standing before me now.
“UAAAAAAGH—!!!”
A scream burst out of me from the horrific trauma.
I kicked the blanket away violently and curled up in the corner of the bed.
My whole body shook like a leaf in the wind.
“Huh? Peace, what’s wrong? Are you hurt somewhere?!”
Mother rushed toward me in surprise.
She must have been in the middle of cutting fruit for me to eat that morning—her right hand held a silver fruit knife that glinted with a cold, sharp edge.
The sunlight reflecting off the blade stabbed into my eyes.
“D-don’t come near me…! Put that knife away!! Stay back!!!”
My bloodshot left eye began to writhe with an eerie crimson glow as it fixed on the knife in Mother’s hand.