Anomaly
I opened my eyes.
In the body of an infant.
What? Why? What in the world—why?
Was reincarnation not meant to end after a single life? The last one had been nothing but killing, when I could not so much as protect a person. I had died because I no longer had a reason to go on living. And yet I was alive?
Why. Why, of all things.
Through the blaze behind my eyes, one worst assumption rose. My power was Infinite Reincarnation—a helpless, feeble life, to be lived again and again and again. Please. Let it not be that.
Praying so, I stopped my own breath. No teeth had come in, so I could not bite through my tongue, and my arms and legs were far too short to be of any other use. Each time the lack of air dragged me under, I woke and stopped my breath again. I lost count of how many times. Only that, at some point, I simply did not come back from the faint.
It was my third reincarnation.
I sucked in a breath on instinct.
What filled my lungs was not air. It was water.
Reincarnated again. Damn it all. And this time, underwater?
Glug... glug....
Water crowded into the tiny lungs of an infant's body where air ought to have been. No. It couldn't be. I forced open eyes that had been sealed shut and looked up toward the surface. I could not see well. I could make out a shape.
A man in a black dragon robe was looking down at me. Black hair. Red eyes. A face much like my own, so far as I could tell. That man was my father—of this life, at least.
Glug....
A father who had tied a stone to me and cast me into water I could not name, river or sea. I stared up at him with my eyes wide, and before long I drowned.
It was my fourth reincarnation.
I opened my eyes again.
Only upon this fifth life could I be half certain. My anomalous power was Otherworld Reincarnation—and, at the same time, Infinite Reincarnation.
Then what was I supposed to do? I wanted to die. No. I wanted to rest. But I couldn't. Die as many times as I liked, and all that waited was another birth. A way. I had to find a way. A way to die. A way to erase the power. And to do that?
First, I had to live. Live, gather what I could learn, and do something. I could not simply lie still. Nothing would be solved by it, and my nature was a long way from collapsing in a heap to weep just because I was tired.
Yes. Live. In order to die. In order to rest.
I did not understand, not until I had sworn it, that a newborn left to itself had no way to survive. Not in a stinking back alley. Not at all.
I was hungry.
Swaddled tight in cloth, I could not properly move my short limbs. A mind that had been clear grew murkier by the hour, and my body withered down to nothing. I cast dignity aside and wailed with everything I had. But the alley must have lain farther out of the way than I had thought. Not even a human shadow passed.
Should I just die? If I was only going to starve, it might be better to stake everything on the next life.
....
No. An anomalous power grew more practiced the more it was used, and stronger for it. This was not a power I called up by my own will—but that was precisely why I could not know what would come of squandering it. What if a way to sever it finally appeared, only for me to fail because the power had grown too strong? Or what if the condition itself sank, so that I reincarnated not when I died, but merely because my body had been cut? Then there would be no answer left.
So I had to refuse reincarnation as far as I was able, and cut the power away. Even the threadbare hope that someone might pass this place before I died—I had to hold even that. Swearing it, I sought sleep, so as to spend as little of myself as I could.
Time passed. Three days? Two? A week? Surely not a month. Ah. A day or two, then. A person could not last longer than that.
"Urk—ghk...!"
I had kept an empty stomach far too long, and dry heaves wracked me. There was, of course, nothing to bring up. It hurt. My mind fouled further with every moment, and my stomach was scraped without rest, as if by a knife. I could not even properly feel my hands and feet.
Ah. Ah, ah, ah. I want to die. I want to rest. No—I don't even ask for that. Please. Please. Even a piece of bread. I want to ease this hunger.
The will to live, which anything alive is bound to carry, scrambled what was left of my mind.
"Uh... huhhh..."
A parched moan leaked out of me as I chewed at the bread set before my eyes. Gums that had not yet grown a full set of teeth knocked against each other. Strange. There had definitely been bread. Bread? No—had it been meat? What had I been thinking?
I didn't know. Ah. Right. I had been drinking water.
....
Then why was my throat burning like this?
Anyway. One thing was certain. I was about to die. Could I die? Could I end this pain? Ha. Hahaha. The laugh never came. I no longer had the strength even to push air up past my throat. Ah. Right. I can't die, can I?
Hahahahahaha. I'll live. I'll live. If I can't die, then I live, don't I? I'm going to survive. Haha—ha—haha—ha—haha.
I let a soundless laugh spill through me, and died. Ha. Ha. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. I don't know. Hahaha. At least I don't have to be hungry anymore.
The fifth death. Its cause was starvation.
I opened my eyes.
Ah. Ah. Aah. I have to live again. Again. Again. Again—alone, unable to do a single thing!
....
Enough. My mind was clear now. I could begin anew. Fortunately, this life had abandoned me in one alley of a downtown thick with high-rises. No deserted back lane, this. Someone would surely pick me up. I clutched that hope in my hand. If I did not, I felt I would go mad.
But why was there no one in the city? No—from the start, thickets had overrun the streets, and more than half the buildings looked long untended.
Surely not. It couldn't be.
It was.
There were no people in this city. Humanity itself had been wiped out. Then why was I here? Where in the world had my parents gone? No—set that aside. Why, of every world I might have fallen into, did it have to be a world like this?
Damn it. I spat curses inwardly and looked around. For better or worse, there were animals. Ah. Beasts were hardly going to save me, so worse, then.
And then—
A flutter of wings cracked against my ears. Fwip. Fwip-fwip. I could not tell what bird it was, only that it was larger than I, who was nothing yet but a human infant. It settled in front of me and jabbed my head with its beak. Pshk. Pshk. Each time, blood leapt toward the sky, and a smarting pain scrambled my thoughts. To that bird, a human baby of soft, tender flesh seemed a thoroughly delicious little morsel.
It hurt. In a myth I had read as a child, the god who gifted fire to humankind was condemned to be pecked by a bird through an eternity of ages. Thuk. Thuk. As a punishment, it made for excellent torture. Not devoured in a single gulp, but eaten away a scrap of flesh at a time, while something knocked against the skull. The sensation was hideous.
Thuk. Thuk. Thuk. Thuk....
The sound of the bird hammering my skull and gouging out meat grew distant.
It was my sixth reincarnation.
The seventh time, I opened my eyes on a wasteland where lava surged and fire burned on every side. Then my whole body charred black, and I died.
It was my seventh reincarnation.
In the eighth life, I was torn apart and eaten by a man wasted thin, as if he had gone hungry for days. Well. Starving is a hard way to go.
It was my eighth reincarnation.
In the ninth life, I was born upon a land of death. A wasteland in the literal sense—not a person, and not an animal or a plant. Death made no exception of me. I died with blood running from every opening in my body. Radiation, it seemed, was what had turned this place into a land of death. Why the things that called themselves my parents had abandoned me here, and how, was beyond absurd.
That was my ninth reincarnation.
In the tenth life, I was born on the street, and a researcher in a white lab coat carried me off. The place he took me, held in his arms, was no orphanage and no nursery. It was one laboratory inside a research institute. There they dosed me with drugs, and I died feeling my organs melt down into liquid. Those mad bastards of researchers felt not a scrap of guilt as they did it. They only scratched away at their notes. Damned monsters. If I could only have walked out of there, I would have put a knife in them. Ah. In this body, I couldn't have managed it anyway. I felt even that thought guttering out, and I died.
A truly commemorative tenth reincarnation.
The eleventh reincarnation. This time a middle-aged man took me. From his clothes, the world seemed much like the Joseon era of my first life—that old kingdom. He shut me in a wooden rice chest where not a thread of light could enter, and starved me for days. Then he set a single rice cake before me, and I crawled for it in desperation, if only to eat that much. And when I reached a hand toward the cake—
Crack—!
A hand axe sheared my wrist away. Not satisfied even with that, the madman cut my body into pieces. I was already on the verge of starvation, and bleeding besides; there was no world in which I could withstand him. I did not survive ten strokes of the axe.
It was my eleventh reincarnation.
In the twelfth life, I had not been awake ten minutes before a falling steel beam crushed me dead.
The thirteenth life, I was born in the polar regions and froze to death.
The fourteenth life, a bear tore me apart and ate me.
The fifteenth life, I starved to death.
The sixteenth life, a grotesque old woman kidnapped me, and I was boiled alive as an ingredient in her pot.
The seventeenth life, I was trampled to death beneath a crowd sprinting desperately for somewhere.
And the eighteenth life.
It hurt. Please. Please, stop. I want to stop. But I can't. Die, and I live again. There is no rest to be had. Hell, and hell, and hell once more. I am shut inside the hell called life, and made to suffer the punishment called death.
What did I ever do wrong, to deserve this? Had I laid the blame for my own weakness upon a god, and angered him? Then that god was far too small of heart. A god hears a little cursing and arranges a fate like this? That isn't a god. That's a sadist gone mad, a wreck with no hold on its temper—the word for god worn like a slur.
What I knew for certain was that no merciful, kindly god worthy of the name existed in any of the eighteen worlds. I was an atheist to begin with. I wasn't even sure gods were real. I sighed, inwardly. Nothing changed for it. It was the same even now. Was I not buried alive in wet earth, soil packed into my nose and mouth, suffocating? In a situation like this, there was nothing worth resenting. And soon enough, I stopped thinking even that.
Because I was dead.
It was my eighteenth reincarnation.
The nineteenth.
An anomaly occurred.
I was born without even an infant's flesh, in a state like that of a soul. Before me was a divine being—one whose form could not be known. It was as if a human such as I were not permitted even to perceive it.
Not a wave that needed some medium to carry it. Words driven straight into the mind. Not a soul born here? Had it noticed my power? Then—could it not sever this reincarnation?
Hope sent a throb through a heart I did not possess. The illusion of one.
Words that could not be called male or female—that could not even be called a voice—carved themselves into my mind, and in the same instant—
Clank!
With that sound, black iron chains wound around my soul. I did not care. Whether the one before my eyes was god, human, or beast... something of this order could surely cut my reincarnation short. That was enough.
I set aside the work of understanding, and let myself fill with joy. Then the divine being spoke again.
...What?
Grant me flesh? You mean to let me live as well? Live more of this hideous life?
And my awareness went black.
It was my nineteenth reincarnation.
The twentieth.
"Haak—hk...!"
I braced a hand against the ground and hauled in breath. A hand? My arms and legs were not short. I had even been dressed in a black martial uniform, cut to fit my body. Startled, I pushed myself upright. Every reincarnation until now, I had been born an infant. Hadn't I?
The words of that unidentifiable divinity came back to me. Only then did a little of the understanding I had postponed arrive.
"Ha. Haha."
I opened my hand and closed it again, and laughed. My twenties. No—a body of exactly twenty. It had not cut the reincarnation short, and still it was a blessing deep enough to choke me with gratitude. I need not be helpless any longer. Ending Infinite Reincarnation was a matter of finding the way myself. From this moment on, I would live for nothing but the sake of dying.
I swore it, and I moved. This was hardly my first reincarnation. Going by experience, the work before me was already decided. Learn what kind of place this otherworld was. That was the first objective.