When I Opened My Eyes, I Was Hanging from the Ceiling
I opened my eyes to find myself hanging by the neck from the ceiling. I have no idea whether I remembered my past life or if I’d suddenly possessed someone, but none of that mattered. My throat was being crushed.
I thrashed wildly, twisting my whole body in a desperate bid to survive.
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“Ugh… gghk, ghhk, fuuuck…”
I was sure I had just died. I hung there in a daze until the strength drained from my fingers again. My throat tightened, and my vision went black.
Is this the end?
The moment I thought that…
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My eyes opened again. The ceiling. Again, the ceiling. The rope was still wrapped around my neck, and my toes kept groping at empty air.
“Khhk, ghhk…!”
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I don’t know how many times I died, but this time the darkness didn’t swallow my vision. Slowly, I grabbed the noose. After flailing a few more times, I finally managed to stretch my foot toward the chair that had been kicked aside. I loosened the rope that had been digging into my neck and slid down to the floor like a sack of meat.
Only the loosened noose remained on the ceiling, swaying gently.
I lay there for a long time. For someone who had just died and come back, I felt strangely numb.
“……Bullshit.”
Someone once said that suicide is a confession that life isn’t worth living. The friend who had thrown this body at me after hanging himself from the ceiling had finally become utterly convinced of that fact.
I felt no guilt about stealing his body. If anything, I’d been saddled with someone else’s discarded trash. Besides, because of this son of a bitch, I had no idea how many times I’d died.
I sat there in a daze for a while, rubbing my numb throat. Then I slowly got to my feet. With trembling hands, I opened the cabinet and pulled out a bottle of liquor. Even though the room was unfamiliar, I knew exactly where everything was, as if I’d lived here my whole life. The memories that came with the body were acting like they owned the place.
Leaning one hand against the wall, I drank straight from the bottle. The harsh liquid burned down my throat, but my mind refused to clear. Everything felt hazy. I couldn’t tell if I had recalled my past life or if I had suddenly possessed this body, but who the hell thinks of that stuff while hanging to death?
While my mind kept chewing on the same thoughts, the door opened without a knock.
“Father is calling for you. You’d better head to his study soon.”
It was my younger sister, Lione. The moment our eyes met—hers a cold blue-gray—I remembered.
“Drinking again at a time like this, of all things.”
When I said nothing, she added a few more words with clear disdain. That this was exactly why I’d ended up like this. That it was no wonder Father called me a worthless insect when I drank instead of going when summoned… She kept scolding me, her gaze idly sweeping the room, until it suddenly froze.
The noose hanging from the ceiling.
“……That.”
Her voice trailed off. The color drained from her face. I could only stare at her deathly pale expression for a long time. It was an unfamiliar look on her.
The girl reached out toward me, then stopped in midair. Her fingers twitched once before returning to her side.
I glanced at her while still holding the bottle, then opened the door and stepped into the hallway.
My neck still felt like the noose was wrapped around it. I rubbed the back of my neck several times, but the sensation wouldn’t fade. Every time that damn Synchronization Rate ticked up, unfamiliar memories forced their way into my head. Memories that clearly weren’t mine.
My name was Rihen Grayan. I had wasted my life. At least, that’s what everyone said.
Suicide is a confession that life isn’t worth living, right? That’s why I died… but looking closer, this guy had actually tried pretty hard in his own way.
He had safely graduated from the Imperial Academy, the school only the elite attended. Sure, he’d skipped more days than he attended, but he still got the diploma. In swordsmanship practicals, he hadn’t been top of the class, but he’d placed in the top twenty of his cohort. Of course, there had only been twenty people in that cohort.
In the spring of his graduation year, he had been formally knighted. It was just that no knight order had been willing to take him.
If he had been born into some minor barony, he might not have been the family’s pride, but at least he would have been called a decent son with all his limbs intact. They could have sold him off to a moderately wealthy merchant as a stud to continue the bloodline and that would have been the end of it.
The problem was that he hadn’t been born into a “moderately” prestigious family.
The Grayan Ducal Family. The most noble name in the Empire after the Emperor himself. A prestigious house that had produced Sword Saints for generations. And the sole piece of trash in that family was none other than Rihen Grayan.
No one had expected him to become a Sword Saint. He simply had to live up to the value of being born the eldest son. From a young age, he had been force-fed elixirs worth the price of an entire fiefdom per bottle, and the Empire’s finest sword instructors had been assigned to him. The Duke had believed without a doubt that with the bloodline that had produced Sword Saints for generations, all it would take was some polishing.
Yet this guy couldn’t even swing a sword properly. The decades’ worth of elixirs never accumulated into proper mana, and one by one the instructors shook their heads and left. If only he had been born a commoner—they might have at least handed him a farming tool.
A worthless insect who couldn’t even pretend to be a knight. Whenever he appeared at banquets, mockery followed him like a shadow. When he picked up a sword, even his peers refused to spar with him. The engagement that had been arranged for him had been broken off just days ago. Everywhere he went, people treated him like garbage, and the family had begun quietly trying to erase his name from the genealogy.
Still, that wasn’t why Rihen had hanged himself. The reason he chose death was far more pathetic.
His childhood friend—a commoner girl he had known since they were little—had run off with another man. She had gone to the capital to study magic, apparently. Whether she had fallen for the guy or not, that was all there was to it. She had been a place of comfort, someone who saw him as Rihen rather than a Grayan. But from my perspective, it didn’t matter.
The father who had long since grown sick of his useless parasite of a son had finally decided to send the boy to the front lines. There was nowhere left for him to run. The destination was the Northern Front, where they said only one out of every ten soldiers returned alive.
So, to put it simply from my point of view, I was about to be drafted into the army twice.
Childhood friends exist to be NTR’d. If he didn’t even know that basic common sense, no wonder he lived like this.
Anyway. I had ended up inside the body of a guy who had hanged himself in despair. Honestly, I wanted to hang myself again right this second. I had zero interest in recycling someone else’s discarded trash. I didn’t want to go to the army twice!
But after dying several times just now, I had somehow come back perfectly fine. It wasn’t a hallucination—I had definitely died and returned. The feeling of my fingers breaking as I tried to pry the noose off my neck wasn’t something I could easily forget.
That lingering sensation of the rope still around my neck made it hard to even stand straight. I brought the bottle back to my lips. More than half of it was already gone.
My head felt completely empty, yet my legs moved on their own. I pushed open the door without knocking. Inside the spacious study, a man sat behind a heavy desk.
Duke Grayan. The father of this body.
His sunken eyes slowly scanned me, then the liquor bottle in my hand. With just that single glance, I could tell exactly how Rihen was treated in this family. Experience hit harder than borrowed memories.
The large study was so quiet it felt suffocating. The bookshelves lining the walls, the afternoon light slanting through the windows—everything seemed to hold its breath in the Duke’s presence.
My body twitched involuntarily. Rihen’s memories were dragging out the terror he had felt every time he entered this room. My head felt detached, like it was someone else’s problem, but the tips of my fingers trembled on their own.
Beside the desk stood a man I didn’t remember. A sharply cut military uniform. A sword at his waist. A body honed without a single ounce of excess, and those same sunken eyes. At a glance, he was clearly a soldier who had survived the brutal grind of the battlefield.
No matter how much I searched Rihen’s memories, the man’s face was nowhere to be found. He slowly looked me up and down, then carefully spoke to the Duke.
“……Is this drunkard your son, sir?”
There was a faint note of doubt in his voice. Understandable, seeing someone stagger in with a bottle after being summoned by his father.
The Duke stared at me in silence for a long time. Then he gave a short answer.
“……No.”
The soldier’s eyebrows twitched.
“I have no son.”
The Duke slowly rose from his seat. There was no anger in his eyes, not even disappointment. If anything, he looked like a man wondering how best to dispose of filth lying in the street.
“That is nothing more than refuse sullying the name Grayan.”
The Duke gave the soldier a light jerk of his chin.
“Take him. Throw him into the worst corner of your unit. Whether he lives or dies is no longer any concern of mine.”