Damian stood in the forest, chest rising and falling like a bell tolling the end of the world. The wind whispered through the skeletal branches above him, carrying a smell that was not of this world—metallic, sharp, and almost alive. Every sound felt amplified: a snapping twig, the rustle of leaves, the distant caw of a crow. Yet, somehow, he felt utterly alone.
He had survived. At least, he thought he had. Sophie's words replayed in his mind like a dark hymn.
Absolute Return. Every time you die… you return five seconds before your death. And it will not stop until you surpass that death.
Five seconds. Every death. Infinite.
Damian sank to his knees and closed his eyes. He had to focus. He had to understand. The forest was beautiful, yes—but beauty had no meaning here. Not anymore. Not for him. He had felt fire, pain, flesh melting under heat, and the horror of screaming bodies crushed beneath spiritual might. He had died a thousand deaths in the black market—maybe more. And now, he was trapped in a world where every moment could end him.
He focused on his thoughts. He tried to separate himself from the physical, from the sensation of being alive, because the moment he breathed too heavily, too greedily, it reminded him: he was mortal. And mortality here was a curse.
A rustling behind him drew his attention. Damian turned slowly, and in that instant—a clawed hand shot out from the shadows, raking across his chest.
Pain exploded like lightning. His lungs filled with blood, his ribs cracked under the force. He collapsed to the ground, vision fracturing into kaleidoscopic shards of red and black. He gasped, tried to scream, but only a wet gurgle escaped.
And then… nothing.
He blinked.
The forest was the same. The trees, the pale green light filtering through the canopy, the smell of iron in the air—it was all the same. Except for the hand. The clawed hand, the blood, the horror of it—it was gone.
He was crouching in the same spot he had been five seconds ago.
Damian's heart stopped. Slowly, it started pounding again. The forest felt colder now, darker.
He tried to shake it off, tried to convince himself it was a trick, a hallucination. But then—before he could even think—something stabbed into the back of his neck.
The pain was instantaneous. Excruciating. A dagger of ice and fire all at once. He collapsed face-first into the dirt, choking on soil and blood. His arms flailed. He could hear bones snapping, teeth breaking, organs tearing.
And then… nothing.
Again.
And again.
And again.
Damian's mind became a metronome of pain. Death was no longer an event—it was a constant, repeating cycle, a machine grinding him to dust over and over.
He tried to focus, tried to control it, tried to breathe through it. But every death forced him through a veil, a realm of fire and ash he didn't understand. Sophie had called it purgatory. Damian didn't care about the name. It was worse than hell—it was nothingness wrapped in fire.
Here, the world stripped him bare. Here, the screaming didn't end. Here, he saw faces he didn't recognize, mouths gaping, eyes empty, twisted bodies burning, bleeding, and disintegrating in slow motion. Sometimes they whispered. Sometimes they screamed. Sometimes they just stared. And every time he returned… he felt a piece of himself peeling away.
By the tenth death, Damian was no longer crouching in the forest. He was standing. His legs moved, but it was like moving through water. His vision blurred, not from pain—but from a strange detachment, a cold, unfeeling numbness spreading through him like ice crawling up his spine.
Am I still human? he thought, though the question felt absurd. Words had no meaning anymore. His mind had been shredded by fire and bone and claw. His thoughts repeated themselves in loops, feeding themselves into a growing, hollow cavity inside his chest.
Another death.
This time, it came from the ground. Roots shot up from the earth like jagged spears. Damian tried to leap, tried to dodge—but one pierced through his stomach, bursting organs and blood in a slow, painful release. He screamed—or tried to—but his voice was hollow, swallowed by the black-green mist of the purgatory realm he entered as the roots retracted.
The realm awaited him, beckoning with cold fire.
The fire burned in his veins. Not real, not physical—but real enough to make his consciousness twist, to gnaw at the last threads of his morality. He could feel something inside him changing. Something essential was leaving him. And yet, with each death, a strange clarity grew.
He understood pain now. He understood fear. He understood the fragility of flesh, the treachery of existence.
And he hated it.
By the twentieth death, Damian's reflection in the water of the green-black river startled him. His eyes—they were no longer the warm brown-black he had once recognized. They glimmered faintly green, echoing the river's unnatural hue. His skin was pale, almost translucent, and his chest rose in uneven, ragged gasps.
He was still alive.
But not really.
Something inside him had been stripped away. Something essential had been burned off in purgatory, melted by the cold fire that licked at his consciousness.
He tried to scream, but no sound came.
He tried to run, but roots, claws, teeth, fire—none of it mattered. Every movement was meaningless. Every death came in waves, an eternal tide that devoured the past before he could even remember it.
He thought of Sophie.
Her smile. Her calm. The way she had promised him a contract. The way she had told him to survive the first stage, no matter what.
I need her, Damian thought, though even the thought felt foreign. Need… that word was slipping away, replaced by a cold, sharp resolve.
"I don't need anyone," he whispered, but the voice sounded strange, distant, like it belonged to someone else. "I'll make it. By myself. Always."
And then, the world tore him apart again.
The deaths grew… more grotesque.
A deer—twisted, ghostly, with limbs bending backwards—suddenly appeared and tore into his legs. A spirit—long forgotten by the forest, its flesh rotting and teeth jagged—ripped his arms apart from the shoulders. A shadow that seemed to be made of his own fear wrapped around his head, squeezing until his skull cracked.
Each death bled into the next. Each scream in purgatory stripped another layer of his humanity. He began to feel less for the pain, less for the world, less for anything. The forest became a machine of torment.
And yet—he learned.
Every death taught him a fraction more about how to move, how to twist, how to anticipate. Every time he died, he remembered just enough to try again.
By the fiftieth death, Damian was no longer the same boy who had been thrown into chains by his mother. The rage, the sorrow, the grief—they were still there, yes—but they were sharpened into something else. Something cold. Something that did not need hope, did not need love, did not need anyone else.
He had only himself.
By the hundredth death, the forest around him became a blur. Trees, roots, fire, claws, and shadows moved as one. Damian could anticipate every lethal trap, every phantom strike, every falling boulder. His body… or what remained of it… moved with precision, though it burned each time. His mind had become a battlefield layered upon itself.
Yet even here, in the infinite cycle, there were moments of clarity.
Sometimes, when he died and returned, he saw the faintest glimmer of purgatory—Sophie's face reflected in the river, smiling, calm.
Sometimes, he thought he could hear her voice.
"Survive this, Damian. Stage one is the curse. Only after can you become more."
He clung to that. Not hope—never hope. But determination. The cold, relentless, absolute determination to survive the unimaginable.
By the three-hundredth death, Damian realized something terrifying.
He no longer remembered the first time he had been sold. He no longer remembered his mother's face. The fire, the black market, the screams of the other captives—these memories were fragments, broken shards he could not piece together.
He was… empty.
But in that emptiness, he felt a strange, icy freedom. No longer weighed down by family, by society, by morality or weakness—he existed only to endure. Only to survive. Only to live through death after death after death.
And yet… somewhere, deep, deep beneath the hollow that now housed his soul, he still felt a flicker.
A spark that screamed:
"I will not die like this. I will not be broken. I will rise."
Even in purgatory, even with his humanity slipping through his fingers, Damian knew one thing with terrifying clarity:
He would not be a weak boy ever again.
And when he returned the next time… he would remember.
And when he remembered, he would begin his vengeance.
The forest remained silent, save for the distant hiss of the green-black river. Damian knelt once more, feeling the cold bite into his bones. His hands were bloodied, his body aching in places that no longer existed, and yet…
He smiled.
Not with warmth. Not with joy. But with something infinitely colder, infinitely sharper.