The silence wasn’t peaceful.
It was the hollow void left after a bomb blast.
Aarav drifted. Not in darkness, but in a formless grey nothingness.
No body. No pain. Just... static. The crushing weight of betrayal, Vikram’s sneering face it all dissolved into a numb, buzzing haze.
’So this is it?’ The thought drifted, sluggish.
’ Just... nothing.’
Aarav never experienced such bliss. He felt no negative emotion. Just pure happiness and peace.
The intoxicating feeling only lasted for a few monts until he suddenly woke up.
’AGAIN?!’
The thought was a scream inside a skull he suddenly rembered having. ’Saved? Hospital?’ But the sounds filtering through weren’t beeping machines or hushed voices. It was guttural shouting, the clash of tal on tal, and a wet, tearing sound that curdled the air.
"DIE, YOU FILTHY MONSTER!"
’Eh?’ His eyes flew open.
Chaos.
A nightmare landscape choked with smoke and the pungent sll of fresh blood.
Before him lood a giant. Not giant in the taphorical sense.
A literal mountain of a man encased in gleaming, ornate plate armour, spattered crimson from helm to greaves. A jagged greatsword, already dripping gore, was raised high above his head. The man’s face, visible beneath the raised visor, was contorted in pure, fanatical hatred, eyes locked directly onto Aarav.
’?’ Aarav’s gaze dropped.
His hands, Small, twisted Skin a sickly, green, . Long nails. He wore crude leather scraps.
Panic, cold and absolute, seized him. ’Goblin? I’m a fucking GOBLIN?!’
The armoured man bellowed. "FOR THE LIGHT, ABOMINATION!"
The sword descended, a silver streak cutting through the smoke-filled air. Aarav tried to scramble back, but his new body was slow, clumsy, limbs uncoordinated. He opened his mouth to scream, but only a choked, a sword piercing his chest.
The impact wasn’t just pain.
It was annihilation.
Agony exploded through him. He felt bones splinter, organs rupture. Hot, thick blood – his blood, green and foulslling gushed over his clawed hands. He looked down, stunned, at the ornate hilt protruding from his green flesh.
’I’m... going to die... again.’
The thought was oddly detached, floating above the searing agony. The armoured man wrenched the blade free from his body.
The world tilted, the sounds of battle fading into a roaring tunnel.
Sensation. Sharp. Burning. Cutting.
Aarav’s awareness slamd back into a different form. He was the pain.
It radiated from multiple points deep, gouging wounds tearing through his very substance.
He tried to move, to scream, but he had no limbs, no mouth.
His perspective was dizzying, panoramic. He saw n, smaller than the knight, but clad in similar, less ornate armour swinging heavy axes.
They were hacking at... him.
’Tree?’ Horror, slow and cold, seeped through his woody consciousness.
’I’m a TREE?’
He felt every brutal bite of the axes into his bark
"Faster!" barked one man, wiping sweat from his brow. "This demonic tress taints the forest! Hack it down! Burn the roots!"
’Demonic? I’m just... here!’ Aarav’s silent protest was drowned by the relentless
THWACK! THWACK! THWACK!
He felt the mont a critical artery of sapwood was severed.
A massive, groaning shudder ran through his entire colossal fra.
He felt the world tilt as his imnse height began its slow, inevitable descent.
The sky, glimpsed through his canopy, spun wildly. Then ca the final, crushing impact as tons of wood smashed into the forest floor.
Darkness swallowed him whole. Not grey this ti.
Black. Crushing.
The cycle beca a maddening, brutal joke. Each return to awareness was a fresh hell, a new form born only to suffer and die.
Sotis a starving Dog, waking aimlessly, and then the sharp agony of a thrown rock cracking against his skull, the world fading as hunger gnawed him as he felt his last breadth.
Sotias a fly, only to watch a fragnted vision of a giant hand descending swatter him, then a at paste. A microsecond of existence.
Sotis Orc standing in a rank, crude spear trembling in green hands, facing a thunderous charge of cavalry. The bone-shattering impact of a warhorse, the lance piercing his gut, trampling hooves reducing him to pulp amidst the screams of dying kin.
.
.
.
Ten deaths. A hundred. A thousand? Ti lost it’s aning.
Existence was a flickering darkness of agony, terror, confusion, and DEATH.
Each death chipped away at sothing fundantal. mories of Mumbai, of Laura, of his family, they blurred, faded. Only the core remained, the crushing disappointnt of being saved from the truck, the old man’s accusing words "Cowardice!" and the searing, endless repetition of dying.
His mind, forged for a single, diocre human life, strained under the weight of ten thousand deaths.
It felt like glass heated in a furnace, vibrating, threatening to shatter into irreparable shards. Fragnts of countless identities goblin, tree, fly, orc swirled in his mortal mind. He was losing sothing.
Becoming madness itself.
.
.
.
DEATH - 999,999
A small, brightly coloured lizard basking on a sun ward rock. Sudden searing pain as a child’s careless foot ca down.
Crunch. Blackness.
Blankness.
This ti, the numbness didn’t bring relief.
It brought rage.
A pure, volcanic eruption of fury that montarily burned through the encroaching madness.
It coalesced into a single, silent, universe-shattering scream directed into the void
’IF THERE A GOD OF DEATH OUT THERE LISTENING, YOU SADISTIC, PATHETIC, PIECE OF ROTTING SHIT IN THE GUTTER OF DRAAINAGE... GO FUCK YOURSELF WITH A RUSTY BURNING ROD WITH BLADES! SCREW YOU! SCREW THIS! SCREW EVERYTHING!’
Blanknesss rippled. Like disturbed water.
For a nanosecond, Aarav felt... sothing.
A flicker of imnse, indifferent attention. Then, he was falling.
Not down. Not up.
Sensation returned, overwhelming.
He was... fluid. Tiny.
Surrounded by frantic, wriggling shapes just like him in a vast, warm, sea.
Tadpoles?
he instinct was primal, overwhelming, drowning out his fractured thoughts
MOVE. FORWARD. REACH.
A biological thing etched into every fiber of his microscopic being.
A race. The ultimate race.
’Win? Win what? Where?’ The questions were human, feeble against the tidal wave of biological drive.
He didn’t care. The drive was him. He focused every iota of his battered, death-weary will into propelling himself forward, wriggling with desperate.
’Get there! First! Mine!’ The goal was a colossal presence ahead, radiating warmth, life, potential. A giant, pulsating egg.
He surged ahead, driven by millennia of death-fueled desperation. He touched the yielding surface. DIVE! He plunged inward, rging, dissolving, becoming part of sothing new. An eternity compressed into an instant of pure biological fusion. Then... blissful, warm suspension. Growth. Safety. For the first ti in countless cycles, peace.
Sensation.
Pressure.
Imnse, crushing pressure.
Movent.
A terrifying, violent expulsion from warm, dark safety into blinding light, shocking cold, and overwhelming noise.
He gasped, but instead of air, liquid flooded new, tiny lungs. He choked.
Panic flared, sothing primal panic.
Rough hands gripped him. He was dangling upside down. A sharp slap landed on his backside.
PAIN.
He scread newborn wail tore from his throat. ’You woman. Dare to beat . You just wait You asshole. AHHH! wait he has throat! Lungs!’
*HE’S ALIVE! YOUR CHILD LIVES!* A voice, loud and strangely accented, but the aning he didn’t understand. (Using *..* which ans the MC didn’t understand a thing)
He was flipped, bundled into sothing soft.
Blinking, stinging eyes tried to focus.
Blurred shapes swam above him.
Colours. Movent.
*GIVE HIM TO !* A deeper voice, rumbling like distant thunder, thick with an emotion Aarav couldn’t na.
He was lifted, transferred. Massive hands, thick-fingered and covered in coarse, greyish fur, cradled him with surprising gentleness.
Aarav’s vision began to clear, adjusting to the harsh light.
He looked up.
’WOAH! WOAH! WOAH! WHAT IN THE ABSOLUTE FUCK IS THIS?’ The silent scream echoed in his infant mind. But to other’s it was just a giggled.
The face looking down at him was... monstrous.
Broad, powerful jaw lined, black haired , brown eyed, handso man with a intoxicating smile
’I am a human this ti? Thaank God’
*LOOK, BELOVED!* the deep voice bood, softer now but still making Aarav’s tiny bones vibrate. *HE HAS YOUR EYES!*
Aarav’s gaze shifted. Another figure leaned in. Slightly smaller than the giant man. This one had beautiful face like goddess, smoother, white skin like a jade in those cultivation novel, large, luminous eyes the colour of moonlit silver. Her hair was a cascade of shimring, raven black hair. She reached out a long fingered hand and gently stroked Aarav’s cheek. Her touch was surprisingly warm.
*AND YOUR SMILE, DARLING,* she purred, her voice a lodic chi just like her appearance.
He stared at his own hand. Minuscule. Wrinkled skin a strange.
’Who... who is this giant man? My hand... it’s so small...’ The pieces, horrifying, impossible pieces, clicked together. The, doting parents.
’Well, well, well,’ Aarav Singh, veteran of ten thousand deaths, thought with a surge of hysterical resignation that bordered on madness. ’So... finally human baby.’ He closed his strange new eyes, but with a relief. too exhausted by rebirth, existential horror, and the sheer cosmic absurdity of it all to even cry. The deep voice rumbled above him, a sound that vibrated in his tiny chest.
*WELCO, LITTLE SCION. WELCO TO RAVENASTRA.*
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