It's a strange thing, what bad luck can steal from you besides material possessions. For me, it took the warmth.
I don't remember the faces of my parents, only the headline on a blurry newspaper clipping: Local Couple Killed by Meteorite Fragment. No, not a speeding car, or a disease, or even a drunk driver—a meteorite fragment. At seven years old, the universe had already marked me as its favorite punchline.
I was moved from one cheap foster home to the next, each one colder than the last, smelling faintly of old grease and crushed hopes. The bad luck followed me like a stray dog. I was the child who caused the house fire, the one who stepped on the winning lottery ticket just before it was claimed by someone else, the one whose pet goldfish choked on a pebble.
By the time I was twenty, I had shed the illusion that life was anything other than a poorly written cosmic horror story. The physical pain stopped meaning anything. The emotional pain? That was gone too. After a while, when the world takes enough, your emotional self just closes shop. A protective mechanism. I couldn't cry, couldn't laugh, and eventually, I couldn't even feel the simple, comforting sensation of human touch. A hand on my shoulder felt like a vague pressure, nothing more. I was hollowed out, a ghost driving a machine made of skin and bones.
I tried to fight back. Not with prayer or therapy, but with malice. If the world was going to be a villain to me, I'd be a villain to it. I sought out the soft, comfortable lives of others, intending to inflict the kind of senseless terror that had defined my existence. I wanted vengeance, not on a person, but on the idea of a world that let such things happen.
I tried to become a serial killer. Even that I failed at.
I staked out a target—a smug, self-satisfied banker. I bought the knife, planned the route, timed the shadows. The night arrived. I cornered him in a dimly lit alley, the knife trembling in my hand. It was the first time I felt a flicker of anything—a toxic, thrilling rush of possibility.
And then, it happened. A sudden, blinding flash. Not a streetlamp shorting out. A bolt of lightning, clean and white, struck the metal fire escape right next to me, vaporizing the air and sending a residual arc directly into my left shoulder.
I didn't die. My arm was paralyzed, my clothes smoking, and the banker was screaming into his phone about a "drug-crazed homeless man." I spent the next year in recovery and then in jail, for assault with a deadly weapon.
When I finally got out—early release, overcrowded prisons, the usual bureaucratic apathy—I didn't "rebuild" anything. I drifted. Job to job, couch to couch, each month hollowing me out a little more. Whatever part of me had wanted to hurt others shriveled into nothing. I didn't even have the energy to be monstrous anymore. I was just tired.
My only true escape, my only solace, came in the form of a ridiculous web novel called Abyss Walkers Chronicles. It was pure, unapologetic power fantasy—mana cultivators, hidden dimensions, beautiful heroines, and a System that rewarded the good-looking protagonist for saving the day. It was everything my life was not. For those few hours a week, I could pretend to feel something, anything, through the pages.
Then the author, a pretentious idiot named Thierry, announced he was dropping the novel indefinitely to "pursue a higher calling in interpretive dance."
That was the last straw. The universe had taken my parents, my sense of self, my freedom, and my ability to inflict satisfying vengeance. Now it was taking my only escape.
The numbness didn't vanish, but it cracked—like a thin shell finally failing under accumulated fractures. Through that gap, something raw and violent surged up: not emotion in the normal sense, but a pressurized eruption of everything I'd suppressed for years.
Pure, absolute rage.
I tracked down Thierry to a dingy coffee shop in the university district. I didn't care about a knife this time. My heart raced, the hollow man ready to end someone's story.
Thierry was sitting by the window, wearing a ridiculously oversized scarf, tapping away on his laptop. He was discussing the 'artistic integrity' of his abrupt ending with a friend.
I didn't rush. I walked across the street, a grim sense of finality settling over me. I looked both ways, a habit left over from childhood, and then stepped off the curb.
That's when the second lightning bolt hit.
Of course it was lightning again. Why wouldn't it be?
It wasn't a crack or a flash—it was an instantaneous white curtain that consumed reality. It found the metal earring I had forgotten to take out, traveled down my spine, and cooked me from the inside out. My body didn't even have time to fall straight. I remember my foot catching the curb, my body rotating sideways, and my head smashing into the granite edge of the sidewalk.
A sudden, jarring, utterly complete darkness. No pain. No sound. Just the void I had carried inside me finally becoming absolute.
As consciousness winked out, a sound that wasn't sound, a light that wasn't light, pierced the black. It was a digital intrusion, a text notification overlaying the end of the universe, accompanied by a sound like a wet cough being filtered through a cheap synthesizer.
[Host Soul-Signature Identified: Core Trauma Factor High. Calculating Reincarnation Parameters...]
[Destination Novel: Abyss Walkers Chronicles. Target Identity: Background Character NATHANIEL.]
[Initializing Harem King System... Please wait. Warning: System files are slightly corrupted and highly lewd. Enjoy.]
[Transferring...]
The world, which I had just definitively lost to, was silent.