The blood was ruining the carpet, which was a real tragedy because that Italian wool cost more than my entire tuition back in Brazil before I dropped out to do crypto.
Roberto was still screaming about betrayal and some offshore account in the Cayman Islands, his face turning a spectacular shade of purple that looked exactly like a passion fruit that had sat in the sun for too long.
I couldn't bring myself to care about his vocal cords or his sudden realization that I had played him like a cheap guitar from a vendor at 25 de Março.
My hand was shaking violently as I dragged the cheap ballpoint pen across the acquisition papers, leaving a wet, red smudge right on the dotted line where his company officially became mine for zero reals.
It was a perfect hostile takeover executed directly from the floor of the penthouse while my lungs were actively filling with fluid because of the hole he had just put in my chest with an old revolver.
I remember thinking about a specific Excel spreadsheet on my laptop—the one with the color-coded macros for the logistics division—and how I forgot to hit Ctrl+S before the shooting started.
All those hours of pivot tables and stressful meetings about absolutely nothing were just gone, deleted by a bullet that probably didn't even cost twenty cents at a shady spot in the city.
Roberto's screaming was becoming this distant, vibrating noise, like a refrigerator that's about to break down in the middle of the night and you just know you're going to lose all the meat you bought on sale.
My vision didn't do the cinematic fade to black, but rather a pathetic flickering, exactly like a cheap monitor from the lan house I used to go to when I was fifteen.
Then the universe decided to do that annoying thing where it refuses to let you sleep after a seventy-two-hour shift without any coffee or decent food.
The smell of expensive office carpet and gun oil evaporated instantly, replaced by a suffocating stench of cheap church incense and some floral perfume that smelled exactly like those chemical air fresheners bus drivers use on the midnight route to Rio.
My knees hit something hard and freezing; the sensation was so violent and physical that it forced a dry retch out of my throat, though the taste in my mouth was no longer copper but old dust and some ridiculously expensive mint tea.
I blinked slowly, my eyes struggling to process the sudden shift from a horizon full of neon lights to a bunch of exaggerated gothic architecture that looked like it was designed by someone with a massive cathedral fetish.
The floor underneath me was white marble, polished with such aggressiveness that I could see the perfect reflection of my own chin, which now belonged to a completely different person.
It was a soft, rounded chin with pale skin that had never seen a day of real stress in its entire life, a bizarre contrast to my old face that looked like it had been chewed on by bad diet and corporate anxiety.
My head was pounding with that specific rhythm of a hangover born from drinking cheap cachaça at a university party, a dull throb behind the eyes that made every candle in this massive room feel like a personal insult.
I tried to shift my weight, but the dress I was wearing—some ridiculous monstrosity with more lace than a grandmother's dining table—was so heavy it felt like I was wearing a wet carpet.
There was a weird, slimy feeling on my neck, probably sweat or some holy water they had splashed on me, and it was making me incredibly itchy in a place I couldn't decently scratch in front of a crowd.
"Evelyn von Astrea, do you even comprehend the gravity of your sins against the holy light and the crown of this empire?"
The voice was a rich baritone roar that vibrated straight through the floorboards until it reached my kneecaps, belonging to a tall guy who clearly loved the sound of his own authority way too much.
I didn't look up immediately because I was too busy staring at my own hands, which were small, impeccably manicured, and completely devoid of the ink stains and paper cuts that used to define my entire existence as a functioning human being.
A few meters away from me, a girl was crying with that rhythmic, professional precision that you only see in politicians during corruption scandals or influencers recording apology videos without any makeup on.
She was draped in white silk that looked incredibly impractical for anything other than standing around and looking holy, her golden curls bouncing slightly with every theatrical sob she let out.
This had to be the "Saint" Elara that the residual memories floating in the back of this new brain were trying to warn me about, though she looked less like a saint and more like an intern who just got caught stealing the office snacks.
Next to the crying saint stood a guy who looked like he had walked straight off the cover of every generic fantasy book ever printed, complete with a gold circlet and an expression of pure disdain.
He was reading from a scroll with an amount of drama that was honestly embarrassing to witness, his voice cracking slightly on the higher vowels as he listed my supposed crimes to the audience.
Attempted poisoning of the holy vessel, treason against the crown, being rude at the royal ball—it was a list of high school drama dressed up in some very poorly formatted medieval legalese.
I could feel the gaze of the nobles sitting in the pews, their eyes boring into my back with that specific blend of moral superiority and boredom you find in people who have never had to pay a bill in their lives.
One older woman in the front row was holding a feathered fan and fluttering it so fast I thought she might lift off the ground like a clumsy pigeon, her nose crinkled as if the mere smell of my presence was lowering her property value.
It was fascinating in a clinical way, like watching a competitor launch a product that you know is going to fail miserably within the first fiscal quarter because they didn't do any market research.
My left leg was already starting to go numb from being forced into this ridiculous kneeling position, a prickling sensation like a thousand tiny ants were trying to build a colony inside my shin.
I wondered if they had a term for sciatica in this world, or if they just blamed it on demons and threw some more of that terrible incense at it until the person went blind.
The prince—let's call him Prince Generic because I couldn't be bothered to remember his actual name yet—was still droning on about my exile to the "Death Lands," a place that sounded like a really bad heavy metal festival held in an abandoned parking lot.
According to the memory fragments that were slowly floating to the surface like grease on a cold soup, the Death Lands were basically a massive trash heap infested with monsters where people went to die without bothering the tax collectors.
It was the ultimate corporate downsizing move: take the problematic asset, write it off as a total loss, and dump it in a region where the logistics of retrieving the body were too expensive to justify.
I respected the cruelty of the maneuver, even if the execution was lacking a certain finesse that only a true bureaucrat could provide.
Elara let out another perfectly timed sob, leaning her head against his armored shoulder with a fragility that must have taken years of practice in front of a mirror to avoid looking like a complete scam.
It was a masterclass in low-level manipulation, the kind of strategy that would have gotten her chewed alive and spat out in a regular board meeting before they even served the cheap coffee.
She was overplaying her hand, making herself look so helpless that anyone with half a brain cell would realize she couldn't possibly be functioning as a religious leader without a massive team of publicists behind her.
This new body had a physical, involuntary urge to cry, a purely muscular reaction to the absolute terror that the original Evelyn had felt before her soul checked out of this mess.
I crushed that impulse with the same practiced ease I used to fire forty people on Christmas Eve when the regional manager told me we needed to cut costs for the yearly bonus.
There was absolutely no point in begging to a board of directors that had already decided to liquidate all your operating assets, and showing weakness now was just giving free entertainment to a bunch of rich heirs who had never worked a day in their lives.
Instead of sobbing or screaming about my innocence like a character in a bad soap opera, I let a short, dry laugh escape my throat, a sound that cut through the heavy atmosphere of the cathedral like a sudden car horn in the middle of a funeral.
It wasn't a cool, cinematic villain laugh, but a raspy, ugly sound born from the fact that my throat was dry as a biscuit and full of that disgusting floral incense.
The prince's brow furrowed for a full second, his eyes narrowing as he processed the fact that I wasn't crawling on the floor and begging for his forgiveness as the script demanded.
"Do you find your own ruin amusing, Evelyn?" he asked, his voice dropping an octave in a desperate attempt to regain control of the narrative in the room, though I could see the slight twitch in his left eyebrow that betrayed his genuine confusion.
He was the classic insecure leader, the kind of boss who needed everyone to play the role of the scared subordinate perfectly so he could pretend he actually knew how to run the company.
I knew guys like him back in Brazil; they usually had expensive cars bought by their fathers and cried in the bathroom when the internet went down for ten minutes.
I pushed myself up from the hard floor very slowly, ignoring the violent protest of muscles that had clearly never done a single day of actual physical labor in their entire existence, and smoothed out the torn fabric of the heavy dress.
"Amusing isn't exactly the word I would use, Your Highness," I said, my voice coming out raspy but firm, without that shrill, desperate affectation that the memories told me was the trademark of the old Evelyn.
"It's just that I've seen eviction notices much better written by slum lords back in the outskirts of São Paulo, and your reading of the decree really lacked conviction."
A collective gasp rose from the nobles huddled in the church pews, a sound like a massive suction of air that made the candles on the altar flicker slightly with the sudden displacement of wind.
Elara actually stopped crying for two full seconds, her mouth opening in a tiny 'O' of genuine surprise before she remembered her role and buried her face back into the prince's cape with a new wave of fake sobs.
I didn't give them time to formulate an indignant response or call the guards to beat me back down to the floor where they thought I belonged.
I gave a shallow, corporate bow—the kind you give to an annoying client whose contract you already know you're going to lose anyway—and turned my back on the entire royal court without waiting for any kind of official permission.
The guards at the heavy oak doors looked at each other with pure confusion, their spears wobbling slightly as they tried to decide whether to tackle me or let me pass.
I walked with my chin up, my mind already calculating the cold logistics of surviving in a monster-infested wasteland with nothing but a torn silk dress and a head full of corporate bankruptcy tactics.
The massive doors creaked when I reached them, the sunlight hitting my eyes with the force of a physical slap after being in that dark, damp cathedral for so long, but before my foot could cross the threshold, the world froze.
A smell of ozone and burning rubber invaded my nose, so strong it made my eyes water instantly, and the air directly in front of my face fractured like a dozen bright, irregular pieces of glass.
It looked like someone had thrown a brick through a window made of frozen lightning, and through the holes in the fracture, a glowing panel manifested itself right against my retina.
The letters there weren't standard text; they were constructed by fluid lines of neon purple and gold that seemed to be actively eating the light around them, vibrating with an energy that made my teeth ache.
[INFINITY GREED SYSTEM: Soul Synchronization Complete. The Sin greets its new owner.]
I stared at the glowing blue interface with a bizarre calmness settling in my chest, realizing that the universe might be a terrible writer, but its severance package was starting to look pretty decent to me.