San gripped his phone with his left hand. The black halo on his right was breathing – yes, breathing – with a slow, vile rhythm. His left fingers moved across the screen, searching for answers he would never find.

  Is this global? Has the whole system collapsed? Or is this… mine alone?

  He searched for "seeing halos." For "disappearing limbs." For "psycho-somatic phenomena." All the results were empty, trivial, written for those suffering from simple delusions, not for those whose bodies were disappearing piece by piece before their eyes.

  He raised his eyes from the screen.

  And silence spread like a heavy fluid.

  His fingers…

  They were no longer there.

  It wasn't a sudden disappearance, but an erosion. It was as if the darkness enveloping his hand was no longer content with containment, but had begun consumption. Where his fingertips had been seconds ago, there was only the encroaching void, cloaked in a shroud of black nothingness. No pain. No bleeding. Just stark absence.

  His breathing became rapid, shallow. He raised what remained of his hand towards his face. Watched his wrist dissolve into the void. Then his palm. Half his forearm now.

  This isn't physical pain. This is something else. This is the horror of non-being.

  Fear froze everything in him except his mind. And his mind was working at a frenzied pace. He was watching his body evaporate, while his senses remained intact. He could feel his hand… but it wasn't there. It was a neurological phantom, a bodily memory refusing to relinquish the illusion of existence.

  Suddenly, a thought: The phone. If this is my end, I must document it. I must leave a message. I must… leave a trace.

  With his left hand – still intact, for now – he lifted the phone, aimed the camera. The black halo was at his shoulder now. His entire right arm: vanished. As if erased from the fabric of reality itself.

  He recorded.

  "Mom. Dad." His voice was terrifyingly level. "If you see this, I'm sorry. Sorry I became this… thing."

  He looked down. The blackness was crawling up his right leg. It was disappearing without a sound, like a shadow eating light.

  "In my bank account… all my savings. The PIN is Rana's birth date. Take it."

  The darkness had reached his stomach now. He felt the lower half of his body was gone, yet he was still sitting. An invisible force, perhaps the black halo itself, was holding him in the air.

  "I didn't want… to disappear like this."

  He remembered the heroes in books. They die smiling. He tried. The muscles of his face strained. He tried to lift the corners of his mouth. But what formed on his lips wasn't a smile. It was a spasm. A surrender. An admission of complete defeat before something he neither understood nor could resist.

  The halo reached his chest. His lungs were still working, but the lower part of them… wasn't there. He was breathing without lungs.

  Then his chin. Then…

  Before it swallowed his eyes, he saw his final reflection in the now-dark screen. Half a face. One eye. The look of a lost child in a dark cell.

  Then everything ended.

  ---

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  It wasn't darkness.

  It was… pressure.

  As if every particle of his being – or what remained of it – was being crushed in a cosmic hydraulic press. Force from every direction, grinding him without moving. No up or down. No orientation. Just infinite pressure.

  How long? How long here?

  No answer. Time was a dead concept here.

  Then… the Light.

  It wasn't a flash. It was an appearance. A human-shaped figure, but carved from pure white light. Glowing from within, filling the "nowhere" with its radiance. Its features were unclear, but San felt a heavy gaze upon him.

  "Welcome to the Void." The Voice did not come through ears, but planted itself directly into San's awareness.

  "The… Void?" His thoughts spread like oil stains on the mental water.

  "Yes. Here is where everything begins. Here is where everything ends. Your previous life… ended here."

  The word "previous" hung like a knife in the space of his mind.

  "But…" continued the Light-Voice, neutral as a machine's judgment. "No life passes without a tax. And none ends without a reward."

  "I don't understand," thought San. "What tax? Who are you?"

  "It does not matter. All that matters is this: you lived your first trial. Twenty-nine years. You reached your limit. The tax will be fourteen and a half years."

  The numbers hit him. Twenty-nine. Fourteen and a half. A cruel equation.

  "A tax? How? Labor? Servitude? What?"

  "No." The simplicity itself was painful. "You will live your 29 years again."

  Shock. Then anger. "How is that logical? How do I live 29 years in 14.5?"

  "You will see."

  And suddenly… withdrawal.

  A golden light began to emanate from within him – from where his heart, his lungs, his missing viscera had been. It was coming out against his will. The black halo still surrounding his core seemed to resist, but the golden light pierced it like a hot knife through butter.

  And he lost control.

  ---

  He stood.

  A hospital.

  The harsh smell of antiseptic. The harsh white neon light. A sound…

  A child's scream.

  He looked down. A doctor in a green coat holding a red, screaming lump. Lifting it. Slapping the bottom gently.

  "Heh. Funny," says the doctor.

  He hands the red lump to the woman on the bed. The woman… tired. Exhausted. But her eyes…

  He knows those eyes.

  His mother.

  Her youth. Her beauty he had forgotten. The love in her eyes he never appreciated.

  "My son…" she whispered.

  He wanted to scream. No sound.

  And he remembered.

  My tax. I will watch my life.

  ---

  And the days passed.

  Month. Month. Year. Year.

  He was a prisoner behind the eyes of his childhood. Watching. Always watching.

  He saw what he had forgotten: his father returning exhausted but carrying him on his shoulders. His mother crying by his bed when he was sick. His little sister hiding candy for him.

  And he saw what he had suppressed: his selfishness as a child. His cruelty as a teen. His neglect as a young man.

  But the worst… what he had never noticed.

  The looks of worry in his parents' eyes when he began to withdraw. The exploitation by his so-called friends. The missed chances for love. His first medical mistake and how his supervisor covered it up – the first seed of the corruption that would consume him later.

  The regret grew. Multiplied. Became an independent entity within his observer-mind.

  I could have been better. I could have chosen differently. I could have…

  Then he reached the moment. The black halo appearing on his hand in the room.

  It's over. Finally.

  But…

  The Light.

  Not the Voice's Light. Hospital light.

  The scream.

  He looked down. The same doctor. The same child. The same slap.

  He was back.

  To the beginning.

  Shock. Denial. This doesn't end?

  And time passed again. The same days. The same mistakes. The same regret piling up, layer upon layer.

  And he reached the end. And returned to the beginning.

  Again.

  And again.

  And again.

  By the fourth time, his mind was screaming in silence: Enough!

  By the fifth, he surrendered. He became a watching machine.

  By the sixth… he began to see patterns. The subtle details he'd missed. A look in his mother's eyes when he was a child. A word his father whispered in his sleep. Small moments of beauty amidst the torment.

  But it was no comfort.

  It was a new torture. The torture of seeing what could have been, married to what was.

  By the seventh time, as he watched his teenage self wound his father with a cruel word, the thought emerged:

  I have lived this moment seven times. I know what will happen. And yet… I see it repeat. I am stuck. Not in my memory. But in my mistake. In my failure.

  The Light-Voice did not return. No answers.

  Only the cycle. Beginning. Memories. End. Return.

  A prison made of his own life. A tax paid in the currency of eternal repetition of failure.

  And at the end of the seventh time, as the black halo appeared, he did not think "It's over."

  He thought:

  How many times? Until when? And is there… a way to break this cycle? Or is this the true hell? To be conscious of your mistakes forever, without being able to change them?

  And as the Light appeared to take him back to the beginning once more…

  Deep in his mind, beneath the mountains of regret, something began to form.

  Not hope.

  But… attention.

  A different kind of attention.

  He was learning. Not how to be better. He was learning… the rules. The rules of this hell.

  But will knowing something new make this torment end, or at least become less?"