I woke up with the kind of headache that usually involves a legendary hangover and a regrettable tattoo, but all I had to show for it was 1,053 VP and the lingering, crystalline memory of turning people into human popsicles.
I didn't mean to kill them. My mind kept looping that thought like a broken record. They made me do it—they cornered us, they threatened the only people who've looked at me with kindness in two lifetimes—but that didn't stop the weight of it from settling in my chest like a bag of lead. It was my first time taking a life, and I was anything but okay. I was burdened with a jagged, suffocating guilt that felt entirely too heavy for my "new" twenty-year-old shoulders.
The phantom smell of burning ozone and flash-frozen death still lingered in the back of my throat, a metallic tang I tried desperately to suppress. On the outside, I probably looked like a stoic, mysterious master of the divine, but deep inside, I was a wreck. I'm too old for this kind of madness. I spent seventy years on Earth just trying to pay bills and stay out of the way; I just wanted to experience an easy life here. A little merchant work, some snacks, maybe a nice view.
But fate seemed to have a different script. It wanted me to experience... everything. The goal of the system felt less like a game and more like a trial. Was I here to learn what it meant to have a family? Friends who would die for me? Enemies who wanted my head? It was forcing me to taste the extremes of life and death, and frankly, I hated the flavor. I wasn't happy killing people. I wasn't some cold-blooded protagonist from a web novel. I was just a guy who felt like he was losing his mind.
A few blinks later, I forced myself to straighten up. I tried to look composed, shoving the horror into a dark corner of my brain where I hoped it would stay quiet.
The carriage was swaying rhythmically, the wood groaning in a familiar way, but the air... the air had turned foul. It didn't smell like the crisp pine needles of the mountain pass or the lingering, floral notes of Elsa's "Ocean Mist" shampoo anymore. It smelled like a dumpster fire behind a butcher shop in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave.
I sat up, groaning as every muscle in my body screamed a formal protest. Elsa was there in a heartbeat, her newly silver hair shimmering like moonlight in the dim, dusty light of the coach.
"Art! You are awake," she whispered, her voice a mix of relief and intense worry. She reached out as if to steady me, then hesitated, remembering my "Divine Burden." "Please, do not move too fast. Your soul was... heavily taxed."
"My soul is fine, Elsa. My nose, however, is currently filing for divorce and seeking full custody of my sanity," I croaked, rubbing the grit from my eyes.
I leaned over and pulled back the silk curtain of the carriage window, expecting to see more beautiful landscapes. Instead, the "Isekai Dream" I'd been living officially curdled into a living nightmare.
The sky above Oakhaven wasn't blue; it was a bruised, sickly yellow, choked by dust and heat. The "hamlet" looked like a skeleton of a town. The houses were collapsing, their thatched roofs looking like rotting teeth. But it was the people—the walking shadows with skin stretched tight over bone—that made my stomach drop.
"Master Art," Herbert's voice came from the front, sounding uncharacteristically hollow. "Welcome to the drought lands. Or as the locals call it, the Queen's Waiting Room."
I stared at a woman sitting by the road, holding a bowl that contained nothing but dust. The "Top of the World" song was still a faint echo in my head, and it felt like a sick joke.
We were rolling through the gates of the first Hamlet—if you could even call it that. It was more like a graveyard where the residents hadn't realized they were dead yet.
The landscape was a monochromatic wasteland of dusty browns and greys. The trees were skeletal, their branches clawing at a sun that looked pale and sickly through the haze. There was no grass—just cracked, parched earth that looked like it hadn't seen a drop of water since the dawn of time.
And the smell. Oh, god, the smell.
It was the thick, cloying scent of Famine. It was the smell of rot, of open sores, and the sweet, heavy stench of bodies that had been left in the sun because nobody had the strength to dig a grave. It hit the back of my throat like a physical punch. I pulled my tunic over my nose, gagging.
"What is this place?" I muffled through the cloth. "Did we take a wrong turn into the Underworld?"
"This is Oakhaven," Herbert's voice rumbled from the box outside, though there was no heart in it. "Or what's left of it. They say a 'Famine Curse' took root here a year ago. The crops turned to black slime, and the livestock just... stopped breathing. The Palace ignored their pleas for help because they couldn't pay their taxes."
I looked out at the villagers lining the muddy path. They weren't people; they were hollow-eyed specters. Ribs poked through skin that looked like parchment. Children with bellies distended from hunger sat in the dust, too weak to even swat away the flies crawling over them.
It was the Slums all over again, but worse. In the Slums, there was at least a scrap of hope or a bit of stolen bread. Here, there was just the silence of the waiting grave.
"Master Art," Barnaby called out from the supply wagon behind us, his voice thick with a sorrow he couldn't hide. "We have supplies... but not enough for a whole village. If we stop, they might mob us in desperation."
I looked at the blue notification still hovering in the corner of my eye.
[TOTAL BALANCE: 1,053 VP].
I looked at a small girl sitting by a dried-up well, clutching a doll made of dead grass. She didn't even look up as our "royal-looking" carriage passed. She had already accepted the end.
A surge of that familiar, stubborn anger bubbled up in my chest, hot and acrid like bile. I knew this scene. I didn't need a history book or a local guide to explain the hollow look in their eyes.
On Earth, before the "rejuvenation," I had tasted the bottom of the barrel. I knew what real hunger meant—not the "I skipped lunch" kind of hunger, but the kind that eats you from the inside out until your bones feel like lead and your thoughts are just a grey fog. I knew what it felt like to sit on a sidewalk, watching busy people rush past in a blur of luxury, while I felt utterly alone in a deserted land with nothing but an empty bowl of nothingness. I had begged once, just once, to survive a winter night, and the shame of it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It stays with you. It scars the soul.
And now, I was looking at these poor souls. They were empty. Hopeless. I knew that feeling so well it made my teeth ache.
The Queen was sitting in her high tower, obsessing over "Divine Relics" and magical ravens, while her own people were literally melting into the dirt like discarded wax. The injustice of it made the guilt of my kills in the forest feel different—sharper, more focused. If I was going to be a monster, I might as well be a monster that fed people.
"Stop the carriage, Herbert," I said. My voice wasn't shaky anymore. It was cold and sharp as a scalpel, cutting through the thick, stagnant air of the coach.