In a dark room, a young man snapped his eyes open.
"Where the hell am I?"
With disorientation, he looked around frantically.
"This is… not my bedroom."
The realization dawned on him almost immediately. He was in a dark, damp basement as he tried to straighten himself but he couldn't move because his hands were bound tightly with rope.
His breathing quickened as a strange sound reached him from somewhere nearby.
An agonized scream echoed from the next room, accompanied by the sickening sound of a punch landing.
"Leave him alone!"
A raw voice rang out from the same room amid the noise.
The boy recognised that voice immediately.
It was his uncle's.
His hands clenched tightly as he screamed.
"OLD MAN!!!"
He yanked at the ropes like a wild beast but they barely gave way. Instead, they bit deeper into his flesh, cutting into his skin until blood began to seep out.
Seeing no way out, he took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down, focusing on the voices instead, hoping to piece together what was happening.
There seemed to be one other person in the room besides his uncle.
"You knew this would happen one day, right?"
The other voice said warmly which somehow felt far more terrifying than anger. "Do what you want with me, but let him go!"
His uncle shouted back. There was unmistakable fear in his voice unlike anything the boy had heard from him in all his life.
Before the boy could hear anything more, the sound of something metallic being dragged across the floor echoed through the basement, accompanied by a horrified scream from his uncle.
The boy's heart pounded as a sense of dread washed over him. He struggled even harder against the ropes, but then the cold voice spoke again
"Is your blood warm… because it's been a long while since I had a proper bath." "You monste—!"
His uncle's voice was cut short by a sickening crunch, the sound of flesh being crushed. SCRUNCH!
The boy's body froze completely.
SCRUNCH!
The sound came again.
SCRUNCH!
And then again.
Only then did he snap out of his daze as a guttural scream tore from his throat, his vocal cords burning with the effort, but he didn't care. Memories of the old man who had raised him since childhood flooded his mind as he finally lost consciousness.
***
"Tsk, that same nightmare again."
In a messy room, a young man suddenly snapped his eyes open, gasping for breath, his body drenched in sweat.
"Is it that day already?"
He didn't even need to check the calendar because the nightmare returned on the same day every year.
The day his uncle was murdered.
Even after ten years, the memories of that night remained as vivid as ever. If anything, they had only become more painful to endure.
The old man had taken him in when he had nothing, when everyone else looked down on him as a nobody. He was the only one who cared for him, the only one who loved him, and the only one who offered him a home and a warm meal.
To others, it might have meant little but to him, it had filled the emptiness in his heart. So…
How could he ever forget him?
He sat on the edge of his bed for a moment, staring into space and then he got up.
Without a word, he quickly went through his morning routine and got dressed before stepping out of his cold and empty room.
Outside, torrential rain poured over the city and the air carried the scent of wet earth and rain-soaked plants. He walked along the familiar road toward his destination as his thoughts drifted back to that incident.
"Why him?"
The words escaped his lips in a whisper.
Why did the good ones always leave first?
As the thought echoed in his mind, he arrived at a familiar place, a place rarely visited by anyone but him.
The cemetery.
It was practically buried beneath a blanket of fog but even through the mist, the young man could tell exactly where the grave was.
"I've come, old man."
He whispered the words as he stopped before a small gravestone. Sorrow and despair threatened to surface once more, but he forced them back down.
Suddenly, the sound of approaching footsteps broke the silence as the young man slowly looked up and saw a man with long white hair and closed eyes standing before him.
"Who are you?" He asked cautiously, knowing full well how rare visitors were, especially near his uncle's grave.
The man smiled warmly.
"Do you not remember me?"
"Am I supposed to?" The young man replied, a strange and unsettling feeling creeping over him.
"Well, the last time we saw each other was ten years ago." The man said with a gentle voice. "Ten years?" The young man repeated.
His heart began to pound faster, as if it were about to burst from his chest. "Why don't you ask what you really want to know, kid?" The man said with a warm smile.
The young man slowly rose to his feet and met the man's gaze. Though the fear in his eyes was impossible to conceal, he forced himself to ask the question anyway.
"Are you the one who killed my uncle?"
The man looked at him in silence for a few seconds.
"Yes, I killed him, although 'tortured' would probably be the more accurate word, wouldn't it? After all, you must have seen his body afterward. I took good care of him, cut—"
"Why did you keep me alive?"
The young man cut him off before the murderer could force him to relive the horrors he had witnessed as a child.
"Why the hell?" He demanded, his voice trembling with rage. "Why the fucking hell did you keep me alive but kill him?"
The question came again, fiercer than before.
The murderer laughed for a few seconds before replying.
"Are you serious, kid?" He asked, a coldness creeping into his voice that made the young man's blood run cold. "Why would I need a reason for anything I do?"
The young man couldn't contain his anger any longer as he lunged at the man who had murdered his uncle, throwing a punch with all his strength but his fist stopped a few inches from the man's face as if the laws of physics simply did not apply to him.
"How…?" He asked, trembling.
"You'll find out one day. Maybe. If you manage to survive long enough." The killer replied.
Before the young man could react, the killer clenched his hand and drove it straight through the boy's heart.
"Goodbye, boy."
For the first time since their meeting, the murderer opened his eyes and they were completely black, as if capable of swallowing the world itself.
And yet, within those eyes, the boy saw an emotion.
Remorse.
Before he could utter even a final word, an eternal darkness consumed his vision and he died…
…or at least, that's what he thought because the next moment, he woke up in a completely unfamiliar place in a completely unfamiliar body.