“How often have I told you to stop scribbling on the table?” Aska’s voice cut through the silence like a lazy scold, the kind that carried more ritual than real irritation. “There’s paper for that, you know.”

  I didn’t bother lifting my gaze as I continued dragging my fingertip over the polished wood, carving invisible lines only I understood. A few days had passed since I started my strange little ritual—writing down who I wanted to be. A laughable task. Even with eternity at my fingertips, the words refused to come. Not because I didn’t have the time. But because I didn’t want to see the truth.

  “Paper is made from wood. Wood is the basis for this table,” I replied absently. “So technically, I am writing on paper.”

  Aska sighed with performative exhaustion as he made himself a cup of coffee, leaning casually against the counter. Steam curled around his face like a crown, and he squinted over my shoulder.

  “Hey. Who do you want to be?” I asked, far too nonchalantly.

  “The god of gods.”

  The words slipped out so quickly, even I was startled. My teacup wobbled dangerously close to tipping over, and I lunged to steady it, nearly smudging my list—which still had only that one, bold declaration. I glanced at him, half-expecting mockery.

  And there it was.

  A snort. A lopsided grin. “As if a third-rate god like you will ever manage that,” I said with a chuckle, not unkind, but certainly not supportive either.

  “Gotta dream high,” he added with a shrug. “It’s still more ambitious than what you wrote. What is that, anyway? ‘Be yourself’? That’s not a goal, that’s a placeholder. Are you having an existential crisis? Or—wait—don’t tell me… Are you schizophrenic now?”

  “No,” I replied flatly. I wasn’t losing my mind. Not in that way, anyway. But something was wrong. I felt it pressing at the edge of every idle moment. Not dread—boredom. Unshakable, suffocating boredom. Like I’d been pacing in a room too small for a mind too large.

  “I just feel like I’m stuck. Nothing changes. No challenge. No novelty. Maybe it’s time to try something different…”

  He raised an eyebrow. “What, like being nice to people?”

  The word hung in the air like an insult.

  “I mean it,” I said, more quietly. “Aside from the boy… we didn’t exactly treat the others well. And we both know how that turned out.”

  It wasn’t guilt. More like the vague sense that I’d already tasted every flavor of cruelty, and all of them had gone stale. Maybe kindness—whatever that meant—was just a new game. A different mask.

  But even as I spoke the words, I knew it wouldn’t last. I didn’t have the capacity for true empathy. I didn’t feel what others felt. Except, perhaps, with Aska. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe that was why he was still here.

  “You’re definitely crazy,” he muttered. “Why not just do what you wrote and stay like you are? You’re good at it. Cruelty fits you like silk.”

  “I don’t want to,” I snapped. “It’s boring. Everything is boring. I’ve done everything here for a hundred years. I need fun. Aska—entertain me. Tell me a joke. Dance. Set something on fire. Do something.”

  I wasn’t asking him who I was.

  I was asking how to survive the eternity I had trapped myself in.

  Turning mortals into playthings had long lost its thrill. They broke too easily. Failed too often. And when they did, I discarded them like defective toys. The boy… he was the last straw. The final misfire. The last time I’d bothered.

  And now? Now, I was left with this gaping hole where purpose should’ve been. Wondering if my future was nothing but a long stretch of nothingness.

  “How about we travel?”

  The words escaped me like a sudden breeze breaking through stagnant air. I stood up, the chair legs shrieking across the floor, and slammed my pen down on the table. For the first time in what felt like centuries, I felt a pulse of purpose. A flicker of movement in my stagnant soul.

  Without waiting for an answer, I bolted toward the bedroom, heart racing—not out of joy, but from sheer anticipation. The walls of our little purgatorial nest felt tighter than usual, like they’d been inching inward for decades. A change of scenery wouldn’t just be pleasant—it was necessary.

  I packed in a frenzy, stuffing clothing into my bag with reckless speed. I didn’t know what I’d need, or if I’d even wear half of it. It didn’t matter. All I needed was to leave. On my way out, I veered into the weapons chamber, the scent of metal and char still clinging to the air like incense. My fingers wrapped around the shaft of my war scythe—a sleek, black weapon Aska had once forged for me in the depths of some cave. Its edge shimmered faintly, pulsing in resonance with my touch.

  When I returned to the kitchen, Aska was still sipping coffee, as if my outburst was as routine as morning fog. Without hesitation, I shoved him out the door, a grin pulling at my lips. He stumbled forward, looking mildly amused.

  “So eager,” he muttered with a chuckle. “You might scare the ghosts.”

  Purgatory was many things—but it wasn’t generic. That much became clear the moment we stepped beyond the safe haven of our home. Maybe that’s why no one visited. Not because it was inhospitable—but because it was real. Raw. Teeming with the consequences of things long past. Maybe it was the souls. The residue of what once was.

  Aska didn’t bring the house, but it didn’t matter. He conjured shelters, cooked meals with flicks of his fingers, and forged paths in impossible places. Surprisingly, purgatory wasn’t the bleak wasteland I’d once imagined. It was… layered. Textured. Full of strange gravity and stranger beauty. We stayed mostly within the first level, but even that was filled with wonder and horror.

  Our path led us through bone fields—acres of calcified remains forming forests of ribcages and hollow skulls. Beyond them lay a structure that could only be described as a prison, but not one built by mortals. Its architecture bent in on itself, impossibly large yet claustrophobic.

  “Why are we here?” I asked, my voice already strained by the howling that echoed from the cells. The cries weren’t just audible—they throbbed in the air like vibrations from a broken string.

  “You’ll see,” Aska said cryptically.

  He led me past cells containing nightmares crafted from the gods’ own regrets. In one, a being composed of boiling black water writhed within a magically reinforced cell. Each time it pressed against the barrier, it hissed and steamed, like a pot threatening to explode.

  In another, a man stood motionless—at first glance, human. Until he smiled. From behind his teeth, a cascade of worms spilled out, crawling from his mouth, nose, ears, even beneath his fingernails. A shell of skin inhabited by insects.

  I gagged. “Why are you showing me this?” I demanded, turning away as one worm bored its way out of the man’s forearm like a slow, triumphant parasite.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Aska’s eyes gleamed. He pointed to the next cell.

  Inside stood… something. Something that didn’t belong to any taxonomy I knew. It had black wings stretching across the cell like shattered obsidian. A humanoid torso, malformed limbs that didn’t agree on what legs were supposed to be—and where its head should have been, it was stuffing its own intestines into a gaping void of a neck.

  “If you want to evolve—truly evolve—you should think about mutating your cells,” he said.

  “I don’t want to be like that,” I hissed, but my voice faltered as we reached the next cell.

  It was a girl.

  Or, at least, looked like one. Her skin shimmered with an ethereal glow under the faint light, and her silver hair floated slightly as if underwater. For a moment, I was enchanted, stepping toward the bars without thought, drawn in like a moth to a flame.

  And then Aska yanked me back by the collar. “Don’t look too long.”

  “What… what was she?”

  “She doesn’t have a face,” he said. “That race uses psychic manipulation to craft illusions. They invade your mind and show you what you want to see. The gods locked them away long ago. Too dangerous.”

  Dangerous… but effective. My heart thudded with the possibilities. If I could use that power, I wouldn’t have to train or coerce anymore. Subjugation would be effortless.

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  “Don’t even think about it,” Aska warned, catching the glint in my eyes. “You can’t use magic anyway. You’ll have to rely on... more conventional means.”

  He pointed to another cell—this one housing a man surrounded by a dozen women, all of whom stared blankly ahead. Their ears bled slightly, and tiny parasites moved beneath their skin.

  “He dug into their brains with worms. Built a harem that way,” Aska muttered.

  I didn’t let him finish.

  I kicked him.

  Hard.

  “I don’t want to hear about some sick freak’s personal hobbies. I want results. I want to control like that thing in the silver cage.”

  “Then we’re going to need to be creative,” he said with a sly grin.

  And I knew then—this journey wasn’t just sightseeing. This was research.

  Field work.

  Blueprints for something far greater.

  “Teach me how to do that. I don’t mean the parasite freak—that’s messed up. I mean her—the woman…”

  Before I could finish the sentence, the cell flared green, and her image vanished in a flash of bone-white light. In her place, a burning skeleton laughed hysterically, emerald flames dancing in its empty sockets.

  I took a cautious step back. “On second thought… maybe not.”

  Aska snorted. “Like I’ve already told you a thousand times, you can’t use magic. Not in any conventional way, at least. Immortality has its price.”

  Frustrated, I trailed behind him as we continued down the corridor of horrors. Cell after cell. Monster after monster. I wasn’t sure what disturbed me more—the prisoners themselves or how many of them felt familiar. Not by face, but by… ideology. They were all twisted in one way or another, but not in a way I could easily condemn. Many had simply followed their own logic too far.

  Still, even as Aska insisted I was wasting my time, he didn’t stop me. He indulged me. Brought out ancient tomes, summoned artifacts, even performed minor rituals in front of me to demonstrate techniques.

  Nothing worked.

  Eventually, he retrieved a rather expensive mana measurement crystal—one that could read even the faintest spark of magical potential. He pressed it to my palm and waited.

  Nothing.

  No flicker. No glow. No reaction.

  It was as if I didn’t exist on a magical level.

  “How is that even possible?” I muttered, staring at the inert crystal. “Everyone has mana. Even plants have a trace amount.”

  “Not you,” Aska replied, far too smug for my taste. “Your immortality is the reason. It consumes every drop of mana to keep your body from falling apart. You’re like a sealed chalice—impenetrable from the outside, and bone dry on the inside.”

  So that was it. A life without death, bought at the price of power.

  When we finally left the prison, I felt hollow. Aska was grinning, clearly satisfied that the parade of horrors had gotten under my skin. I, on the other hand, left with something else entirely—a solid understanding of what I didn’t want to become.

  Liches that had fused themselves with sentient libraries. Insectoid hive minds infesting planets. Necromancers who had turned their tumors into magical conduits. A guy who prolonged his life by becoming a vessel for living cancer.

  All of them had one thing in common: they’d pissed off a god. Some for petty crimes, others for the small offense of, say, obliterating a world. There didn’t seem to be much of a spectrum for punishment in purgatory—only extremes.

  But to be honest, I didn’t care about what landed them in those cells. Their stories didn’t faze me. Some were lunatics, some zealots, and all of them were dangerous in a way I strangely admired. The guy who nuked a world did it for his apocalypse cult. Absolutely deranged—but at least he believed in something.

  Honestly, we were all broken in purgatory. That was the point.

  As we stepped beyond the prison’s reach, the howls and murmurs faded behind us, replaced by silence. Real silence. The kind that makes you question whether the last few hours were real or just another fever dream of the damned.

  Aska finally spoke.

  “Have you figured out why I brought you here?”

  Was this about redemption? A lesson in morality? Did he want to fix me?

  I looked at him sweetly and took his hand in mine. “To show me I should seduce the guard before I get thrown in?”

  His deadpan expression didn’t change, but I caught the smallest twitch in his brow. “No, dumbass,” he replied flatly. “Don’t get caught.”

  A hundred years fly by when there’s something worth exploring. With Aska by my side, I saw half of purgatory—at least the upper floor. From the soul-recycling forges of Alwahan to the endless shores of the burning River Styx, we wandered between desolation and spectacle.

  And I hated it.

  The River Styx was the worst, of course. While the water of it was on fire, it remained water.

  We were only a few days from the Lighthouse of Misguided Sheep when something shifted—on Solaris. The planet where my body was.

  Its water drowning me every night had started to vanish.

  Within a month, all the water was gone.

  I didn’t know what caused it, but it meant one thing: For once, I was relieved. At least I wouldn’t feel the water in my lungs anymore.

  But that relief came with grief.

  Because this meant leaving Aska behind.

  We’d already discussed my return to Solaris—the rebirth, the plans he crafted and I wouldn′t follow. I’d assumed he’d come with me. Of course I had. But that idea quickly crumbled.

  “Aska, are you sure I shouldn’t just get you now?” I asked, hopeful. Maybe he'd changed his mind.

  He just waved a hand and gave me his usual half-smile. “Oh, no, don’t worry. My fruit sap business is booming right now. I’m very busy.”

  Fruit sap.

  Right.

  Maybe that was a code. Maybe for slaves. Maybe puppies. Maybe souls. I had no idea anymore, and honestly, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “Just do your thing,” he continued. “But try to lay low for a while, yeah? Make some friends. Go to school. Beat up some humans. Get a snack.”

  “Hmmm… do you mind if I kill myself rather often?” I asked casually.

  That wiped the smile right off his face. His eyes dropped away from mine.

  “Yes.” One word. Flat. Final. No room for playfulness or debate. “I′ll be too busy“

  Normally, I ignored his opinions. But this time… I’d obey. Not because I feared him—but because I could tell we wouldn′t meet much if I killed myself.

  We sat in silence for a long while, hands clasped as we watched purgatory’s horizon. I hated the idea of parting ways. He was the constant. The shadow behind me, the voice in my ear, the thrill in my spine. Without him, everything felt—less. Quieter. Duller.

  And this time… it was me leaving him. The reversal stung more than I expected.

  “Aska?” I whispered, eyes lifting to meet his.

  He turned to me, expression open, unaware. “Yes?”

  If there was ever a moment to say something real… this was it.

  But I hesitated.

  “I love you.” I wrapped my arms around his neck, and he lifted me by the waist. Our foreheads pressed together, his breath warm against my skin.

  “I love you too.” Without hesitation, I kissed him for the first time. A wave of warmth spread through my chest as our lips met, standing on the lighthouse in purgatory. In that moment, I felt like the luckiest woman in the universe. For once, I didn’t think about control or power.

  Love wasn’t about domination. It was about giving and taking… hopefully, more of the latter.

  And then, something extraordinary happened. For the first time, I saw a tear escape Aska’s eye. And for the first time, he didn’t mind that I cried too.

  That moment opened something inside us both. I could feel our minds shift, even if only slightly.

  I had changed him.

  Suddenly, I was lifted into the air, and for a fleeting moment, it felt like our embrace was the only thing keeping me grounded. But then the pull became too strong, and we released each other with tears still shimmering in our eyes.

  “Till next time.”

  It wasn’t goodbye. Aska was right—there would never be goodbye between us. I vowed then that no matter the cost, no matter the distance—even if I had to drown myself in water—I would see him again.

  “Hmm,” I nodded as I drifted further away. For the first time, I gave him a genuine smile, one I hadn’t known I was capable of.