To be honest, I’d long lost count of my own deaths. What was even sadder—I had no clue how many more times I was doomed to meet the bony bastard again. Who was I, and what the hell did I do to deserve this? Somewhere in the dusty corners of my mind, scraps of a first life still lingered, but after countless rebirths, I’d lost every memory of who I was. So no, I wasn’t finding the answer to that anytime soon.

  I must’ve been a bad guy. Some wretched, vile scum—why else would I be caught in this cursed carousel of death? That was the only explanation that fit. I wished I knew the real reason. But one thing was painfully, undeniably clear: God had abandoned me. And no matter how many times I prayed, begged, cried for salvation—it was useless. Not once did I get so much as a flicker of hope from the divine.

  So I came to a bitter conclusion: no one was coming to save me. No one ever would. All I had… was me.

  I’d passed through thousands—no, tens of thousands—of worlds. But I never stayed more than a day in any of them. Death was always there. Breathing down my neck. Watching. Waiting.

  That day was no different. I was reborn again. For a split second, I thought I’d become a bird. Wouldn’t have been the first time, so no reason to get excited. Death always found a way to get me, even in the sky. Planes, slingshots, storms, hawks, you name it. But this time was simpler. I was in the air—but I wasn’t the bird. I was the pathetic, frail lamb clutched in an eagle’s talons. It soared to the cliffs, then tore its claws from beneath my ribs and dropped me like garbage. First impact didn’t kill me, so I got to savor every hellish second of my body bouncing off the rocks below.

  That was that. Time to roll into the next life—if you could even call this living.

  A lab. Old. Dusty. Reeking of rot. In the name of “science,” they slowly lowered me into some foul-smelling green sludge. You ever see what happens to cotton candy in water? That was what was happening to me. My skin, my muscles, my blood and bones—they all melted, turning into a wet, oozing slop.

  I died from the pain before it even reached my knees.

  Lucky me—I reincarnated again. What a surprise! I wanted to shout, but the body I was in wouldn’t let me speak. After all, I was just a fetus… still in the womb.

  “Mom, mom! You’ll protect me, right?”

  Ha! Good one. We both knew how this ended. Ah, here they came—those all-too-familiar steel hooks, tearing apart my half-formed body like it was trash. Ninth abortion this month. Guess Death was running out of ideas?

  The worst part? I couldn’t even go insane to escape the pain. I was nothing more than pure, raw conciseness. Every new life? A brand-new nightmare. The pain always felt fresh. No matter how much I begged for numbness, it never came. And things only got worse when I ended up in the body of a creature with a high pain threshold. Like, say... a crayfish.

  To the bastards who claimed crustaceans didn’t feel pain—screw you. Seriously. Though, to be fair, different worlds, different biology. I did know this: being boiled alive as a crayfish hurt a hell of a lot more than being a dog in the same pot. Yep. Been there too. Chihuahua, if you were curious. Barely had any meat on me, but hey—not like that ever mattered.

  So yeah. That was how I “lived.” Not once in all this time did fate toss me a bone. Not a single “fight and survive” moment. I usually showed up just before death. When it was already too late. A dying old man choking on the wrong pill. A fly stuck in a web, just as the hairy bastard of a spider moved in. A monster about to get butchered by a bunch of knights in shiny armor. Ogre? Orc? Hell if I knew. I gained a body the moment cold steel sliced across my throat.

  And yet... and yet... maybe I was messed up, but I did see a silver lining. Those poor souls, the ones who were supposed to suffer—they didn’t. Because I took their place.

  So maybe I wasn’t that bad, huh? Maybe I was even a good guy! Suffering for other people’s sins—just like the Almighty Himself! Maybe it was finally ti—

  ...Okay, okay. That was a pathetic attempt to kiss up to the Higher Powers. As usual. Screw the idiots I kept replacing! If some damn geezer couldn’t swallow his pill right, why the hell did I have to suffer on the floor, gasping uselessly for even a shred of air?!

  Another body. Great. Who the hell was I now? Some tiny creature being hunted. Men with rifles. Dogs barking at my heels. Should I even bother running? Maybe I should just stop. Die. Reboot. Repeat. Over and over until the last living thing in the last rotten world finally died.

  Truth was, I’d only kept going out of habit. But if I was honest? I didn’t give a damn anymore. There was no happy ending for me. Denying that would be beyond stupid.

  Only oblivion could save me from this joke of an existence.

  While I was thinking that, a bullet blew out the organ doing the thinking.

  I didn’t even get a moment to breathe. Invisible force yanked my soul back into the meat grinder and shoved me into yet another body.

  The darkness faded fast. Light stabbed through my eyelids. A warm breeze slid over my skin, rustling the grass. Above me, a sky of endless blue—brushed with clouds like lazy strokes of white paint.

  Not a bad start. Except... why couldn’t I breathe? What was that burning pain in my neck?

  Then I looked down.

  Oh.

  I was hanging.

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  No. Not hanging out at some swanky party with two beauties on my arm—but by the neck.

  Everything started to blur as the curtain of black came down again.

  A-a-a-a-aand cut! I died.

  What now? Hopefully a quick death. I wasn’t in the mood for another slow crawl toward the inevitable.

  Bright light again. You wouldn’t believe this—but I was still hanging. Still the same damn tree. First time this had happened. If I came back as a third hanged man in a row, that was a full-blown jackpot.

  Kind of excited. Crap. Was I... a gambling addict? Huh. Learned something new every day.

  Looks like the system’s glitched. Thirty-seven rebirths in a row—and always the same damn noose. But the weirdest part? The scene never changed. I wouldn’t play dumb. Let’s be real—somehow, I kept coming back to the same body.

  I thought it might be a time loop. But the changing light proved otherwise. Days passed. Nights fell.

  So I reached a weird-ass conclusion: this body was immortal. Ironic, wasn’t it?

  Or maybe this was just Death’s new game. She got bored and decided to mess with me in a new way. Either way, I wasn’t playing along. The second I started believing I had a chance—it would all crash down again. It always did. I was done getting my hopes up.

  So what now? Just hang there forever?

  Eventually, I decided I had to break out of this noose. Not easy. Every time I came back, I tugged on the rope, hoping to snap the branch. That bastard wouldn’t budge.

  To give myself more time before suffocating, I figured it was time to feed the starving beast. I meant my brain—assuming I still had one, because my attempts to saturate it with oxygen cast serious doubt on that fact. Long story short, with my fingers, I poked a hole in my throat a few times, hoping it would let me breathe. Maybe I was aiming in the wrong spot, or maybe it was just impossible—who knew—but in the end, these efforts didn’t turn out well.

  I died. Again. And all the wounds healed, erasing every trace of my low IQ. A happy ending, right? Except....

  My sweet, dripping blood attracted some unwanted company.

  Guess who showed up in this world first? If you read the synopsis, you already knew. For everyone else—enjoy the reveal: zombies.

  They came from a nearby village. Gaunt medieval peasants in torn linen shirts and rough trousers, eaten away by time. Their skin was a sickly greenish-gray. Worms and flies crawled in the holes where flesh used to be. Their eyes were milky and lifeless. Faces tight with deep cracks and wrinkles. Gaping wounds revealed tendons and bones.

  The eager one went first. He bit my toes. The rest joined the buffet. The pain blurred my vision, so I couldn’t count exactly—but there were at least twenty of those foot-fetish freaks. They grabbed at me with rotting stumps, clawing for more. Once they finished my feet, they moved up to my calves.

  For the first time, I saw my body regenerate. Flesh bubbling back over bone. Nerves reforming. Blood pulsing through fresh veins.

  And when the feet were back in premium shape? The undead went back to work.

  No matter how much I thrashed, they overwhelmed me. Only death could free me from their grip.

  But on my eighty-fifth resurrection, something changed. I woke up on cold ground.

  The noose was still hanging above. Which meant... they pulled so hard, they tore off my damn head. Not surprising. More and more zombies were showing up every day. Word had spread. The freaks were gathering from every village around.

  I was so exhausted that even the worst pain didn’t faze me anymore. I still screamed, sure—kicking, writhing, shrieking like hell—but inside? I was calm.

  Until I saw the female zombies.

  And damn... they were into me.

  That look in their eyes—distant, empty... and burning hot. Lips bitten. Drool trailing. Ladies! One at a time, please! I had only got two hands—wait, scratch that, one hand. One tongue. Lower body? Not sure what was left. Hard to see past the dudes slurping up my intestines like spaghetti Bolognese.

  My neurons had been activated.

  Mmm, enjoying the neck? Go ahead, kiss i—ow! Did you just bite me?! You stupid corpse!

  What the hell was I gonna tell my mom about that hickey?

  Oh, so you thought a high-neck sweater would be enough? Ah, no—you weren’t saying shit, just 'blargh-ugh-ahh'. Hey! HEY! At least don’t eat my damn tongue! Don’t care if you love me! If you stopped at the cheeks, I might still kinda forgive you. But if you stole my first kiss, I would burn every last bridge between us!

  Let's be real—she totally stole my first kiss. Luckily, I was already pushing up daisies by then, so it damn well didn't count.

  Alright, jokes aside—my situation wasn’t exactly great. No, scratch that, I’d been deep in the shit for a while now, but this? This was next-level darkness. Every time I came back, I felt… incomplete. Like, literally missing half my body. Without arms, there wasn’t much I could do.

  Did this life suit me? The endless cycle of rebirth had ended, yet death remained. Would it always be this way? If so, was there even a point in trying to escape this hell? The suffering wouldn’t just vanish... I didn’t have an answer, but one thing was for damn sure—I was sick of this zombie situation. I was no masochist, and I refused to just endure their godawful "massage" without a fight. Whatever came next… the only way to find out was to keep moving.

  I held no illusions, but that didn’t mean I was ready to give up completely. In the end, it looked like I’d finally gotten my chance.

  In that moment, in my messed-up head, a brilliant idea was born. To make them stop eating me, every single one of them had to get a taste of me! Their bodies were rotten and frail. They mindlessly chomped on raw meat, occasionally hitting bone. Soon enough, every one of them would lose their teeth. I still had to deal with the crowd pinning me down, but that was the least of my worries now.

  So eat me up, friends! Eat me up!

  The plan worked. The only thing I didn’t expect was how long it’d take. I had to be their all-you-can-eat buffet for a little over a week. Then I moved on to phase two: "an eye for an eye." I started eating them back. Mostly the stubborn ones. I bashed skulls with my forehead, then scooped out the brains like soup. By the third meal, I figured out I didn’t have to swallow—just spit the rotten mush out. That was enough to kill them.

  Once the crowd started thinning, I came back with more and more muscle. No more headbutts that knocked me out cold. Now? Now I could throw punches. Sure, I broke my hands a lot—but compared to everything else?

  That pain was a gift.

  I only managed to claw my way to full freedom by the end of the second week. Classic me—I was braced for another cruel twist. A surprise meteor, endless lightning strikes hammering the same spot, or some other bullshit that’d put me down for good.

  But everything was... fine. Relatively fine. After finishing off the last of the zombies, I finally sucked in a deep breath. The godawful stench hit me like a brick, triggering my gag reflex—but with nothing left in my gut, all I did was cough violently.

  And that, more or less, was how my grand adventure in this new world kicked off. Now all that was left was figuring out what the hell this world even was. Not that I actually believed I’d last long in it anyway.

  Hey everyone! I hope you enjoyed the first chapter and want to read more! I also want to mention that I plan to write fun facts after some chapters. Some will reveal moments from the characters’ pasts that didn’t fit into the main plot. Others will give more insight into the world itself. My goal is to expand the worldbuilding.

  So, here’s the first fun fact: Caught in the endless cycle of death, the protagonist started keeping a sort of mental diary to cope with the pain and stay sane. Over time, he realized that losing his mind wasn’t really an option in his situation, but by then, that habit of internal monologue had already taken root. Goofing off for imaginary spectators became his only form of relief during the countless reincarnations.