If we didn't cross our paths
Although I killed myself more than ten times before, it was still a daunting task every time.
I knew I would wake back up on October 1st again after I 'die', so dying itself was no big deal and it was a futile exercise anyway. HOW to die though was something that I investigated quite in depth and had a few extremely painful trials and errors with.
There was this once I jumped off a 10-story building and managed to survive, with most of my bones broken, and hospitalized for about two weeks before I actually died. That really sucked so I never took that option again.
Then I tried the good old 'burning coal indoors with sealed windows' trick. I tried that twice and both times went horribly wrong. The first time I tried it I was a total noob and ended up setting my house on fire, so I burnt to death. Horrible.
The second time I managed to not die and got rescued by emergency service because my sealing wasn't good enough and people smelt something burning from my room. I was declared braindead but I actually wasn't, and survived while trapped in my paralyzed body for god knows how long until my life just got snubbed one day.
I'd never know how that actually came to an end. It could be that November 9th came, or maybe someone pulled the plug. Either way, it was possibly the worst thing I've ever experienced in my immortal life and I never went that route again.
I tried many other methods, but there really was no painless DIY suicide (is it even a suicide if it's not DIY though?). Ultimately, I came to the conclusion that no matter how bad life was, dying wasn't worth it.
So I lived on. Trapped in this time loop forever.
However, I did force a 'reset' once for the sake of it.
After a few cycles of 40 days, I got this brilliant idea (how did I not think of it any earlier?) that I should get into gambling. I would remember horse racing results and lottery winning numbers, then kill myself, and come back and become mega-rich for my remaining days.
That's when I found the cruel law of the universe though.
I firmly believed that there was at least one god, for I knew for a fact that there was a Hell Beast.
And I learned that god intended gambling to be fair.
I spent 14 days painstakingly memorizing all the horse racing results and lottery-winning numbers. I knew I couldn't memorize 40 days' worth of those numbers (if I could I might not have been a NEET) so I limited myself to 2 weeks' worth. I then killed myself with a smile on my face by hanging. I woke up all excited and ran to the horse race track - no luck.
I was furious.
Why? Just why?! Did I get the numbers wrong?
I tried and tried, but I lost all the races.
With absolutely the last bits of money I had left, I bought a lottery ticket and I was sure I had the numbers right.
That didn't work either.
So I realized that among countless number of gods that may exist in this universe, the most powerful of them was the god of RNG.
I never gambled since and neither have I committed suicide.
But this time, I felt like I couldn't wait for 40 days to do something about Haein again. I wanted to try something different at least once now, so I could spend the next eternity figuring out if there was a way to make use of this anomaly of a girl. One failsafe way of dying that I knew was one thing that I hated the most, so I went to a bridge over the Han River that divided Seoul in two and jumped off because I couldn't swim to save my life.
"BLAARRRGHHH!"
I woke up throwing up nothing, for my stomach was empty.
Man, that was fucking horrible. I hated drowning.
I checked the time and it was 12:04 again. I got dressed to look as inconspicuous as I could (not that I ever had a look that stood out) and went over to the ramen shop. My stomach was growling but I had no intention to eat today. My plan was to stalk Haein.
It happened only twice, but I didn't want Haein to meet her untimely demise the third time to confirm the pattern. My plan was to observe and see where she goes and what she does, and to see what would have happened if we didn't cross our paths.
As expected, I got a notification on my Webnovel app for the one-star review while Haein was enjoying her Shoyu ramen inside the shop. It was an open eating area in the food court so it was easy enough to keep my eyes on her. Around 30 minutes later without being interfered, she got up to leave. I stealthily followed her, feeling somewhat childishly excited about this little detective role I've given myself.
What I learned about Haein then was that she could eat a lot.
After the ramen, she went to have a big tub of ice cream at Raskin Bobbins 32 ice cream shop. She then went for a couple of donuts at Sunken Donuts, had a boba from Bongcha, and took a walk by the riverside sipping on the Flappuccino from Moonbucks that we had the other day (or should I say another day today?).
She seemed to be having a jolly good time throughout the whole afternoon.
Actually, that would have been an understatement.
She looked as if she dedicated today to eating everything she wanted as if today was her last day on death row.
I had to keep some distance away when she went on the bridge over Han River though as I would have been too directly in her line of sight and I probably couldn't linger on for too long without appearing suspicious, so I kept a distance of about 50m from her as she started to cross the bridge.
About halfway through crossing though, she stopped and leaned against the fence to look down on the river and she seemed to be enjoying the cool autumn breeze. Then all of a sudden, she climbed onto the fence and jumped before I could even call out her name.
I half expected that the Hell Beast would jump out of the river like a whale and swallow her, but it did not appear.
Passerbys screamed, called the police, and did everything good citizens would do. But after around 40 minutes, all I could do was watch her dead body get carried away in a zip bag and loaded onto an ambulance that no longer needed an emergency siren.
So this was how it was going to be.
If we didn't cross our paths, today was going to be the day that Haein died.