Second Chance

Notification

Condition met, the contract with the Goddess of Scales has been expended. Exchanging the user's soul to grant a request…

Notification

Error, user's soul cannot be exchanged if request is granted, requesting permission from the administrator…

Notification

The request has been granted with permission from the administrator. The user will be given a second chance. Request interpretation in process…

Notification

The user will return to 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 2023.

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I looked up and saw a very familiar sight. It was a white ceiling with a single screw imbedded into it and some twine wrapped around it. I squinted my eyes and focused all my attention on the twisted piece of twine. It was familiar to me because I remember waking up and seeing that screw every night when I was living on my own and attending college. I had hung my favorite Millennium Falcon model spaceship there about five years ago, only to accidentally knock it down while swinging around my VR controls one unfortunate night.

"What kind of afterlife is this? Or is my life flashing before my eyes? If it was, wouldn't I start at the beginning? I am dead, aren't I?"

I looked around, confused as to how I ended up in my dingy one-bedroom studio apartment I had before the Five Seasons started. The walls were covered in old movie posters, and my desk and floor were covered in bits of torn wrapping paper. Several leftover fast food takeout bags sat on my floor at the foot of the desk beside empty and partially empty cups of leftover sodas. I remembered how I used to fill those bags up when my trash was overflowing. I looked over at my trash can and saw that it was, in fact, overflowing. Yup, this was definitely my old college apartment, but I literally just kicked the bucket.

I was lying down in my old bed, which was just as hard as I remembered. I was a very gullible person in the past and chose an extra-firm mattress because I read online that it was supposed to be better for your back. I later realized that the person who made the claim was just a troll on Reddit, but I decided that I had already crossed the point of no return, so I just resigned myself to the suffering.

In the past, I was very dissatisfied with the lack of comfort that my bed provided me when I attempted to sleep. Now, however, I found that the hard bed and that small, dingy studio apartment were providing me with a sense of comfort I hadn't felt in a very long time. This comfort didn't last long as my mind began to think about all the other better afterlives there could have been. Where were the golden gates? The clouds you can walk on top of? Or the angels dressed in togas playing harps?

"I guess this is what heaven is like. It's a bit underwhelming, though."

I felt a vibration coming from my pants pocket and reached down to discover my old phone. The screen was cracked in the top right corner, just like it had been when I was back on Earth and alive. I looked dumbfounded, first thinking that if I were to enter the afterlife, they could have at the very least fixed my cracked phone screen.

"Now what are you doing there? No way, heaven has Wi-Fi?!"

I looked at the screen and saw that the phone was connected to Wi-Fi and that the time was 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 2023. I recalled that the Five Seasons officially started on January 1, 2024, at 12 p.m., just half a day from now. Right now, I was more confused than I had been when I saw Doctor Trauss back alive and kicking it in the Shadowed Abyss. I shrugged, disregarded the time, and lazily stretched myself out across my bed. "It doesn't matter anyway; I'm dead, so I am probably just seeing what my mind wanted to see, which I guess was life before the Five Seasons. Heaven sure is weird."

My phone buzzed again, revealing an alarm that indicated that the time was officially 12 a.m. on January 1, 2024. At the same moment, there was a flash of light that broke through my blinds and the sound of fireworks. "Huh? Fireworks in heaven?"

I shot out of bed and rushed to the window so I could peek through the blinds. There were fireworks going off, just like they did in the past. A teenage boy from another apartment complex across the street stepped out onto the balcony with a firework in his hand. "Wait. I remember what happens here. He sneezes while holding that and ends up aiming it inside his apartment at the last second."

I watched as my prediction, or rather, my memory, was confirmed to be accurate. The teenage boy did, in fact, sneeze into his elbow at the last second, aiming the firework backwards. An explosion occurred within his home, and I heard the all-too-familiar shouts of an angry mother disciplining her unfortunate son. "Something's off here… I wonder… status window."

An all-too-familiar blue screen popped up in front of me with dozens of notifications that covered the actual status window. "Wait, no freaking way, this is what happened?"

Notification

Condition met, the contract with the Goddess of Scales has been expended. Exchanging the user's soul to grant a request…

I browsed the notifications and realized that I had an unidentifiable scroll in my inventory that turned out to be a contract with the Goddess of Scales. This contract must have been something I thought was a junk item that I forgot about during the seasons, but I was too excited to care about making any connections right now. What was important was that I was actually back in the past! I swiped away all the notifications after I read them, as most of them were just explaining how all my skills, stats, and equipment had been reset. After getting through most of the notifications, I found two that caught my attention.

"Holy fuck, I can't believe my luck…"