Chapter Two: A Distant Past ||

I watched the woman warily as she sipped on her tea, enjoying it.

"So what is it with my past lives, miss?"

I decided to catch to the chase.

The girl stopped and blew on her cup, she patiently swirled her cup in silence, which annoyed me.

"Are you here to kill me? No if you wanted to you would have done that a long time ago. If so are you a supernatural being..."

I babbled and babbled about who she might be and what her connection of my past lives be, but no matter what she just sipped on her tea until it ran out.

She said that we needed to hurry, but look at her being leisurely.

This just made me curious even more.

Finally she put the mug down and said, "Excuse me sir, we are from the Reincarnation Program Team no.333005. And we would like you to fix your previous world since there were a few misfortunes that grew within it. And it 'was' our job to fix it, but upon further analysis, it was only YOU, that could balance it again."

"Huh, what do you mean?"

She stood up and I heard statics of electricity as she started disappearing bit by bit, she handed him the envelope along with a rather thick folder and said, "Well then, farewell and good luck."

And with that, she completely disappeared.

"Ah! Wait!!"

But she was gone.

"....."

"What the hell."

I muttered as I scratched the back of my head lost in what I should do, she only gave me a small explanation.

But according to what she said, I have a feeling that my death in the previous life caused an uproar.

But maybe along the lines I had already anticipated that something like this might happen, since the previous world was not just a simple world, it was a world within a novel.

In my first life I had read it just to relieve me of boredom, but somehow along the lines I started liking it and had wished for many characters' lives to get better.

That's why I changed some minor plots during my fourth life and had helped quite fairly while also making the spotlight stay illuminated on the main character's.

I sighed whilst feeling defeated, "Was I worth more than I thought?"

"But why? It's not like I was absolutely close to the protagonist or any other character, I was more of a stepping stone than a friend. Or did my death bring pity to them and they did something big.... but then that's just silly since we only had one common enemy, why would that world need fixing?"

I shook my head and decided to open the folder, I saw the profile of my previous companion, the protagonist, Achroite Win.

"..."

I flipped through the few pages that contained his personal informations, his birthday, his parents, his bloodtype, and many more, then it was his relationships with characters of the novel, these pages consist of things I already know since what was written here were original events in the novel.

I skimmed through the pages till the end and finally came across a thick red page with nothing written on it.

And after this page was contents of my fourth life in Achroite's point of view.

From when I first met him, how he viewed me when we first worked, down to my death. I was quite embarassed, I didn't know he thought of me like this, I guess that's why my friends always gets jittery everytime they receive a love letter.

I shook my head and continued flipping, I blushed from shame and second-hand embarassment.

'Ah, this old man.... this old man feels sorry for this kid.....'

Then I flipped through the pages consisting of my death and how it impacted the team and Achroite.

I felt a bad premonition because there was still many pages to go after my death.

I skimmed through the words that contained on how the team members greived for me for a little while, how they defeated the monsters, the final boss, and the now changed ending.

'One last page.'

Finally, the last one...

I gasped, there were two paragraphs written on the page.

‡‡‡‡‡‡

Achroite felt immense depression and went deep into the research about time, he wanted Gem to come back again so they could work together again. He wanted every moment with Achroite again, he wanted it so badly that after just three years into the research he finally made a tower that could reset the time back and could also possibly bring back the dead. Even though everyone tried to stop him, he still turned back the clock. But Gem wasn't there, even though he saw that everything went back to their places, he was the only one who was not there. How could that possibly be? So he turned time again but he still wasn't there, even though he looked at every nick and nook, he wasn't there.

He turned time again back to the future, then back to the past, then back to the future, he repeated this again and again for hundreds of years when he finally came to the realization that maybe Gem's soul was not born in this world. So he went back to the tower, he planned to modify the tower so it could also travel dimensions, but his team members stopped him. They had found out about his actions and tried to convince him to stop, Gem will never come back ever again. After that the tower exploded probably because of the overuse and killed them all.

‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡‡

I felt a shiver run down my spine after reading this.

Now I knew why the woman in black gave me this.

I was the reason a world died.

My breath hitched as panic filled me not because of the task, but because of Achroite's sudden obssesion.

I thought, 'What if he had succeeded on traveling dimensions and had found me. What would he do to me? Most psychopaths would lock their target in a glasshouse full of red roses. What would he have done to me in his unstable state?'

Guilt settled in as I knew it was because of ny meddling which made that world explode killing many innocent lives.

'I feel sick.'

I decided to first sleep before deciding anything.

††††††††††

When I woke up the next day I found myself back in my fourth life.

"..."

(sound of birds chirpping) [tweet tweet]

"FUCK!!!!!"