By the time I entered high school, I had already accepted one simple truth.
The world was broken around me.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
At first, I tried to rationalize it.
Humans are very good at lying to themselves when reality becomes uncomfortable.
I told myself I was simply talented.
Smarter than average.
More observant.
Better at reading people.
That explanation died quickly.
Because intelligence cannot explain impossibility.
I remember one particular exam during my second year.
I hadn’t studied at all.
Not because I was confident, but because I genuinely forgot the test even existed.
When the teacher handed me the paper, I realized immediately that I knew almost none of the answers.
For the first time in a long while, I thought:
Maybe this time I’ll finally fail.
Ten minutes later, the fire alarm rang.
Students panicked and rushed outside while teachers tried to organize the evacuation.
During the confusion, another student accidentally dropped his answer sheet directly onto my desk.
Every answer I needed was right there in front of me.
I stared at the paper for several seconds without moving.
Not because I was surprised.
Because I wasn’t surprised anymore.
That was the disturbing part.
Reality always corrected itself.
Always.
The moment something inconvenienced me, the world twisted unnaturally to remove the obstacle.
And the older I became, the more aggressive those corrections started feeling.
At first they were subtle.
Small coincidences.
Convenient timing.
Lucky guesses.
But slowly, the universe stopped pretending.
One evening, I was crossing the street while looking at my phone when a car sped through a red light.
I heard the horn too late.
The impact should have killed me instantly.
Instead, the driver suffered a heart attack before reaching me.
The car crashed into a nearby pole less than two meters away from where I stood.
I remember staring silently at the wreckage while people screamed around me.
Ambulances arrived minutes later.
Police officers questioned witnesses.
Everyone called it tragic.
But all I could think was:
Reality protected me again.
Not skillfully.
Not naturally.
Desperately.
As if existence itself was terrified of letting me die.
That realization changed something inside me.
Up until then, I had mostly been passive.
I let reality bend itself around me without questioning it too deeply.
After that accident, I started experimenting.
Carefully at first.
Then more aggressively.
I wanted to understand the limits of whatever I was.
One night, I sat alone inside my apartment and placed a coin on the table in front of me.
“Ten heads in a row,” I whispered.
The coin landed on heads ten consecutive times.
No hesitation.
No probability struggle.
No resistance.
It simply obeyed.
I increased the difficulty afterward.
Twenty times.
Fifty.
One hundred.
The result never changed.
Eventually, I stopped feeling impressed.
So I moved on to larger experiments.
Traffic lights changed before I reached them.
Rain stopped whenever I wanted to walk outside.
Elevators arrived instantly.
People canceled meetings moments before inconveniencing me.
Even technology behaved unnaturally around me.
Computers stopped lagging in my presence.
Internet outages restored themselves seconds after irritating me.
Once, an entire server failure fixed itself immediately after I muttered:
“How annoying.”
That was the first moment I genuinely considered the possibility that reality could hear me.
The thought should have sounded insane.
Instead, it felt obvious.
And strangely enough…
The world became more unstable after I acknowledged it.
I noticed it gradually.
Small pauses in reality.
Tiny delays.
Moments where existence itself seemed to hesitate around me.
Like a machine struggling to process something it was never designed to contain.
At first, those distortions lasted less than a second.
A clock freezing briefly before resuming normally.
A person repeating the same sentence twice without noticing.
Birds suddenly changing direction mid-flight for no reason.
Minor things.
Then came the poker game.
The moment I finally realized I was no longer dealing with luck.
The game took place beneath a luxury hotel in Tokyo.
From the outside, the building looked completely normal, but several floors underground existed a private gambling lounge that officially didn’t exist.
No signs, no advertisements, no records.
You either knew the place or you didn’t.
The people invited there were absurdly wealthy, politically connected, or dangerous enough that normal rules no longer applied to them.
CEOs, heirs, celebrities, criminals pretending to be businessmen, businessmen pretending not to be criminals.
And somehow, despite barely being nineteen at the time, I was already sitting among them.
Not because I belonged there.
Because reality kept opening doors for me.
The moment I entered the room, I noticed the dealer staring at me strangely.
At first, I assumed he recognized me from previous games.
Looking back now, I think it was something else entirely.
Some people unconsciously sensed that something was wrong with me.
Not consciously.
Instinctively.
Like animals sensing a predator before understanding why they feel afraid.
The game started normally enough.
Cards moved across the table, chips stacked higher and higher, expensive alcohol flowed endlessly while people laughed with the fake confidence wealthy men always wear around each other.
And for the first hour, I intentionally lost.
Not because I had to.
Because I wanted to.
I wanted to know whether I could force reality to stop helping me.
So I made terrible decisions on purpose.
I folded winning hands voluntarily, ignored obvious plays, and intentionally acted recklessly.
I still won.
Not barely.
Absurdly.
A player accidentally revealed his cards at the perfect moment.
Another became distracted after receiving a phone call informing him that his company’s stock had suddenly collapsed.
One man misread the table despite being completely sober and experienced.
Every mistake I made was corrected by reality itself before consequences could reach me.
That was the moment genuine fear finally appeared inside me, because if the universe protected me even against my own intentions, then what exactly was controlling it?
Around midnight, the atmosphere inside the room began changing.
Conversations became quieter.
People looked increasingly uncomfortable without understanding why.
Even the dealer’s hands started trembling slightly while distributing cards.
At first I thought I was imagining it.
Then I noticed the lights.
They flickered every time I touched the cards.
Tiny fluctuations.
Subtle enough that nobody else seemed to notice, but once I saw it, I couldn’t ignore it anymore.
The man sitting beside me noticed it too.
He was probably in his fifties, dressed in an expensive charcoal suit with the calm expression of someone used to controlling every room he entered.
Yet the longer he looked at me, the paler he became.
Eventually, he leaned slightly closer and lowered his voice.
“Do you ever feel like the world is… wrong around you?”
I slowly turned toward him.
For a few seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then I smiled faintly.
“All the time.”
The moment those words left my mouth, every light inside the lounge shut off simultaneously.
Darkness swallowed the room instantly.
Several people shouted in surprise while chairs scraped violently against the floor, but the panic lasted less than a second before something even stranger happened.
Silence.
Not normal silence.
Absolute silence.
The kind that feels unnatural the moment you experience it.
Oppressive.
Empty.
Like reality itself had suddenly stopped breathing.
And somehow, despite the darkness surrounding us, I could still see perfectly clearly.
That was the strangest part.
The entire room looked frozen in time.
A glass remained suspended mid-fall beside one of the tables.
Playing cards floated motionless in the air.
The dealer was trapped in the middle of blinking.
No movement.
No sound.
No time.
For several seconds, reality itself seemed paused.
Then something moved.
Not inside the room.
Beyond it.
At first, I thought it was merely a distortion hidden inside the darkness.
Then I realized the darkness itself was watching me.
The sensation is difficult to describe properly.
Imagine standing at the edge of an infinite ocean before suddenly realizing the ocean is alive…and aware of your existence.
That’s what it felt like.
For the first time in my life, something looked back at me.
Not a human.
Not an animal.
Not even a god.
Something larger.
Something beyond language itself.
And despite never hearing an actual voice, I instinctively understood its meaning.
You should not exist.
The exact same sentence again.
My heartbeat slowed slightly, not because I was afraid, but because I was curious.
For the first time since my birth, something in existence was resisting me.
I took a single step forward.
The darkness recoiled instantly.
Reality resumed violently afterward.
Lights exploded overhead, showering the room in broken glass while alarms echoed throughout the building.
Several players collapsed into panic as the frozen objects crashed back into motion all at once.
And in the middle of the chaos, I laughed.
Not because the situation was funny.
Because I finally understood something important.
The universe was afraid of me.
And that meant one terrifying possibility still remained.
Maybe I should be afraid of myself too.
The white space around me suddenly cracked.
A deafening sound echoed through the emptiness as enormous fractures spread across reality itself like shattered glass.
The throne remained perfectly motionless in the center while the world surrounding it slowly fell apart.
Then something appeared behind it.
At first, I couldn’t properly understand what I was looking at.
My mind instinctively tried to give it a shape, a form, a face… but failed every single time.
It wasn’t a creature, nor a god, nor anything humanity would even possess the words to describe.
It felt larger than the concept of size itself.
And for the first time since my birth, I felt genuine danger.
The thing behind the throne was staring directly at me.
Not at my body.
Not at my mind.
At me.
At whatever existed beneath my existence itself.
An unbearable pressure filled the white space around us.
The fractures spreading through reality accelerated violently, as if existence itself was struggling to maintain cohesion under that thing’s presence.
Then it spoke.
Not through sound.
Through understanding.
“You were never supposed to wake up.”
The moment those words reached me, I opened my eyes violently inside my apartment.
Everything around me was shaking.
The walls cracked loudly while books fell from shelves and the lights overhead flickered uncontrollably.
Outside the windows, I could hear distant screams echoing through the city below.
And then every electronic screen inside the room suddenly turned black.
My television.
My phone.
My computer monitors.
Even the digital clock beside my bed.
For several seconds, the screens remained completely dark before white letters slowly appeared on every single one simultaneously.
YOU SHOULD NOT EXIST.
I stared silently at the message while the apartment continued trembling around me.
Then, slowly…
I smiled.