Blood pooled beneath him, warm against the cold stone, the only warmth left in this godsforsaken pit.
The air reeked of rust and rot, a thick, cloying stench that clung to the back of his throat with every ragged breath.
Somewhere above, water dripped in slow, indifferent rhythm, each drop landing far too loud in the suffocating silence of the pit, counting down some invisible clock only it could hear.
“To cherish life, one must first survive its cruelty. Suffering is the toll God demands before he lets you keep anything worth having.”
His father’s voice.
Still here, still needling him, even now…
even with three ribs caved in and his left arm hanging like dead weight at his side.
He almost laughed.
Almost.
The thing across from him didn’t have a face so much as a suggestion of one, a knot of teeth and wet, shifting muscle where a face should be, eyes too many and none of them blinking.
It hadn’t moved in the last few seconds.
It didn’t need to.
It knew he wasn’t going anywhere.
Its breathing rasped low and wet, each exhale stirring the stagnant air with the faint, metallic tang of old blood, patient in the way only something that had already won could afford to be.
He spat blood onto the stone and dragged himself an inch higher against the wall, every inch a small war.
His fingers scraped uselessly against the jagged rock behind him, searching for purchase that wasn’t there, the cold seeping so deep into his bones it felt less like temperature now and more like something settling permanently into his marrow.
“You know what,” he rasped, voice cracked but carrying, “my old man used to say that. Suffering is a trial from God, boy. Cherish it. It’s how He proves you’re worth loving.”
A wet, rattling breath.
Somewhere between a laugh and a sob.
“Bullshit.” The word came out clearer than anything else he’d said.
“That’s bullshit, and you know what? If a god needs to break every single thing I love just to prove a point, if He needs this…”
he gestured, weak, at his own ruined body, at the monster, at the dark closing in from every side, “…to call it a gift… then he’s not a god. He’s just a bigger monster with better PR.”
The creature tilted its head, as if considering the words.
As if it understood.
For one absurd, fractured heartbeat, something almost like curiosity flickered behind those too-many unblinking eyes, as though the dying thing in front of it had said something worth pausing for.
He almost hoped it did.
His vision blurred at the edges, not from the pain, though there was plenty of that.
From something older, something that had nothing to do with the monster in front of him.
Memories surged through him, tearing through what little remained of his composure, dragging his past life up from wherever it had been buried.
It came like a tide pulling back before a wave, an inevitable undertow he had no strength left to resist.
As darkness consumed his thoughts, the pit and the monster and the blood all fell away, swallowed by something deeper and older—
….
Beep.
Beep.
Beep.
The hospital ceiling had a water stain shaped like a rabbit.
He used to stare at it for hours, counting the ceiling tiles, counting the days.
Twenty-two years old, and his whole world had shrunk down to a room, a drip line, and a laptop balanced on his knees.
The fluorescent light above buzzed faintly, a tired, flickering hum that had become as familiar as his own heartbeat, and the sheets smelled permanently of antiseptic no matter how many times they were changed.
<Leveling Up As The Player [Chapter 709]>
The cursor blinked on an empty line.
It had blinked there for three weeks.
He’d started writing in middle school, scribbling stories in the back of notebooks because the real world had never made much sense to him, but systems did.
Levels, growth, effort turning into power in numbers you could actually see.
He built his protagonist [Ethan Walker] — an orphan with nothing, no name, no backing, just a leveling system that gave him infinite potential when everyone told him he had none.
It was supposed to be everything Yoo Hajin never got to be.
Seven hundred and nine chapters.
Thousands of comments begging for more.
And now his hands shook too badly to type, and the machines around him beeped a countdown he couldn’t stop.
The last thing he remembered was the monitor flatlining into a single, endless tone.
Then nothing.
No light.
No tunnel.
Just black, and cold, and a silence so complete it had weight.
It pressed against him from every direction at once, formless and total, the kind of silence that felt less like an absence of sound and more like something waiting.
“Seven hundred and nine chapters,” something said, and the voice came from everywhere and nowhere, amused in a way that made his skin crawl even without skin to crawl with.
“I read every one, you know. Rooted for your boy. Ethan Walker, was it? Infinite potential. Cute.”
“…Who’s there?” Hajin spoke in a low voice.
“Someone very, very bored of watching you leave your readers on a cliffhanger for three weeks. Rude, honestly.” A pause, almost fond.
“Call me God…
Capital G.
I earned it.
And since you clearly weren’t going to finish your little story yourself, I’ll finish it for you.
Correction…” the amusement sharpened into something crueler, “…you will.
From the inside.
Personally invested this time.
Isn’t that exciting?”
“…You’re insane,” Hajin said, or thought he said, couldn’t tell anymore whether he still had a mouth to speak with.
“Probably,” the voice agreed, entirely too cheerful about it.
“Do you know how many failed little worlds I’ve had to sit through before yours actually interested me? Boring. All of them, unbearably boring. Yours, at least, had the decency to almost be good.”
“…Almost?”
“Seven hundred and nine chapters, and you never once decided how it ends.” Something like a smile threaded through the words, wet and unkind.
“That’s not an ending, Yoo Hajin.
That’s an open wound.
Lucky for you—” the darkness rippled, delighted, “…I love stitching those shut myself.”
“You know, for someone who claims to be a writer,” the voice continued, almost conversational now, almost bored, “you have a terrible habit of abandoning your own creations.”
Something in that sentence didn’t sit right, not the accusation itself, but the weight behind it.
Like it wasn’t the first time the voice had said those exact words.
Like it had said them before, to someone else, in some other silence just like this one.
“…What do you mean by that?” Hajin asked, though some small, buried part of him already dreaded the answer.
The voice didn’t answer.
It only laughed, soft, delighted, and far too knowing, before the black cracked open beneath him like breaking glass, and he was falling, and somewhere far below him a boy named Dylan Harrow, seventeen, first-year at Nexus Academy, blade buried in his back by the very hunters he’d trusted, hit the ground of a dungeon and did not get back up.
Hajin fell into him like a coin into a well.
…..
Dylan’s eyes snapped open, and he immediately coughed, blood spattering hot across the stone.
“That damned god,” he rasped, dragging air into lungs that felt full of glass, “didn’t even give me a chance to prepare. Not a countdown, not a warning, just drop, and here’s your dying body, good luck.” The system window flickered to life in front of him, pale blue light washing over the blood on his hands.
[System Awakening: Complete]
Host: Dylan Harrow
Innate Ability: [Refraction] (3/3)
Unique Skill: [Plagiarize] (0/3 Slots) — Unlocked
He stared at it through blurred vision, and something that might have been a laugh tore out of him, wet and humorless.
“Of course. Of course it shows up now.” His hand curled weakly into a fist against the stone.
“Seven hundred chapters and I never once wrote down how long the notification takes to load, and now I’m finding out the hard way, bleeding out in front of the thing that’s about to eat me.”
The monster across from him hadn’t moved.
It was still observing him for some unknown reason.
Perhaps it was because of his crazed behaviour, or a divine miracle.
“Great timing,” he muttered, pushing himself up another inch, every word costing him.
“Really. Immaculate. Somebody give this god a writing award.”
Hi everyone, this is my first work, so bear with me!
Writing this purely for fun and to finally finish a story I’ve carried in my head forever.
Hope you enjoy the ride.