Ryan had never been a good boy.
At least, that was what most people said about him.
He was troublesome, short-tempered, and always ready to throw a punch when someone provoked him. He didn't care whether the person standing before him was stronger, taller, or more experienced. If someone insulted him or deliberately picked a fight, Ryan would respond with his fists before he ever considered using his words.
He wasn't the kind of person who went around looking for innocent people to hurt. But once his temper flared, he rarely stopped to think about the consequences.
Unfortunately, the world had never given him much reason to think that anyone would care about his own feelings, either.
His life had begun to fall apart long before he was old enough to understand what a family was supposed to mean.
His father drank.
And when he drank, he became a different person.
The man who should have protected Ryan and his mother became the source of their suffering. Their home, which should have been a place of comfort, gradually became a place of fear.
Then, one terrible day, the unthinkable happened.
His father killed his mother.
It was an act that shattered Ryan's world in a single moment.
The woman who had cared for him, comforted him, and loved him despite his troublesome nature was gone. And the man responsible for her death did not stay to face the consequences of what he had done.
His father abandoned him.
Just like that, Ryan lost both of his parents.
One was dead.
The other was gone.
And Ryan was left alone.
For a time, he continued living the way he always had. He still got into fights when people provoked him. He still reacted to insults with anger, and he still refused to let others walk over him.
But there was something different about him now.
He had lost the person who had given him a reason to come home.
His mother had been the one person who could make him listen. Even when he caused trouble, she had tried to guide him. Even when he made mistakes, she had never stopped treating him as her son.
Without her, the world felt strangely empty.
Yet Ryan did not know how to deal with that emptiness.
He only knew how to fight.
And fighting, he would eventually learn, could not bring back the dead.
There was one memory Ryan could never forget.
It was the memory of his mother's final moments.
Even now, when he tried to recall those moments, he could remember the weakness in her voice and the way she had looked at him.
She had known that she was running out of time.
And Ryan, despite all his recklessness, had understood that something was terribly wrong.
He had been a troublesome boy. He had fought with other children, argued with people, and repeatedly found himself in situations that left others complaining about his behavior.
But his mother had never asked him to become a perfect person.
She had never demanded that he stop being himself entirely.
Instead, as she lay dying, she asked him for one final thing.
"Ryan..."
Her voice had been weak.
He had moved closer immediately.
"Mom?"
She looked at him, struggling to speak.
"Promise me something."
Ryan had never been good at making promises. He was impulsive, stubborn, and rarely thought very far ahead.
But this was his mother.
So he listened.
"Please..." she whispered. "Don't hurt girls. At least... promise me that."
For a moment, Ryan had simply stared at her.
Then he answered immediately.
"Okay, Mom. I promise."
He didn't argue.
He didn't ask why she wanted that promise.
He didn't hesitate.
If his mother wanted him to do something, he would do it.
That was all there was to it.
He had given her his word while she was still breathing, and he had meant every word he said.
But a promise could not save her.
Her eyes slowly lost their light.
And the boy who had always believed he could fight his way through any problem discovered that there were things in this world against which even his fists were useless.
His mother was gone.
Ryan had kept breathing.
But something inside him had broken.
He would remember that promise for the rest of his life.
Even when he forgot other things, even when years passed, even when his world changed beyond recognition, those final words would remain with him.
They were the last thing he had given his mother.
And he would never willingly take them back.
After his parents were gone, Ryan continued getting into trouble for a while.
Whenever someone provoked him, he fought back.
Whenever someone insulted him, he answered with anger.
And whenever a fight broke out, the other person's parents would eventually appear.
They complained.
They blamed Ryan.
Some accused him of being a bad influence. Others demanded that someone teach him manners. They spoke as if they understood everything about him simply because they had seen him fight.
Ryan used to argue with them.
He used to explain that he hadn't started the fight, that someone else had provoked him, or that he had simply refused to let another person bully him.
Sometimes, he was telling the truth.
Sometimes, he was just too stubborn to admit that he had gone too far.
But eventually, he noticed something.
Nobody really cared about his explanation.
The other parents wanted someone to blame, and Ryan was an easy target.
Why would they listen to a boy who had no parents standing beside him?
Why would they believe him when the other children had their own families to defend them?
At first, Ryan grew angry.
Then he grew tired.
Finally, he stopped trying.
The next time someone complained about him, he didn't argue.
When someone called him troublesome, he didn't deny it.
When someone criticized his behavior, he didn't bother explaining himself.
He simply accepted whatever they said.
"You're a problem child."
"Okay."
"You never listen to anyone."
"Fine."
"Don't you have anything to say for yourself?"
"No."
That was how it began.
Ryan stopped wasting his energy on people who had already decided what kind of person he was.
He stopped caring whether strangers thought he was good or bad.
He stopped trying to prove that he wasn't the villain in every story.
If people wanted to hate him, they could hate him.
If they wanted to misunderstand him, they could do that, too.
What difference did it make?
His mother was gone.
His father had abandoned him.
And none of the people who judged him could bring either of them back.
Gradually, the boy who once answered every provocation with his fists became a boy who often couldn't be bothered to answer at all.
His temper hadn't vanished.
His stubbornness hadn't disappeared.
He had simply lost interest in explaining himself to the world.
Ryan had not learned to stop caring because he had become wise. He had stopped caring because, to him, caring about other people's opinions had become pointless.
As time passed, Ryan withdrew further into himself.
He had no family waiting for him at home, no mother asking how his day had gone, and no father who would return to apologize for abandoning him.
There was nobody whose expectations he felt compelled to meet.
So he found something else to occupy his time.
Mobile games.
At first, they were simply a distraction.
Whenever he played, he could forget about his empty home. He could stop thinking about the past. He could enter a world where he had objectives to complete, enemies to defeat, and rewards to earn.
Inside those games, things made sense.
Win a battle, and you received a reward.
Complete a mission, and you progressed.
Become stronger, and the enemies who once defeated you would eventually fall before you.
Real life was nothing like that.
In real life, being strong didn't bring his mother back. Winning a fight didn't make him less alone. And explaining himself to other people didn't guarantee that they would understand.
So Ryan played.
One hour became several.
Several hours became entire evenings.
He neglected responsibilities, avoided conversations, and grew increasingly lazy. If he had a choice between doing something productive and lying down with his phone, he would usually choose the latter.
He wasn't particularly ambitious.
He didn't have some grand dream of becoming rich, famous, or respected.
He simply wanted to be left alone.
As long as he had his phone and a game to play, the rest of the world could do whatever it wanted.
People might have called his lifestyle pathetic.
They might have said he was wasting his life.
They might even have been right.
Ryan didn't care.
He had stopped expecting anything from the world, and in return, he stopped feeling obligated to give the world anything.
His life became a monotonous cycle of sleeping, eating, and playing games.
Days passed.
Then months.
And without realizing it, Ryan began spending more and more of his life staring at a screen.
He never imagined that the very habit he used to escape his loneliness would eventually become the reason his first life came to an end.
Among the games Ryan played, there was one that particularly fascinated him.
It was a fantasy game filled with powerful characters, mysterious abilities, ancient beings, and battles that could reshape entire worlds.
Ryan enjoyed it for the same reason he enjoyed most games.
There was always something new to discover.
A stronger enemy to defeat.
A hidden ability to unlock.
A mysterious character whose story had yet to be revealed.
He could spend hours exploring its world without becoming bored.
One day, however, something unusual caught his attention.
He saw several pictures of a female character.
At first, he didn't think much of them.
She appeared to be a powerful female main character, the kind of figure who belonged at the center of a grand fantasy story.
But there was something strange about the images.
The woman was surrounded by forces that Ryan could not easily understand. One image seemed to depict divine power, radiating an overwhelming sense of majesty. Another showed a mysterious black energy that looked unlike anything he had encountered in the game before.
Perhaps it was the woman's appearance.
Perhaps it was the strange power surrounding her.
Or perhaps it was simply the curiosity of a gamer who had stumbled upon something he had never seen before.
Whatever the reason, he remembered the pictures.
Then he moved on.
He had no idea that those images meant anything beyond the game.
He had no idea that the female character might be connected to a future far beyond his imagination.
Most importantly, he had no idea that the images he had casually glanced at were not merely pictures.
They were glimpses.
Glimpses of events that had not yet happened.
Glimpses of a world that existed somewhere beyond his current life.
A world where the female character would become part of a future that Ryan had somehow been allowed to see.
But at that moment, Ryan knew none of this.
To him, they were just strange images from a game.
And he soon forgot about them.
Or at least, he thought he had.
Ryan's days continued much as they always had.
He played for hours.
He ignored the world around him.
He paid little attention to how much time had passed or how badly his habits were affecting him.
The phone in his hands had become his favorite escape, and he had grown so accustomed to that escape that he rarely considered putting it down.
Then, one day, his body finally gave out.
The exact moment came without the dramatic warning he might have expected from a game.
There was no countdown.
No flashing screen announcing that he had reached his final life.
No miraculous opportunity to undo his mistakes.
There was only a sudden, frightening realization that something was wrong.
Ryan's attention drifted away from the screen.
For the first time in a long while, the game in front of him no longer mattered.
His body felt strangely weak.
His thoughts became difficult to hold on to.
He tried to understand what was happening, but his mind refused to cooperate.
What... is this?
The question formed slowly.
He had spent so much of his life treating every day as if there would always be another one.
Another morning.
Another match.
Another opportunity to continue doing exactly what he had done yesterday.
But now, for the first time, the possibility of tomorrow seemed uncertain.
The screen before him blurred.
And with it came a memory.
A woman surrounded by an extraordinary light.
A mysterious black force.
Two names.
Divinity.
Z Black.
The images returned to him with startling clarity.
Why was he remembering them now?
What had made those pictures so strange?
For a fleeting moment, Ryan felt that he had overlooked something important. Something hidden behind those images, something that had been waiting for him to notice.
But he couldn't put the pieces together.
His thoughts were slipping away too quickly.
His life, which had once seemed endlessly repetitive, was suddenly becoming terribly short.
And then another memory surfaced.
His mother's face.
Her weak voice.
Her final request.
Don't hurt girls.
Ryan had agreed immediately.
He remembered that much.
Even after everything that had happened to him, even after he had stopped caring about so many things, he had never willingly taken back that promise.
Mom...
He couldn't tell whether he had spoken aloud or merely thought the word.
He had no grand final speech.
No list of accomplishments to look back on.
No great ambition left unfulfilled.
His life had been a mess, and he knew it.
He had wasted countless hours. He had pushed people away. He had allowed himself to drift through his days without asking what he wanted his future to become.
And now his future was disappearing.
So this is it, huh?
The thought was strangely quiet.
There was no heroic music.
No dramatic declaration.
Only a boy who had spent his life avoiding the world, finally realizing that he would soon leave it behind.
His consciousness faded.
The images vanished.
The memories grew distant.
And Ryan died.
His first life ended without glory, without achievement, and without anyone waiting to welcome him home.
For the world he left behind, he was merely another person who had died.
But death was not the end of his story.
Far beyond the world he knew, beyond the limits of the game he had played, a different world continued to move toward its own future.
A world of extraordinary powers.
A world where the female figure from those mysterious images would become part of events that could change everything.
And somewhere within that world, a new life was about to begin.
A life that would belong to Ryan.
He had no idea what awaited him.
He did not know who his new parents would be, what kind of world he would enter, or why those images had appeared before his death.
He did not know that the family he was about to receive would help heal wounds he had carried for years.
Nor did he know that, even after being given a second chance, some things from his first life would remain with him.
His indifference.
His laziness.
His troublesome nature.
And the final promise he had made to his mother.
Death had taken his first life.
But it had not taken his memories.
And it had certainly not taken his promise.
Somewhere beyond the darkness, Ryan's second life was waiting.