NOVEL NEXT I just wanted to live.
So when I unexpectedly got a second life, I was grateful for that miracle.
Even if my life was insignificant, it was fine. Compared to my first life, where I waited on a sickbed for death, I believed I could be satisfied living day by day as an unnamed villager, just scraping by.
I wasn’t even bothered by the fact that I had been thrown into a strange world alone. Didn’t they say that even rolling in dog poop is better than this world? To feel alive, the unfamiliarity was just a spice.
I didn’t care that I had settled into a new body. I was a bit flustered at first because I even changed genders, but if my body moved as I willed it, gender was a trivial matter that I could accept.
Even when I realized that I wasn’t actually human… I thought it would be fine. I had a human heart, memories of living as a human, and days spent building understanding with them, so I thought we could understand each other.
That’s what I thought.
I thought so.
How foolish that thought was. As someone who lived their life frail in a greenhouse, I was too naive and dumb to recognize malice.
It was only after everything became irreversible that I understood the kindness I had enjoyed in my first life was actually a hypocrisy sent to a terminal patient, whose existence was completely devoid of threats in a fiercely competitive society.
Why didn’t I realize I had no enemies because I was completely marginalized? How foolish it was to think that the world was beautiful while having been thrown into a position of vulnerability and living off the consideration given to me like charity.
In my first life, I was entirely harmless, but now I wasn’t.
Even if I claimed for understanding and coexistence, I held the ‘possibility’ that I could threaten them.
Yes, possibility.
Whether I had guilt or not was never important from the start.
In their eyes, I was a monster, and that was reason enough for them to want me dead.
I want to live.
I don’t want to die.
Please don’t kill me.
Even when I plead, they do not stop.
I realize too late that to not get taken away, I must take away.
That if I don’t want to die, I have to kill.
And I make a decision.
No matter what, I will survive.
Even if I have to kill them all and take everything,
Even if it means giving up being human,
Even if I become a monster that drinks human blood,
I will definitely survive.