Evening 6:45.
Askra was planning to go for a run. He didn't want to sleep again. That dream—no, that nightmare—would hunt him if he fell asleep. With this thought, he decided to go out for another run.
But? Would something same happen?
As the thought came, he kept himself locked inside his room. Doors locked, windows closed. He couldn't fight back against his fear right now. His mental health was completely disturbed.
"God has chosen you! You can't escape!" Those words kept playing in his mind. On his back, he felt like those tattoo-like markings were burning.
"Stop it! Someone stop him!" Askra said. He started to cry. "Stop! Please stop. I can't take it anymore. Stop it."
Then! He lost consciousness! Slowly!
He didn't know when, but when he woke up, the nightmare began! Again!
The same clock. The same time. And the same feeling.
The clock read 2:49 when his body began to betray him. His jaw tightened. His fists clenched the thin sheet until his knuckles blanched. In the dream he was already begging himself—Wake up, please, wake up—but the words dissolved before they reached his tongue. His chest rose and fell in shallow, useless gasps. Sweat pooled in the hollow of his throat.
Then the breath came.
Not the warm, living breath of someone who once smiled at him. This was cold, deliberate, like air rising from an open grave. It dragged across the nape of his neck, carrying the faint, impossible scent of sandalwood and his mother's old jasmine oil.
He woke with a violent start.
The village room was silent except for the clock's steady tick. Moonlight sliced through the cracked window, painting silver scars across the mud walls. For one heartbeat everything felt almost ordinary. Then the mattress dipped beside him.
Aunt Juhi was there.
She wore the red sari he had memorized years ago—the one she had worn the day she came to his parents' house for his sister's engagement, the day he had accidentally brushed her hand while serving tea and felt lightning in his veins. Her hair spilled loose over her shoulders, black and shining. Her eyes, soft and knowing, caught the moonlight the way they always had when she teased him about his studies.
"Askra," she whispered, voice velvet and warm. "You look so tired, beta."
His heart cracked open at the sound of that familiar endearment. For a moment the nightmare forgot itself. He almost reached for her, the way a drowning man reaches for the last light on shore. She had been the only softness left after the fire. The only person who still called him by his childhood name. The only one who made the loneliness feel survivable.
The clock clicked to 2:55.
She leaned closer. Her fingers—cool, impossibly cool—traced the line of his jaw. And then the warmth vanished.
Her smile stretched too wide. The skin at the corners of her mouth split with a wet, tearing sound, like silk ripping over bone. Blackness poured into her eyes until they were nothing but two bottomless wells. Her beautiful face began to peel away in thin, curling strips, revealing raw muscle and something darker beneath—charcoal flesh that glistened like wet ash. Her hair lifted, writhing as though each strand had its own hungry life. The jasmine scent curdled into something metallic and spoiled.
She was still Aunt Juhi.
And she was no longer anything human.
A low, distorted laugh crackled from her throat, the sound of a radio drowning in static and broken glass. "You wanted this," the voice hissed, layering his mother's gentle scolding with his father's disappointed sigh. "You wanted me."
She moved faster than thought. One moment she was beside him; the next she was straddling his chest, knees pinning his ribs with crushing weight. Her nails—long, black, curved like hooks—dug into his shoulders. Blood welled instantly.
"Give me pleasure," she crooned, the words warping, multiplying, echoing inside his skull. "Give me what you never gave your mother before she burned."
She lowered her head. Her teeth—red as fresh blood, jagged as shattered pottery—sank into his cheek. Not with pain. With something worse. A slow, sucking absence. He felt memories being pulled out of him: his mother's laugh when she pinched his cheeks, his father teaching him to ride the old bicycle, the secret nights he had lain awake imagining Aunt Juhi's hands instead of his own. Each bite took another piece of who he used to be. He tried to scream. His throat only produced a wet, strangled click.
She ate deeper.
The room filled with the sound of tearing.
Then—nothing?
No! It begins again.
The clock goes back to 2:49.
Aunt Juhi! The same woman. But this time she looked more horrific. She launched on him. Ate him like a piece of cake.
"Hahaha!" She laughed.
"Why? Why?" Askra asked in a low, painful last voice.
But no answer came. Only the sound of chewing flesh came.
When Askra thought it ends, the clock goes back to 2:49.
Today doesn't seem it will end so soon.
"How much longer will I stay here? How much longer will I die? I don't want to. I can't anymore. Leave me," Askra said while crying.
But that didn't end. Aunt Juhi launched and ate again. Again. Again.
When it continued so much that Askra lost his will to survive or fight back, just laid there and let it continue, that's when something strange happened. Everything stopped. The clock too.
Slowly everything broke like a glass.
The place changed. A red sky. Black smoke on ground. White exoskeleton of a huge serpent laying on the ground. And there, stood a shinigami. Ancient death god, skeletal lich king in crimson ritual robes, wearing a deep crimson hooded robe with intricate golden embroidery and chains, adorned with glowing magical relics and gemstones across his chest, skeletal face with glowing orange eyes visible beneath the hood, holding an ornate staff with a blazing fire orb and curved blade design, conjuring a burning miniature world in his hand surrounded by flames and molten energy glowing runes, burning souls trapped inside a floating orb, chains binding cursed artifacts, hellfire swirling around.
"A shinigami? Is this the end? Everything ended?" Askra asked himself.
Suddenly he heard a familiar voice. A voice that's been long forgotten.
"Askra!" The voice said.
Although it's been a long time, Askra recognised the voice.
"Grandpa?" Askra asked.
"Fight Askra! Fight it! You can do it! Askra you have our shinigami powers in your soul. Don't let it be consumed by a mere cursed entity. Fight!" The voice said. But it felt like this voice was fading.
And slowly he was back.
Same room. The clock was ticking 2:49. Aunt Juhi is sitting right beside him. He looked at her.
Fear, panic—everything came in his mind. But then he heard his grandpa's voice again.
"Fight! Fight Askra!"
But how? He doesn't have any weapons…!
Fear!
Fear is one of the most primal, powerful, and universal emotions shared by humans and animals alike. At its core, it is the brain and body's ancient alarm system, screaming: "Threat detected—act now!"
From the instinctive terror of death, fire, thunder, and earthquakes to the quiet dread of ageing, fear takes many forms.
But the most terrifying fear of all is the one that slowly crushes the soul from within.
But fear also gives birth to anger sometimes. Sometimes it gives birth to a spark. Spark of a will. Will to do whatever you can to survive. Human instincts sometimes do wonders.
Askra wasn't opposite to this law. He launched on Aunt Juhi before she could and bit her neck. He felt pain in his teeth but he bit harder.
His teeth went through her flesh. Sanskrit words came out of his mouth. The words floating around that entity. Slowly that entity goes into his body.
Crack!
A sound came!
He looks back! That clock broke. And with that everything started to break like glass.
Askra started to feel heavy. He knows sleep is taking him on her lap.
"Finally! Some sleep." Askra said before falling asleep.
††
At the same time, in the city. A luxurious villa named "Xivixus".
A man was laying in the bathtub with a dead girl. The girl is at least 27. Her body was sucked dry.
Suddenly the man felt his hand burning. In a second he lost his arm and a new one grew there. But he didn't react. Like it's nothing major.
As he came to the light, we see the same man Askra met in his dream, when he was sleeping in the noon.
"Interesting. So he broke the god's blessings. Hehehe! God really has eyes for his children. Seems like this game of tag will be entertaining." The man said while laughing like a madman.
Askra didn't wake up right away.
For the first time in thirty-one long, torturous nights, there was no nightmare waiting for him. No ticking clock frozen at 2:49. No cold breath crawling across his neck. No monstrous laughter ripping through his skull.
Only silence.
Deep, endless, peaceful silence.
He floated in it, weightless, as if his body had finally slipped free from the world that had been slowly devouring him. The pain was gone. The constant, crushing fear had vanished. Even the precious memories that the creature had torn out of him now felt distant and hazy, like old echoes heard underwater.
But something else remained.
A quiet warmth.
It pulsed gently inside his chest—steady, deliberate, like a second heartbeat that had always been there, waiting.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
With every beat, faint golden cracks began to spread through the darkness around him, thin lines of light fighting to break through what felt like a sealed coffin.
Then, slowly, he opened his eyes.
The ceiling of his uncle's old village room came into focus, blurred at first, then sharpening. Soft morning light spilled through the cracked window, gentler and warmer than it had felt in weeks. It was real.
He took a deep breath.
No sandalwood. No rotting jasmine. Just clean morning air.
"…I'm alive," he whispered.
His voice shook, not from fear this time, but from pure disbelief.
He pushed himself up on shaky arms. His body felt… different. Not completely healed, not suddenly powerful, but undeniably awake. As if something deep inside him had finally been unlocked.
His hand moved almost on its own toward his back.
The markings.
They were no longer faint, faded lines. They had spread across his skin, expanded, and twisted into far more intricate patterns—ancient symbols that seemed to shift and move if he stared at them too long. And right at the center, just below his shoulder blade, one mark glowed with a dull, stubborn orange light.
Like embers refusing to die.
Askra froze, heart pounding.
Then came a whisper.
Not from the room. Not from outside.
It came from within him.
"You have taken the first step."
His breath caught in his throat.
"…Who…?"
No answer came.
But the warmth in his chest pulsed again.
Thump.
And suddenly, a flash of memory hit him like lightning—the blood-red sky, the ancient Shinigami standing tall, the burning miniature world spinning in its skeletal hand.
Askra staggered off the bed, gripping the wall to steady himself as the vision faded.
"…This isn't over," he muttered under his breath.
Outside, the village carried on with its usual morning sounds, completely unaware of the war raging inside one broken boy's soul.
In the quiet of the room, the Shinigami appeared once more, its crimson-robed skeletal form towering yet strangely gentle.
"I am here to train you," it said, voice echoing with ancient authority. "But your soul has already been eaten away so much by that cursed entity. You need to rest first."
Askra looked up at the figure, eyes wide with a mix of fear and hope.
"Are you really my grandpa?"
The Shinigami nodded slowly, its glowing orange eyes softening for a moment.
"Yes. I am your grandpa. Don't ask about the others—we don't have much time. I need to go back soon."
It leaned closer, its presence both terrifying and comforting.
"Just remember this carefully: Tomorrow night, a great star event will happen. Whatever you wish for, you will receive it. Because you now carry the stigma, your wishes will be greatly amplified. So ask for something that will allow you to fully awaken as a Shinigami and unlock the power hidden deep in your soul. That is the only way you will survive what's coming. Remember my words, Askra. Remember them well."
Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, everything vanished again.
Askra sat there in silence, staring at the empty space where the Shinigami had stood.
"Something great? A star event?" he murmured. "What does that even mean? But… I need to be ready. A wish that will turn me into a Shinigami…"
He fell deep into thought, mind racing.
"If I ask for a system to help me use this power… that seems possible!"
A spark of excitement cut through the lingering fear.
"Well, I should write it down first—what I really want."
Askra quickly grabbed his old notebook and a pen. As he began writing, his brain started working faster than it had in years. Ideas poured in—wild, exciting, dangerous ideas.