Chapter 3
<47 days of hell>(2)
✧Dreams and lies✧
Keter (כֶּתֶר) — A revered name in the "Tree of Life," meaning "Crown," embodies profound compassion and utter humility. It symbolizes pure consciousness, transcending the boundaries of human understanding, often spoken of as "Nothingness" or the "Hidden Light."
Keter, later designated by the Foundation as "The Cursed File," harbors an origin cloaked in shadows. Once known as Jin Chen (金晨), his story began in China, though it was destined to span worlds beyond our own.
In the year 2590, as the Third World War ignited, Jin Chen fled his homeland, a small seaside city caught in a ruthless battle between Russian and Chinese forces. Seeking refuge, he crossed the waters to Japan, the closest sanctuary. Upon reaching Japan, he sought further escape to Korea, hoping to find peace. Yet fate held darker plans: in Yokohama(横浜), he was engulfed in the aftermath of a nuclear blast, which left the land barren and irradiated. Jin Chen, believed to have perished in the explosion, found himself instead entangled in something far stranger — a rift.
This rift, a tear in the fabric of existence itself, originated from the death of Hoshino, an event that echoed across timelines, creating anomalies where realities twisted and bent. Jin Chen's rift led him to a different reality altogether — one that existed within the depths of a black hole, a bizarre, alternate universe where reality obeyed none of the laws we know.
In the grand expanse, every alternative universe (AU), multiverse (AO), timeline (TX), world-line (AL), parallel universe (PU), and parallel world (PX) weaves a complex tapestry of possibilities. A timeline represents various moments in a universe, threaded by an imaginary scale of probability. An alternative universe (AU) follows the probabilities of occurrences, creating realms that vary from ours in countless ways. Minor shifts can lead to worlds where people possess supernatural powers or societies are locked in ancient epochs. In more profound AUs, reality's structure warps, creating realms where black holes are habitable, or magic permeates existence.
Each AU holds limitless potential. Thus, alternative universes, timelines, and worlds are capable of converging into singular entities, transcending even infinity. When Jin Chen crossed into the rift, he emerged in an Alternate-Universal-Line (AUT), a fusion of alternative universe and timeline, reshaping his very being.
Jin Chen's journey through the rift shattered his body down to the atomic level. His molecular structure twisted, bones elongating and thinning to grotesque proportions. His neck became transparent; his skin turned a deep, matte black; his mouth vanished entirely. His sensory organs morphed — his nose became his mouth, his ears dissolved into black mist. Composed only of helium and hydrogen, his body became a shadow of humanity. His eyes filled with darkness, spilling ink-black tears, while his hands and feet melted into a formless mist with skeletal traces. His brain ceased to function in the traditional sense, transferring what remained of his rationality into a single, small object he carried: a file, containing the fragments of his former self.
The pain was unspeakable. He endured the agony of his body splintering, burning, electrocuting, and dismembering, each joint dislocating and his heart faltering repeatedly. His nails were torn away; his insides twisted and exploded; he drowned in despair, gasping for oxygen. His very organs twisted, disintegrated, and reassembled, suffering horrors beyond comprehension. All these torments repeated in an endless loop, as he was trapped in the singularity of a black hole, where time itself reversed and spiraled around him.
Jin Chen, now reformed as Keter, died 562,290 times, each death imbued with unimaginable suffering. His file — a corrupted remain of his essence — became tainted by nuclear radiation.
From the singularity, Keter, formerly Jin Chen, was thrust into World-Line 72,593, an existence that defies mortal comprehension.
✧
Mark had never been a man who liked children. In fact, he could never have imagined dedicating his life to raising them — until the death of his son changed everything.
Mark was born in New York, where he grew up and made a name for himself as a successful businessman. He married a quiet woman from Japan, who'd urged him to learn her language and customs, as she wasn't comfortable speaking English. He obliged, learning enough Japanese (日本語) to communicate with her. They had a son, Klein, and for a time, Mark had the picture-perfect life he'd always envisioned. But it all shattered when his wife died in a car accident, leaving him to raise Klein alone.
He didn't let the grief break him, not outwardly. Mark focused on his business and poured his remaining love into his son. Klein was all he had left, and he promised himself that he'd protect him, no matter the cost. Yet, just as he seemed to have recovered some stability, his closest friends — people he'd trusted his entire life — falsely accused him of murder. Overnight, his reputation crumbled. The fallout was swift and ruthless; his house was seized, his wealth vanished, and his son, Klein, was caught in the crossfire, exposed to relentless bullying and cruelty.
Mark's heart ached each time he saw Klein come home bruised and silent. Klein would brush it off, insisting he was fine. But Mark could see it in his eyes: Klein was struggling, drowning in a world that rejected him. Still, he didn't give up. The boy kept his head high, even as he endured vicious treatment from classmates who saw him as an outsider — a broken family's son, a half-foreigner who didn't fit in.
With no other options, Mark decided to move them to Japan, his wife's homeland, hoping for a fresh start. They settled in a small, cramped apartment, and Mark opened a modest business to support them. Life was hard, and the change weighed heavily on Klein. The language barrier was harsh; despite his father's efforts to teach him Japanese, he struggled to fit in. His foreign features and halting Japanese made him a target. The bullying followed them, more insidious and cruel. At school, Klein's classmates would shove him in hallways, scribble cruel notes in his books, and taunt him in words that became sharper as he learned to understand them. They'd throw his lunch in the trash, lock him in empty classrooms — small cruelties that bled him of innocence and made him grow quiet and guarded.
Yet, even as he endured this cruelty, Klein clung to a strange, naive dream of making the world a better place. When he turned 20, Klein was accepted into a mysterious foundation, an organization known only to a select few. The foundation's application process was grueling, filtering for people who clung to hope even in the face of despair and who had no fear of death. Klein, who'd faced despair his entire life, passed the test with ease, along with only five other applicants out of a thousand.
When Mark learned of Klein's acceptance, he had mixed feelings. The foundation was shrouded in secrecy, and he knew very little about its origins or purpose. And then, before he could protest, he learned that Klein was being sent on a high-risk mission. Mark urged him to reconsider, tried to tell him there was no shame in walking away from danger. But Klein was resolute, his words calm and almost reassuring, "Don't worry, Dad. I'll be fine. I'll come back soon." Mark wanted to press further, but before he could, Klein had slipped away, leaving only his promise behind.
Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, but Klein did not return. Mark filed a missing person's report, clinging to the hope that his son would be found. He went to Klein's school, hoping to speak to his friends, hoping they might know something. Instead, he discovered the cruelty his son had suffered in silence, the bullying that had chipped away at him piece by piece. He was devastated, guilt gnawing at him for not having seen it sooner, for not doing something, anything, to protect his son from that darkness.
Months passed with no sign of Klein. The police turned up nothing, and Mark's hope dwindled until, one year after Klein's disappearance, his phone rang. The call came from an unknown number. Mark picked up, feeling a strange sense of dread. A cold, nonchalant voice on the other end greeted him, sounding almost annoyed. "Ah, hello? Yeah? No need to respond, just listen. Your son died on a mission at an old research site — the kind of place that probably doesn't exist anymore, if you catch my drift. His body, well… it rotted away. But don't worry, we'll compensate you. Bye now."
Mark's world froze, his mind struggling to process what he'd heard. He knew there was always a chance that Klein wouldn't come back, that he could be gone forever, but he hadn't been ready to confront it. He wasn't ready to hear that his son was dead, with no chance for goodbyes, no body to bury, nothing but a voice on a phone that dismissed his child's life as an inconvenience.
His grief turned inward, eating at him, leaving him isolated. He withdrew from the world, haunted by Klein's voice, by memories of his son's face, his smile, the hope that never faded even when life had given him every reason to let it go. Mark fell into despair, his nights filled with nightmares, dreams in which he saw Klein, young and afraid, reaching out to him from some dark, unreachable place.
It was during this isolation that Mark stumbled across Klein's will, tucked away among his belongings. It was brief, written in a shaky hand, but its words were clear: "Build a place where children can be safe, where they won't suffer." It was Klein's last wish, a small hope that had survived everything else. With no other purpose left, Mark used the compensation he'd received to build an orphanage. He chose the site carefully, setting it at the same coordinates where the foundation had said Klein died. Somehow, he believed it might bring him closer to his son, perhaps even help him find peace.
Yet, even as he poured his energy into the orphanage, something felt wrong. The building, tall and bleak, seemed to resist him. The walls creaked and whispered in the night, as though they were alive. The hallways stretched too long, and strange drafts would swirl without reason, carrying faint murmurs Mark couldn't quite catch.
The children arrived one by one, quiet and withdrawn, as if they, too, felt the wrongness of the place. They were unusual children, with hollow eyes and a silence that disturbed him. They seemed haunted, just like the building itself. They never cried, never smiled, as if every bit of warmth had been drained from them long ago.
One night, as he checked a broken glass container, he discovered a file he'd overlooked. It was marked with strange symbols, and the coordinates matched those of the orphanage. Something in him recoiled. His fingers trembled as he held it, feeling an urge to open it, to uncover whatever secrets it held. But he didn't. He put the file away, leaving it untouched.
✧
Keter, formerly known as Jin Chen, was a supernatural entity — a consciousness that had merged with a mysterious file. An anomaly never meant to exist in this world, Keter was an aberration that would soon bring hell upon it.
This was World-line 72,593, a universe marked by subtle but insidious differences that set its fate on a darker course than that of World-line Zero. It had been classified as rank D, a level normally reserved for worlds where survival and prosperity hung by a fragile thread. Normally, such a world would rank as an E, a universe where fate could veer towards misfortune yet wasn't doomed outright. But Keter's presence had shifted everything, pushing the universe's classification up a level.
A shift from E to D may seem insignificant on the surface, but it was profound. E rank implied a world with the slightest chance of redemption, where a shadowed future could still be salvaged. But D rank meant that fate had turned treacherous, that the world was in the grip of a force both hostile and enigmatic. Keter, having gone through a special evolution, had become an entity defying all natural order — a being that simply should not be. Its presence, like a dark infection, had begun eroding the world itself, threatening to drag it into ruin.
✧
Alexei Volkov was born in a remote Russian village, where winters were long and brutal, and life was unforgiving. His family's small home clung to the edge of the forest, where he and his sister used to play under the watchful gaze of towering pines. But their laughter faded on a harsh February night when a fire tore through the village. His parents had gone to gather supplies, leaving Alexei alone with his sister. Flames swept through the house faster than he could run, trapping them inside. Though he survived, his sister did not. The sight of her reaching out to him, her voice desperate, haunted him. Guilt became his constant companion, and despite the years that passed, he felt himself unraveling, a quiet grief and anger knotting within him. When he learned of the foundation, its secrecy intrigued him, and he hoped it might offer answers or, perhaps, an escape.
Ji-hyeon Lee grew up in a bustling Seoul neighborhood, her life shaped by the pressure to succeed in a world where excellence was the bare minimum. She was the pride of her family, an outstanding student and an obedient daughter. But beneath the surface, Ji-hyeon was drowning. Her father, a man of unyielding ambition, imposed strict discipline, punishing even the slightest mistakes. When she scored lower than expected on a major exam, he turned cold, pushing her into isolation and long hours of study with no reprieve. In her loneliness, she tried to reach out to her best friend, only to learn that she, too, had given up under similar pressures. This broke Ji-hyeon in a way no punishment could. She began searching for something, anything, that might let her escape from the relentless expectations. Then, she found the foundation's notice, promising a trial for those with unwavering hope. She applied, drawn by the possibility of a place where she could vanish from the life she could no longer bear.
Michael Thompson grew up on a small farm in rural Ohio, surrounded by fields stretching endlessly to the horizon. His childhood had been quiet and peaceful until his mother fell ill with a rare disease. They spent every last penny trying to save her, but the treatments drained them, and after his mother's death, his father fell into despair. Michael watched his once strong and kind father wither, succumbing to alcoholism and ultimately abandoning him. Michael was left alone to care for the farm, toiling under the weight of debt and loneliness. With nothing left but memories of a family that had faded like an old photograph, he longed for something more, something that would break the numb monotony. The foundation's entrance exam arrived like an unspoken invitation, a glimmer of escape. He joined, hoping it would bring meaning to his lost life.
Anaya Patel came from a rural village in southern India, a place vibrant with colors, festivals, and stories passed down through generations. But her life had been far from idyllic. Her family was burdened with debts, and as the oldest daughter, she bore much of the weight. Her younger brother had been sickly since birth, requiring medicine and care they couldn't afford. Desperate to save her family, Anaya dropped out of school and took a job in the nearby city. She worked tirelessly, facing exploitation, sleepless nights, and the cruelty of strangers. When her brother passed away, her world shattered; everything she had sacrificed seemed futile. Her parents, consumed by grief, withdrew from her. In the empty space that once held her dreams, only bitterness and sorrow remained. One day, she heard of the foundation's exam. It was mysterious, shrouded in silence, and she saw it as her last chance to leave her village, her pain, and perhaps herself behind.Anaya Patel decided to go to Japan.
✧
Hoshino jolted awake, his hand grasping at nothing as he struggled to remember—was it a dream, or a memory? The tragedies he had witnessed, or rather, endured, clung to his mind like shadows, refusing to let go.
These dreams—or experiences, if he dared call them that—had grown more vivid, more unsettling with each night. The first one had been about a cryptic foundation and its archive, a repository of forbidden files. One file in particular, labeled with the name "Keter," seemed cursed. He had seen it once before, read vague warnings of an entity, a looming threat called "Keter" or perhaps "Jin Chen." He remembered viewing the world through the eyes of a researcher who met a violent end, and a man named Klein, who perished alongside his friends. Even stranger, after waking, the file had somehow appeared before him in the dim light of his room. And then there was the time regression—the haunting reset that began on the forty-first day, or perhaps even earlier. The sensation of déjà vu gnawed at him, as if he had been trapped in this cycle of repetition far longer than he could recall. He tried, at first, to ignore it. Yet the cycle persisted, looping endlessly, until he could no longer turn away.
The second dream had taken him deeper into this enigma, unveiling pieces of Keter—or rather, Jin Chen's origins. The memories were hazy, like fragmented snapshots, but a chilling truth lingered: he was fated to kill this entity if he ever hoped to escape. A task he barely understood yet felt branded upon his mind. His resolve wavered under the weight of it, yet the pain he suffered kept his purpose sharp. He had died over 562,290 times, enduring flames that seared his flesh, electricity that tore his nerves apart, his atoms shattered and distorted in ways beyond human comprehension. The agony was unrelenting, each death a precise, calculated torment. He couldn't explain how his mind remained intact, how he could still think after facing the pain of death so many times.
The third dream was more subdued, a memory of sorts, showing him the director of the orphanage where he once lived, and Klein's story as well. By then, his emotions felt hollowed out, eroded by the endless cycle of death and rebirth. He struggled to care about the memories, they felt distant and irrelevant—but the fourth dream lingered, pressing into his thoughts. Four names echoed through it: Alexei Volkov, Ji-hyeon Lee, Michael Thompson, and Anaya Patel. People bound by a web of sorrow and tragedy. Each had eventually joined the foundation Klein had belonged to. Coincidence, Hoshino told himself, though he wasn't entirely sure he believed it.
Hoshino tried to think about the mysterious foundation but the dreams had begun to blur together, layers of reality and memory colliding. Hoshino's breathing grew shallow as he lay on his side, feeling sleep's grasp slip around him once more. He fought to hold onto these fragments, to piece together their meaning, but the weight of exhaustion pulled him down. His eyelids grew heavy, his vision fading until only darkness remained. Fleeting thoughts surfaced as he succumbed—what awaited him this time? Another memory, another death, or some revelation hidden in the dream's shadows?
And so, Hoshino drifted once more into the depths of dreadful nightmares.
✧
The Foundation is a mysterious organization, shrouded in secrecy and obscured from history. Nothing concrete is known about it—its purpose, its origins, even the date it was founded are all veiled in shadow. Few recall its true name, and even fewer retain memories of their time within it, as if every trace of the Foundation slips deliberately from memory.
Leaving the Foundation is almost impossible. There are only two ways out: through death or severe injury, or by capturing or destroying an entity. Yet even these exits come at a cost. Those who leave do not simply lose their memories. They undergo a process that strips away something far deeper—the very essence of who they were, leaving behind a hollow version of the person they used to be.
In the end, the Foundation erases not only memories, but identity itself, dissolving all traces of its existence like a dream that fades upon waking.
✧
Hoshino found himself there, his senses unfocused, his mind drifting in a haze. He wasn't awake, but he wasn't asleep either. It was as if he'd slipped into some liminal space—a short dream, yet different, disorienting.
Beneath him was a floor as clear as glass, reflecting a sky so vividly blue he felt as though he was floating within it. There was a chair, simple and unassuming, in the middle of this strange place. He walked toward it, each step feeling slow, deliberate. When he reached the chair, he paused, frowning slightly, then sat down, looking around the endless expanse.
A voice—faint, familiar, but not his own—murmured within his mind.
"I—? What is this place? Where… where am I?"
The voice spoke hesitantly, as though it was trying to grasp a memory that refused to settle. Hoshino frowned, unable to determine if the words were his own.
"Wasn't I… sleeping? No… no, I was… at the orphanage… or was it… the Foundation? Wait, what Foundation? Keter? What does that mean?"
The thoughts came as waves, fractured, and in each, he felt like a stranger in his own mind. Strange words, names, symbols floated to the surface like pieces of a puzzle he'd never seen.
Another voice, deeper, colder, responded.
"Is it really so confusing? Perhaps you're just lost in delusion, a mind broken by its own misplaced hope," it sneered, as if mocking the confusion. "Hope. A lie people tell themselves to survive this emptiness. You, clinging to hope—isn't that a joke?"
The first voice protested, fearful, agitated.
"What… what are you saying? Stop! Just… just stop! Hope… it—it's the only thing that keeps us going, right?"
"Pathetic," the deeper voice continued with disdain. "Hope only blinds you. A useless illusion. It's only there to make you forget what's real, what's inevitable."
Hoshino sat, silent, feeling the clash of voices reverberate within him. The arguments scratched at him like nails on glass, growing louder, like echoes clambering for control. A third voice, softer, weary yet resigned, broke through the noise.
"Who… are you two? Are you in my head?" It felt strange—unfamiliar, yet somehow connected, as though it were the voice of someone distant but deeply rooted.
"No," the colder voice snapped, "you are in my mind. All of you… fragments of what I am. Though what that is, I can't even remember."
"Fragments? But… I am Hoshino," the weary voice replied, as if reaching through a fog.
The deeper voice laughed, cold and humorless. "Are you sure of that? What does that name even mean? Just sounds we cling to, desperately believing they make us real."
The first voice interjected, panicked and sharp.
"Stop! Just… stop this. This is all wrong. I don't even understand what any of you are talking about! My head… it's filled with all these pieces—Keter, Jin Chen, the Foundation… they're meaningless, I don't even know if they're real."
The softer voice replied, quiet yet steady. "Does any of this need to be real? Does it matter? We could be dead… for all we know, we already are. I… remember dying, or maybe… no, maybe I only think I do."
Silence followed, thick and suffocating, as the voices seemed to quiet within him, brooding, all seeking some truth hidden beneath the surface.
Hoshino closed his eyes, sensing the weight of the thoughts crowding his mind, twisting and turning. Somewhere deep down, he felt himself drift further into this abyss, a space beyond memory, beyond identity. Reality felt like a flimsy mask, something that could tear away at any moment. And behind it, he knew there was only a vast, indifferent emptiness, a void too deep to comprehend.
One by one, the voices faded into whispers, leaving only fragments of thought—hope, despair, questions unanswered. He sank deeper into the dark, alone yet surrounded by parts of himself he could no longer understand.
Hoshino rose from the chair, his once-red eyes now a strange, shifting green with a yellowish hue, the color seeming to flicker with an otherworldly light. His white hair, once pure, now glitched erratically between black and silver-white, fluttering in a nonexistent wind that seemed to move through the liminal space. As he stood, the world around him shifted, dissolving into a white void of nothingness. His worn-out shirt was gone, replaced by a black hoodie, shadowed and frayed at the edges. Hosh!no, whose face had always held a strange, magnetic charisma, now seemed even more refined, his presence carrying an air of maturity that was almost surreal. But something about him was amiss—his hand flickered, glitching in and out of sight, distorted, as if struggling to hold its own shape.
A translucent green window appeared before him, faintly pulsing.
[Welcome back!]
Hosh!no merely stared, silent.
The screen glitched, and a cascade of error messages flooded the void. Familiar words began to repeat themselves, appearing like an eerie greeting.
[Y!ou have d!i!ed!]
Hosh!no barely registered it, expecting the message by now. But then, something unexpected occurred. The translucent red and blue interface shattered, the space around him flickering with jagged errors. Cracks formed in the very fabric of this reality—a disruption of conceptualized time and space. In an instant, the world turned gray, only to flicker back to the endless white void.
Before him stood another figure—Hoshino.
Hoshino's hair, white from the beginning, framed his gaze as he locked eyes with Hosh!no. In that instant, a tension settled between them. Hosh!no's face twisted with displeasure. He knew the rules well—two identical beings could not exist within a single timeline. Alternate versions from different universes, yes, but not two versions from the same line of time. And yet, here they were.
Hosh!no, visibly older, immediately understood the consequences. Either the paradox would result in both of them ceasing to exist, or the weaker of the two would be forced into death. Each possibility hung in the air, oppressive, inevitable.
Both Hoshino and Hosh!no possessed a mysterious system, but the difference between them was undeniable. Hoshino wielded the [Genocide System], a power crafted to bring despair across universes. Hosh!no, by contrast, held the [Deception System]—powerful, yes, but faint in comparison to the boundless devastation of Genocide.
Suddenly, a myriad of translucent red and blue windows appeared, flickering before Hosh!no. Each one displayed a different scene—Hoshino's deaths, countless and relentless, at the hands of Keter. The windows displayed these moments of agony, each one like a shard of suffering.
One second passed, and Hosh!no crumbled into dust, his form breaking apart as he experienced the agony of hundred thousand deaths. A silence settled in the wake of his absence.
The white void flickered, transforming into an ethereal cosmic expanse, stars shimmering in the dark like distant memories. Hoshino slowly closed his eyes, and as he did, he and the entire space around him began to fade into nothingness, swallowed by the silent vastness.
✧
[Klein has perished to Entity 605.
Alexei Volkov is alive.
Ji-hyeon Lee is alive.
Anaya Patel is alive.
Michael Thompson is alive.]
[Quest: Die 10,000 times]
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[Completed!]
[Quest: Die 100,000 times]
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[Completed!]
[Quest: Die 500,000 times]
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[Completed!]
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[Congratulations. You have almost completed the tutorial.]
[Quests completed: 4/5]
[One quest remains to complete the tutorial.]
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[Quest: Kill an organism with a power threshold stronger than your own]
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[Completed]
[Congratulations. You are the first soul to complete the tutorial.]
[Genocide System
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[Activating True Genocide System]
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[True Genocide System activated]
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[<\checking logs/>]
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[Primary directive: KILL KETER TO PROCEED!!]
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[Trait 『Broken』remains active]
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[Trait 『Deception』 remains active]
[Time remaining to eliminate Keter: 47 days]
[Quest Reward: True Genocide]
[Quest Failure Penalty: Multiverse collapse]
[Remaining attempts: Two]
✧
[There are only two paths to defeating Keter.]
[The first lies with the enigmatic Foundation.]