Soulscorched

“People cling to life as if it were everything, yet when death finally arrives, it is not death they fear—but the loss of what they never truly valued.” — Paraphrased from Arthur Schopenhauer (existential pessimism interpretation) Ren Santier did not arrive in a better world. He arrived in a world where death was incomplete. Souls did not leave cleanly. They scattered, lingered, and sometimes returned wrong. The boundary between ending and continuation had weakened, and everything alive suffered for it in ways most people could not properly explain, only endure. Ren was a transmigrator, but that fact meant very little here. In this world, survival was rare, but dying peacefully is more than rare. People built their lives around avoiding suffering, yet the moment death approached, most of them realized they had never understood what they were protecting in the first place. Ren’s path was simple in definition, if not in consequence. To understand death. To endure what it leaves behind. And to remain himself while everything else forgets what true death means. Ren was forced to see the end of this world.