Orestis shot upright and looked around.

  Same bed. Same faded curtains. Same painting on the wall. He was back in his room. Again.

  Suppressing his agitation, he decided to run a full sweep for foreign mental signatures, distortions in perception, and the tell-tale static of dream manipulation. He hadn’t detected anything wrong the first time, but it had been a cursory thing.

  This time, he didn’t stop at the basics; he went through everything. Every method ever taught to him by ancient seers, every safeguard he had learned while dealing with trickster spirits, every anchor spell and grounding technique he’d memorized across centuries of unwilling immortality.

  In the end, the results were all the same: there were no fractures in memory, no false logic loops, no emotional distortions, and no psychic residue clinging to his thoughts.

  His mind was untouched. Which meant that everything he was seeing, feeling, breathing—every impossible detail—was real.

  Orestis suddenly had a sinking feeling.

  It can’t be…

  He didn’t want it to be true. He needed to verify his theory.

  After looking around, he grabbed a chair and threw it at the mirror, breaking the glass. Then, he picked up a jagged piece and promptly shoved it into his throat.

  S#!%… I’d forgotten how annoying pain feels.

  That was his last thought before things slowly faded to black.

  …

  And then he opened his eyes again.

  “Son of a b@#$%!” Orestis roared as he bolted upright.

  Same bed. Same room. Same cursed morning sunlight leaking through the curtains like nothing in the world was wrong. And there—pristine, uncracked, mocking him—was the mirror.

  The sight of it made him unleash a fresh string of profanity fit to peel the paint off the walls.

  That mirror confirmed it. His nightmare was real.

  Yes, his body was mortal again—he could die now. Wonderful. Great. Exactly what he wanted.

  But staying dead? Apparently that luxury was still off-limits.

  It didn’t take a genius to put it together: every time he died, reality yanked him straight back to this room—this precise moment—like some cosmic reset switch he’d never agreed to.

  No. Absolutely not. I won’t accept this. I refuse. I am going to die—permanently—no matter what it takes.

  That was the exact moment the door flew open.

  A woman stormed inside, her face tight with worry and irritation. It took Orestis several seconds to recognize her as his mother—an absurd delay, considering he had known her for the first fifteen years of his life. But it had also been nearly a thousand years since he’d last seen her, and her features felt like half-forgotten ink on an ancient page.

  I forgot she was alive again.

  Then her voice broke through his daze.

  She was… threatening him? With having his mouth washed out with soap?

  He blinked at her.

  Oh. Right. The swearing.

  To her, he wasn’t a centuries-old immortal with deep-seated trauma and a vocabulary curated from taverns, battlefields, and demon-infested ruins he’d had a hand in creating. He was a ten-year-old boy shouting words that no ten-year-old should even know existed. She was demanding to know where he’d heard such things.

  Under any other circumstance, he might’ve laughed. The absurdity had the potential to be genuinely entertaining.

  But not now. Not when he had bigger problems than parental scolding.

  He dodged her reaching hands and bolted past her, ignoring her startled shout. He didn’t have time for discipline, lectures, or soap-based threats. He had much more important work to do. Like killing himself.

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  Her mention of washing his mouth had sparked an idea—poison. Fast, quiet, effective. Maybe that would break the loop.

  It was easy enough to locate the storage cellar. Sliding inside, he slammed the door shut and dropped the locking bar before anyone could reach him.

  Within moments he located ingredients—herbs, tinctures, powders—that could be coaxed into something suitably lethal. Fortunately, his current body was small and frail, so he didn’t need anything elaborate.

  Voices outside rose in alarm as they tried to force the door open, but he ignored them. He ground, mixed, and prepared with practiced ease. His hands moved with the confidence of someone who had brewed far deadlier concoctions in his long, miserable life.

  Here’s hoping.

  He raised the cup of bitter, acrid liquid and swallowed it in one go.

  Pain lanced through him as his body seized, and his vision faded.

  Once again, Orestis died.

  …

  And then he opened his eyes again.

  Fine. So poison won’t work. Big deal.

  Orestis exhaled sharply, irritation prickling under his skin. There was more than one way to skin a cat—he’d learned that long ago, along with about eight thousand other dubious survival lessons.

  He swung himself out of bed with a determined scowl. If one method failed, he would simply try the next. He’d spent centuries searching for a way to die; now that he actually could, the hardest step was already behind him. All he needed was a method that stuck.

  And so began the grand, miserable experiment.

  At first he threw himself into it with the single-minded efficiency of a man tackling a familiar chore. Hanging, drowning, starving, freezing, burning himself to a crisp—each attempt was crafted with precision, executed without hesitation… and each one landed him right back in his bed, blinking at the ceiling in fresh outrage.

  So he decided to get organized.

  If suicide wouldn’t work, then he’d outsource.

  Unfortunately, nature offered no solutions either. Wolves, bears, snakes, and even the occasional digestive plant failed spectacularly. Frustrated, he turned to more civilized predators.

  Civilization proved equally unreliable: hired assassins, duels, and battlefields filled with swords, arrows, magic, and chaos—all proved to be useless.

  He even flirted with the supernatural. Getting possessed by vengeful ghosts, selling his soul to demons, volunteering for a few sacrificial rituals dedicated to hungry gods.

  And yet, no matter how he died—or how creatively—there was always the same moment of nothingness, followed by his eyes opening to the same morning light, the same cursed bed.

  Eventually, in his growing desperation, he even tried to destroy his mind: sleep deprivation, sensory overload, forbidden rituals, the works. It was an exercise in futility.

  He’d already tried it centuries ago, but he’d been hoping that his weaker body would have weakened his mind. But no. His mind refused to crack. A thousand years of adversity had forged his mental resilience into something unbreakable.

  Still, he refused to yield. His determination burned as fiercely as ever.

  But eventually… finally… after exhausting every strategy, every scrap of knowledge, every ridiculous, desperate idea he could muster—Orestis reached the limit.

  He had run out of ways to die.

  ***

  Orestis opened his eyes and simply lay there, glowering at the ceiling like it had personally wronged him.

  That useless hero. He’d had one job—and somehow managed to fail it in the worst possible way.

  By now, Orestis had long since pieced together the truth; this regression ability had originally belonged to that last hero he’d fought.

  No wonder the idiot had been so fearless. He wasn’t brave, merely certain that death would send him back to try again. It also explained his skills—how he always seemed to know exactly when to push, when to retreat, and when to gamble everything.

  And during their fight, Orestis had—accidentally or otherwise—snagged this regression ability from that hero.

  Although… did the hero also wake up specifically on the morning of his tenth birthday? Or could he choose the rewind point? Even better, could he choose whether to regress at all?

  If he could turn the damned thing off, that would solve all his problems.

  I really wish I could interrogate that idiot about how this works.

  Not that that was going to happen, considering the boy wouldn’t even be born for another thousand years.

  And the only way Orestis could survive long enough to ask him in person… would be to become immortal again.

  He grimaced so hard his face hurt.

  As if I’d be stupid enough to step into that shrine and curse myself a second time. Never happening. Ever.

  Which left him with exactly one option: dying of old age.

  That was the hope, anyway. Maybe the regression wouldn’t trigger if he died naturally. Maybe the ability had standards.

  “… It will work, right?” Orestis muttered, frowning.

  There was absolutely no way to know unless he tried. Which meant he’d have to lay low, keep his head down, and live the most painfully quiet, boring life imaginable. Just until he was wrinkled enough for nature to finish the job.

  Hopefully he wouldn’t get himself accidentally killed before old age claimed him. The thought of dying prematurely again—resetting to ten years old again—and having to repeat the entire timeline made his stomach twist.

  And I thought life was monotonous back when I couldn’t die. Now, dying would mean doing the same thing all over again. Forever.

  If this failed, if he went to sleep as an old man and woke up back here again…

  I swear, I’ll make sure to survive long enough to find that hero—without going anywhere near that shrine—and then I’ll make his life a suffocating, unending hell. Maybe I’ll drag him to the shrine and make him immortal. See how he likes that.

  The mental image of that idiot hero suffering under that curse brightened Orestis’s mood considerably. Enough, at least, for him to finally roll out of bed.

  He didn’t want to do any of this. But stubbornness was his defining trait, and after spending centuries trying—and failing—to die, a few decades of patience seemed almost reasonable. He just had to be careful. Very careful.

  So, the new plan: don’t die… until the end.

  And yes, the irony was not lost on him.

  For now, he had to go talk to his parents.