Chapter One: The Mortal
“Where am I?” I said to myself. My head felt as though it were about to explode. “What am I doing here? How did I end up here?” I kept talking to myself.
I managed to find an answer to those questions, but the most difficult one remained.
“How come I even exist?”
Later I would find out that answering this question would take quite some time.
I wanted to believe I existed because God had created me so eagerly. But I couldn’t. Consequently, I was depressed, believing there was no justice – and would never be justice. Unless God existed.
No one in the history of mankind wanted God’s existence to be true more than me.
God’s existence meant justice, even if it is lacking in this life. In the afterlife, God would make things right. People who wronged others would be punished in the afterlife. Creatures whose rights were taken would be compensated.
God was the almighty, the one and the only, He was justice.
One day while I was home playing some casual movie on my laptop, I heard a cat meowing. I immediately went outside, as I loved animals. I approached her carefully, but she darted away, still meowing. I could tell she was hungry enough to meow for food, yet too afraid to let a human near her. I brought her some meat from the kitchen and threw it to her carefully in order not to scare her away.
From that day on, the cat and I became friends. I always gave her the protein-rich food from my lunch or supper. I named her The Rabbit. She had lost her tail, looked a lot like a rabbit from behind, a grey rabbit.
“Not even a small cat was safe from the evil of human beings,” I told myself. “She was probably just looking for some food, and humans saw her and instantly decided to hurt her. God, I hate human beings. They are so evil. Why can’t they just let other creatures live? Why do they have to hurt everything around them? I guess the answer is that they are naturally evil.”
That’s why I detested the concept of using humanity to represent goodness. Humanity represented everything evil.
“Helping another creature makes a good person, while humanity represents evil,” I said to myself. “Good virtues and humanity are opposite poles. The only thing humanity ever did was destroy everything on the Planet Earth.”
It can’t be ignored that there are many good humans, the voice inside my head replied. Not everybody is evil. But majority rules.
“Whoever buys my book is a good human being,” I said, laughing, while writing about the topic.
I liked all animals, no matter their size. I had owned many cats, though it was more a matter of coincidence rather than being a cat person. Though I admired cats, what I liked most about them was that they were independent, they needed no one. I also liked that they were beautiful, joyful, cautious, and intelligent.
Animals are so amazing, they are simple. They don’t have complicated rules, they don’t have complicated homes, they are just in nature, they don’t destroy, and they only eat and mate.
I also liked children. They reminded of animals; they are just as innocent. I liked to see animals and children happy. It drove me crazy seeing them get hurt.
The Rabbit was always cautious, even with me. She never trusted anyone. The mistreatment she had received from humans had probably caused her not to trust anyone. I never minded The Rabbit not trusting me. I was afraid that if she did trust me, she might let her guard down with other people and one of them might hurt her. Fortunately, that never happened.
The date was 2009, I was reborn useless, helpless, without any kind of power.
I was severely depressed. I had decided to take my own life. But I gave myself two years before doing so. I thought maybe something would happen to alter my destiny. Indeed something did happen, however, it only made things worse.
I was very poor, and I thought maybe that was why I had such disdain for the world. It felt like suicide was the only power I had.
The world I was born into was full of injustice. Compared to the jungle, it was simply a hell made by humans. In the jungle there is a kind of justice where animals survive based on skills and strength. However, in the human world, circumstances are different. Humans invent laws and rules to protect the corrupt and the filthy, not to protect the weak and promote justice.
I was reborn at age eighteen. Most others by that age have learned something useful. I had not. I had no experience in human interaction, I had no social skills, no nothing. I had to start over.
Before 2009, I was completely disconnected from the world. I didn’t even know the years I was in. The reason is a remarkable story. However, that is a story for another time.
In 2009, I had just graduated from high school. I was about to study engineering at college. However, due to a mistake in my college submission, I stayed home for a year. I worked as a painter with my uncles in the family business. I learned a lot of things in that first year of my rebirth, most of which happened while I was a painter.
I was of average height and weight. I thought it would be nice to have a good physique, a muscled body. I started going to the gym, thinking being miserable in a hot body would be better than being miserable in an average one. I took the workouts seriously and made significant progress. But I didn’t attain the body I wanted. Later I found out that it required a good budget to do so. Scientifically speaking, I needed more than two years to transform my body. You need to be using at least a few types of steroids and growth hormones and you also definitely need a good diet, which is quite expensive.
None of this was possible as I was only getting paid $15 a day, even though my uncles were making much more from each painting project. They were clearly using me. But what choice did I have? I had to keep working for them as it was my only source of income to put myself through school. There was no way I was going to ask my parents for money. I couldn’t bear to be a burden.
I was a painter for around four years. My first year being born and the next three years in the summers between classes as an engineering student.
In my first year, I watched countless movies and TV series, ranging from comedies and drama to thrillers. My favourite comedy was Two and a Half Men; back then Charlie Sheen was the star. Even though the show was really entertaining, I didn’t much like Charlie Harper. Maybe I was envious of him regularly having different girls. Charlie was the heart of the show when he got replaced by Walden (Ashton Kutcher). The show getting rid of Charlie was a colossal mistake.
My other favourite show was Criminal Minds, its most memorable character was the "The Reaper" – a recurring serial killer and one of the major enemies of the BAU. What I liked the most about The Reaper was his colt python and his being highly intelligent, resourceful, and manipulative – and that he knew how to cover his tracks and avoid capture.
In my city, there was a warlord with three sons. They were a powerful mafia-like force. They could do anything and had the police in their pocket. I ended up painting the warlord's house a few times. Their reckless behaviour resulted in some of the rooms catching fire occasionally.
The warlords were based in a rural village just outside the city. The whole place was heavily guarded by their men.
I dreamed of taking them down one day.
