They say your life flashes before your eyes when you die.
What a lie.
All I saw was the blinking cursor on my monitor. A half-finished report. Two cups of stale coffee. And a system notification telling me I'd missed my twelfth consecutive meeting.
Then the world tipped sideways.
My fingers froze on the keyboard. My heart forgot how to beat. There was no drama. No final scream. Just… silence. As if even Death found this moment too pathetic to announce.
I collapsed onto my desk, face-first, cheek pressing into the slightly warm keyboard. My last thought?
I forgot to delete my browsing history.
God.
All those late-night searches. The tabs I left open. The "research" I never finished. The unspeakable horrors I had stumbled upon in the darkest corners of the internet. Not even for pleasure—just curiosity. Morbid, shameful, curiosity.
My mother was going to find that.
And suddenly, dying wasn't the worst part.
If there was an afterlife, I hoped it had a firewall.
But I digress.
The truth is—I was tired. Not just physically, though that was a given. I was tired of waking up every day to chase deadlines that didn't matter. Of watching the calendar blur into a gray smear of responsibilities of pretending that all this meant something.
Sleep had become a luxury I couldn't afford. I survived on energy drinks and lies, both of which stopped working long ago.
So yeah—maybe this was inevitable.
Burnout: the final patch note.
And yet... as the light faded, a strange feeling settled in.
Regret.
Not for the career I ruined, or the friends I ghosted, or even the parents I hadn't called in months.
But because I'd never lived.
Not truly.
Not once.
Just an endless grind toward nothing, driven by fear, routine, and the haunting need to matter. I never did anything for myself. Never chased a dream. Never took a risk. I just… worked. Like a cog in a machine I didn't build and couldn't escape.
And now the machine had spit me out.
So be it.
I closed my eyes, letting the void take me. Finally… rest.
***
Except—
I woke up.
***
The air was thick with something unfamiliar—floral? No… perfume. Expensive.
My body felt wrong. Heavy in all the wrong places, light in the wrong ones. My limbs weren't sore anymore, but they weren't mine either.
I sat up—abruptly. Gasped.
My voice cracked out of a throat I didn't recognize.
The room was lavish. Old-world decor, velvet drapes, ornate furniture. Everything screamed "noble," "wealthy," and "I've never paid my own taxes."
I looked down at my hands.
Smooth. Pale. Well-manicured.
Whose body is this?
Then it hit me like a sledgehammer wrapped in cringe.
The mirror.
I stumbled toward it, tripping over the stupidly long rug. The face staring back at me was handsome—no, objectively beautiful—but ruined. Unkempt hair, dark bags under dead eyes, posture that screamed "I watch people from bushes." And then…
Recognition.
This was a face I'd seen before. (In my mind and in fanart)
From a novel.
A fantasy novel I'd binged during a week-long sick leave. One with an overpowered protagonist, a magical academy, and an ensemble cast of waifus and warlords. The story was decent. The worldbuilding? Solid.
And this guy?
A nobody.
A minor villain. A noble-born simp who stalked one of the female leads like a stray dog looking for scraps of affection. The kind of character you forget the moment he's gone.
He dies early. Real early.
Chapter seventeen, if memory served.
Just another casualty of the "real" protagonist's rise.
No.
No way.
I checked again. The eyes. The hair. The name engraved on a small plaque by the bedside.
[Caleb Thorne]
No. Freaking. Way.
Panic bubbled in my throat. I stumbled back from the mirror, tripping over myself. My heart—well, Caleb's heart—was racing. I wanted to scream, to wake up, to [Ctrl+Z] my entire existence.
This was real.
This was happening.
And worst of all?
I had reincarnated into the body of a man with no tragic backstory. No hidden power. No secret lineage. Just a hopeless, obsessive side character doomed to die badly.
I had become a meme.
And not even a good one.
I curled into a corner of the room, wrapped in a silk robe that cost more than my old apartment, and whispered to myself:
"What kind of sick reincarnation is this?"
And somewhere, in the twisted script of fate, I swear I heard the author laughing.