Ken's eyes snapped open, biting cold rushing through his body like a thousand needles.
He lay sprawled on hard-packed snow beneath a sky so gray it seemed to swallow the world.
Around him was nothing but frozen silence.
No trees, no animals, no towns, no people.
Just endless, barren mountains stretching to the horizon.
He forced himself to sit up, but a sharp sting ran through his fingers and toes — they were numb, almost frozen.
The bitter wind sliced through his thin clothes.
"This... this is worse than the desert," Ken whispered, chattering his teeth.
He dragged himself toward a gnarled tree standing stubbornly alone amid the snow.
The branches were bare, the bark rough and cold.
Ken pressed himself against the trunk, trying to shield his body from the relentless wind.
But the cold crept in like poison.
His vision blurred.
Dizziness spun his head.
His breath came in ragged gasps.
"I have to survive... I can't die here."
Hours passed.
Ken's strength drained like water through a cracked bucket.
His body shook uncontrollably.
His fingers curled into frozen fists.
And then—
The world went black.
You have died.
Ken woke again.
Same place.
Same cold.
Same loneliness.
He tried to stand.
His legs trembled violently.
The biting frost numbed his skin faster than he could warm it.
"Not again," he groaned.
Days, or maybe only hours, slipped by in a blur of cold and pain.
Each time he died, he woke back under the same empty sky.
Each time he struggled, fighting the freezing grip.
But his body gave out.
And he died.
And he woke.
And he died again.
Time lost meaning.
Ken stopped counting at fifty.
Then seventy.
Then over a hundred times.
Over and over, the same cycle of freezing, failing, dying.
His mind began to crack under the weight of the endless winter.
"Why... why won't this end?" he whispered hoarsely.
"I'm trapped."
The cold wasn't just in his bones.
It had settled in his soul.
"I can't even escape death itself here."
Ken's eyes closed.
Frostbite claimed his fingers.
His chest tightened with icy pain.
The mountains watched silently.
And the endless winter swallowed him whole.