Unauthorized Reincarnation

  Chapter 1: Turning Point in Death

  Memories don’t come in order when you’re dying. They come in weight.

  The first thing he knew was the cold.

  It didn’t surround him—it filled him. A liquid, black cold that seeped into the hollows of his bones and pulled him down, away from a pinprick of light far above. He was drifting. Suspended in a nothingness that held him like a clenched fist.

  Where…?

  A face surfaced in the dark. His face. Gaunt. Weathered. Eyes that had once been sharp, now dulled to exhausted glass. Black hair drifted across his vision like smoke. He tried to speak. A whisper, a prayer of air, left his lips in a chain of silver bubbles.

  “Colder…”

  The word vanished toward the distant light. His eyelids, heavy as stone, began to fall.

  And then—the replay.

  It didn’t flash. It unspooled. His life, not in sequence, but in a crashing tide of fragments—voices, faces, pain—all of it raw and urgent. This was no peaceful review. This was a desperate, final search, his mind clawing through the wreckage of his years, sifting for… something. A reason. A single point of light in the dark.

  His body, he dimly perceived, was a testament to a war he could no longer remember. A powerful frame, layered with muscle, was now just a battered anchor. Every scar, every weary line carved into his face, was a sentence in a story he was too cold to read.

  He was a man drowning in the dark. And his past was the only thing left to grasp.

  The searching memories latched onto a point of white-hot betrayal—the last anchor before the dark.

  A crosswalk.

  A dull urban glow. The Don’t Walk signal bled red onto wet pavement. A buzz in his pocket. Micah. The message was its own kind of shove: Big Madam says stop playing clean. Make it hurt. 4 a.m. Usual spot.

  He pocketed the phone, the movement automatic. A glance left, a habit for threats.

  Headlights. Two eyes, growing into a screaming grill.

  But the real blow came from his right.

  His sister. Her face, a pale moon of pure hatred, shoved into his. Her hands hit his chest—not a push, but a strike. The force stole his breath before the truck ever could.

  As he stumbled into the street, the world didn’t slow. It shattered.

  “You did this!” she screamed, her voice raw.

  Her hand snapped forward. Not to grab him, but to condemn.

  A sheaf of photographs—blurred, graphic—exploded into the air between them. They fluttered like grotesque leaves in the truck’s wake. Stark police evidence photos. Crime scene tape. Blood on concrete. His mind refused to focus, but the implication was a knife to the gut.

  “My own brother!” The cry was half sob, half snarl. “You’re a sickness! A monster I have to cut out!”

  The truck’s horn became the only sound in the world.

  Her final words were a vow, not a goodbye:

  “Rot in hell where you belong!”

  Then—the blinding impact. The universe cracking like a bone.

  Silence.

  And the cold, dark water of the void, welcoming him back.

  He closed his eyes in the drowning dark. The memories rolled back again, not forward—a film reel spinning in reverse, desperately seeking a single frame of light. A happy moment. It failed.

  Instead, it showed him what he was.

  The first memory was cold precision.

  The alley. The thugs were already on the ground, groaning. It was over. But Daniel stood over the biggest one, the man’s own iron bar now in his hand. The thug whimpered, “Please… we’re done…”

  Daniel’s eyes didn’t glow. They darkened, the brown bleeding into a flat, pitiless crimson. He brought the bar down. Once. Twice. The sickening crunch was an answer to a question nobody had asked. He walked away, not from a fight, but from an execution. The memory held the wet sound of it, clinging to him.

  It spun further back. A memory of fire and silence.

  A warehouse office. Big Madam’s lieutenant, a man named Kreno, was counting cash. “Your cut,” Kreno said, sliding a measly stack across the desk. A deliberate insult. Daniel said nothing. He picked up a metal desk lighter, flicked it on, and held the flame to the stacked bills. He watched Kreno’s face as the money burned, his own expression as empty as a closed vault. “The next time you short me,” Daniel finally said, his voice quieter than the flames, “I burn everything you love. Starting with that classic car you polish every Sunday.” He left the man choking on smoke and fear.

  Further back. A memory that smelled of cheap antiseptic and dread.

  A hospital corridor at night. A man in a patient gown—a rival who had targeted Micah—was trying to shuffle to the exit. Daniel stepped from a shadow. He didn’t raise a hand. He just leaned in and whispered, “The doctors say your heart is weak. A sudden shock could kill you. Look at me.” The man looked. Daniel let his eyes shift, just for a second—a flash of hellish red in the fluorescent light. The man gasped, clutched his chest, and slid to the floor, codes blaring from the monitors. Daniel was already gone, a ghost in the stairwell.

  The reel of memories stuttered, each one a heavier stone in his sinking chest. No laughter. No peace. No warmth. Just the escalating calculus of violence—the transformation of a boy shoved into hell into a man who learned to rule it.

  This was the "proof" she saw. Not a monster born, but one forged. And the search for a happy memory drowned in the evidence of its own impossibility.

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  The grim catalog of his violence dissolved, the memory reel spinning back to a different kind of ache.

  Soft fluorescent hum. The shuffle of state-issue shoes. A modest room in the Warbash Valley Correctional Facility.

  A young woman with hair like frayed wheat and eyes the color of a winter sky sat across from him. Sophie. She opened a small, photocopied booklet—crop rotation diagrams. Her finger, nail bitten to the quick, traced a line of soybeans.

  “You plant them here, after the winter rye. It fixes the nitrogen.”

  Daniel watched, not the diagrams, but her. The intense focus there. The strange peace. “Why are you here?” he asked, his voice low in the institutional quiet. “Compared to the rest of this place, you’re the sanest one I’ve met.”

  Sophie didn’t look up. Her shoulders lifted in a tiny, resigned shrug. “My mother didn’t want a farmer’s life. So she ran. Then she didn’t want a mother’s life. So she left me on the porch of the farm she’d run from.” A pause, filled by the distant clang of a cell door. “My uncles… they thought I was part of the property. When I was thirteen.”

  She said it like she was reading soil pH levels. Flat. Factual.

  “After a few months, I put rat poison in the stew pot. It… solved the problem.”

  Finally, she looked at him. A ghost of a smile touched her lips, devoid of warmth. “Once I’m out, no one’s hiring a poisoner. So. Farming. The earth doesn’t care about your record. It just asks for work.”

  A flicker of other memories: Heads bent over seed catalogs. Her laughing at his first attempt to sketch a irrigation plan. A moment, just one, where the grim world receded, replaced by the simple geometry of growth.

  Then—the severing cut.

  A common room TV, buzzing with static. A news anchor’s bland voice: “...body identified as Sophie M. found outside a shelter in Terre Haute. Police are investigating a suspected homicide...”

  Her booking photo filled the screen. Those winter-blue eyes, now frozen in a DMV glare.

  A raw, punched-out sound escaped Daniel. He inhaled, air scraping through clenched teeth like shards of glass.

  Next to him, a freckled kid snorted. “Hah. Serves the witch right. Always with her ‘can I help you study?’ act. Fake bitch.”

  Daniel’s vision tunneled. There was no thought, no decision. Just a piston-fire of motion. His fist connected with the boy’s sneering mouth. A tooth became a tiny, ivory comet in the fluorescent light. The crunch was satisfying. It was nothing. It changed nothing.

  Back in the drowning dark, the memory’s aftertaste was ash.

  “Happiness?” The thought was a hollow echo. “Why am I searching for happiness in this landfill?”

  Then, the grim, ironic understanding surfaced. Oh, I get it. The phenomenon. They say the brain stays active, fires its last salvos—seven seconds playing the highlight reel. A final gift of peace.

  A bitter, soundless laugh shook him.

  What a cosmic joke. My seven seconds are a montage of garbage and graves.

  He closed his eyes against the void. The question wasn't a search anymore; it was an accusation.

  “Then what was? What part of my life was supposed to be happy? Where did I put it?

  The memory reel, denied happiness at every turn, spun back past all the violence, past the prison bars, and snagged. It held. There, preserved in the amber of a lost time, was the answer—and the wound.

  A small apartment. Golden hour.

  His father, Marcus—tall, with a square jaw and a thin scar on his right cheek that caught the light like a seam of silver. Hazel eyes held a quiet pride as he looked at his wife. His hands, still dusty from work, wiped on his jeans.

  His mother, Emily. Freckles across her nose. Almond-shaped eyes that shone with a joy so pure it seemed to generate its own light. She laughed, dimples appearing, as she tousled the dark curls of the toddler squirming in her lap.

  Him.

  They were a perfect triangle of contentment, leaning in for a photograph that would never be taken.

  In the drowning dark, Daniel’s soul clenched.

  “So this is it?” he whispered, the sound a disturbance in the void. “This is the happy memory? Then where… where does it break?”

  The memory obliged. It shifted.

  Young Daniel, grinning up at his mother. “Mom, I washed the dishes! Where’s my gift?” Emily’s smile was warmth itself. She kissed his forehead, his temples.

  Then—the knock.

  The memory didn’t just shift; it shattered.

  The door opened. A tall, thin man stood beside Marcus, his presence a chill shadow in the warm room. His eyes were piercing, analytical, like a surgeon assessing a specimen.

  Emily’s smile froze, then melted into pure, unrecognizing dread. Her voice was a thread of air.

  “Are you… Oliver?”

  The stream of memories halted, the truth finally laid bare.

  “Ah,” Daniel breathed, the realization colder than the void. “The day my happy life ended. Not with a bang, but with a knock. The day Oliver walked through that door.”

  Deeper. Colder.

  “Oliver Miller…” Bubbles of bitterness escaped him. “…he killed my father.”

  A new memory, stark and colorless.

  A grave. Black suits, black dresses. Emily, Daniel (so young, so small), and Oliver—standing together, a twisted new family unit. Oliver’s hand was on Emily’s shoulder. Possessive.

  A priest’s voice droned, hollow against the wind: “—never harmed anyone. Did his best to help everyone he could—”

  The lie was so vast it choked him.

  Daniel’s eyes snapped open in the void. A storm of fury and sorrow detonated within him, so vast it gave form to the formless dark. He tried to move, but the darkness was a swamp, a coffin, a fist.

  The dam broke.

  “HOW MANY TIMES?!”

  The cry tore from him, raw and echoing in the nothingness.

  “How many times did I wish? Hope? Beg on my knees for someone—anyone—to come and save me from him? From the hell he made of my home?”

  He struggled, the void clinging like tar.

  “How many times did I scream without sound, beg without words, just to be treated like a GODDAMN HUMAN BEING?!”

  Silence. The eternal, answering silence.

  “No one came.” His voice cracked, then hardened into a blade. “No one came. Not the neighbors who heard. Not the system that looked away. Not the gods I cursed and prayed to.”

  A breath, a lifetime of weight in it.

  “No one… but me.”

  The truth, absolute and devastating, settled in his core. The final accounting of his soul: every crime, every brutality, every deal sealed in blood—it was the price of his own salvation. The only hand that ever reached for Daniel Martinez was his own.

  “So don’t you DARE call me a monster,” he snarled, a guttural sound of pure defiance. “I did what had to be done. Because no one else would. Because no one else EVER DID!”

  A laugh erupted—harsh, broken, scraping the walls of his mind. “Heh… Heh heh… AHAHAHAHAHA! And the punchline? I get taken down by my sister! The one I protected! The one I had faith in! WHAT A PERFECT, FUCKING JOKE!”

  The laughter died, leaving something harder than diamond in its wake.

  “No.”

  It was not a word. It was a verdict.

  “I refuse this end. I reject this silence.”

  The darkness reacted. It coiled around him like chains of regret, squeezing, pressing him down into final oblivion. His limbs were lead, his body a failing husk.

  But Daniel’s fury was not blind rage. It was the sharp, unyielding fire of a man who had survived hell itself. It was his first tool and his last weapon.

  His voice cut through the void, low and venomous.

  “Move.”

  The command was to his own dissolving will.

  “I clawed my way through hell once. I will not rot in it now.”

  The pressure became immense, the universe itself demanding his submission.

  Daniel Martinez roared. With no air. No lungs. Nothing but pure, undiluted will.

  “I. CHOOSE. TO. RISE.”

  CRACK.

  Not in the void. Within.

  The cold shattered like glass.

  A supernova ignited in his core—not warmth, but POWER. A blinding, searing brilliance that was his alone, forged in betrayal and tempered in survival. The chains vaporized. The swamp boiled into nothing.

  He did not float. He did not drift.

  He DROVE himself upward—a spear of conscious will punching through memory, through pain, through betrayal.

  Toward life. Toward vengeance. Toward purpose.

  As his essence breached the threshold of light, the darkness behind him SCREAMED—a final, furious denial of his escape.

  His fingertips brushed the light.

  Everything went white.

  Then blank.