To live is to die. From a philosophical standpoint, that may be a cliché. However, this man was truly living to die. In a way, for this man, “living” as a concept no longer had value. The daily routing that he had repeated for hundreds of years had far exceeded the limits of boredom. Recently, he had finally stopped feeling anything. What could be seen, heard, smelled, or tasted. He felt nothing equally from any stimuli he received from his five senses. However, there was one thing from which he could still enjoy fresh sensations: Pain.
Death is a necessary condition for the fulfillment of a life. The completion of life is a necessary condition for the enjoyment of death. What, then, of immortality? Can eternal life, which the living ultimately seek, be equated with life? The man had a clear answer to this question.
For longer than anyone could know, the man had been seeking death. The pain he felt in the pursuit of reaching death was an irreplaceable pleasure that awakened within him a sense of life. This man always sought death; he always sought the pain that was as close to death as he could get, and this thirst for death was expressed in the form of several suicides. Every attempt was a failure.
The man was resolved to die, and he had procured a way to guarantee it. A special device with an octagonal weight attached to each end of a cylinder. If he could penetrate the brain stem with it, perhaps....
Komm susser Tod!
With a prayer, the man struck his own forehead with all his might…
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What am I living for?
Since the beginning of human civilization, there have been young men who have never forgotten that universal question every human born into the world has pondered at least once.
It was over a thousand years ago. Born and raised in a very average middle-class family in Germany, this young man was drafted into the army in his mid-20s and served a tour of duty in a foreign country. On a battlefield filled with the smell of blood and death, he fought hard wielding the weapons he was given, and defeated his enemies. With his excellent physical strength and physique, he attained great results in his first battle and continued to accumulate military achievements. Thanks to his successes, the expeditionary force defeated the enemy one after another and advanced deeper into the enemy's country.
However, as the war dragged on, the expeditionary force found it difficult to maintain its long supply lines. Its frontline units also became increasingly isolated. The loneliness and starvation of the battlefield made the soldiers anxious and they began to lose their composure. Military discipline became a formality, and soldiers soon began to raid enemy farming villages for food.
A little over a year into the man’s service, his unit hit a small enemy farming village in the mountains. The soldiers, who had not had comfortable beds or food for a long time, feasted and got drunk late into the night. When they had fallen asleep, the troops were attacked in the night. When the man awoke from his sleep in a room of a private house, his unit was already half destroyed and in a state of pandemonium. The clanging of bells, screams, and shouts were all one sound that rang in his ears. The enemy had surrounded his unit as part of a scorched-earth strategy, using a single village as bait.
(
I have to escape!
)
Sensing danger, he reached for the armor that lay beside his bed. However, a roar sounded close by, stopping his hand. The door to the house had been kicked in. The next moment, enemy soldiers would break into this room. Understanding this, he decided to give up his armor and escape with only his sword. Being careful not to make a sound, he opened the window and let himself soar into the outside world.
Just before dawn – the eastern sky beginning to turn white. There was no match between the defenseless army and their well-prepared enemies. It would have been a one-sided slaughter. The troops had suffered catastrophic damage in a matter of minutes.
(
Somehow I must find a horse.
)
Taking great care not to be spotted by enemy soldiers, the man searched for a horse, ducking behind cover as he went. Soon after, he found a horse that had lost its owner and was standing around with nowhere to go. The man did not know who owned the horse, but that didn’t matter anymore. He gently approached the horse and rubbed him down. The horse was ill-tempered and seemed to be fearless. Then the man put his foot in the stirrup, jumped up with all his might, and just as he was about to step over, the horse whinnied. The sound alerted enemy soldiers and they descended upon him.
“There’s a survivor! Over here!”
“Round them up! Horses! Get the horses!”
He chose the mountain forest as his escape route, but was pursued relentlessly by the enemy and spent half an hour on the run. His horse's legs were pierced by numerous arrows, and he himself was hit by several arrows in the back.
The arrow wounds took their toll – after several miles, the horse shrieked and suddenly fell over. The man was thrown from the horse, and he flew into the air. His whole body hit the ground hard, his face contorted in pain. When he tried to stand up, the enemy had already caught up with him and he was surrounded by five soldiers.
He rose to his feet and readied his longsword. However, the sword fell out of his hand without reaching a single enemy soldier. A volley of arrows from the enemy pierced him and he fell to his knees.
Blood poured from the arrow wounds and flowed down to his feet, creating a sea of red and black on the ground. As the man gazed at the scene, he knew that his life was coming to an end and his vision gradually became narrower and darker. He had been prepared for death ever since he went to war.
He should have had the same fear of death as anyone else but when the time came, strangely, he felt no emotion. As he was vaguely wondering if this was how he was going to die, he heard a strange sound. It was not a sound heard directly by his ears, but a sound that traveled through his body. When he realized that it was the sound of blades stabbing through his chest and into his abdomen, he was certain then that he had at last died. This was the first death he had experienced.
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Where am I? Heaven, Valhalla? Am I dead?
The man was in a place unknown to him. A cylindrical space about 10 meters
in diameter. Light shone through windows set on all sides, but he could not see the world outside them. The windows were like mirrors, showing only his reflection.
His body was floating in the air. Despite this, his sense of up and down was maintained.
He examined his body and found no abnormalities. There were no arrow or stab wounds, which were his cause of death.
That's right. He had been hit by arrows from enemy soldiers on the battlefield and stabbed through the chest and abdomen with swords. They were definitely mortal wounds. Unable to think clearly, the man held his head in his hands.
At that moment, the man suddenly felt as if someone was looking at him appreciatively. He was not sure how many, but more than one or two or at least. It was as if a large crowd was staring at him all at once. “
Like a cage surrounding a bird of prey…
” the man thought.
The gaze he felt began to hurt. The pain was like sharp thorns cutting into his hands, legs, face, abdomen, and organs; everywhere receptive to touch. The constant pain violated the man's exposed nerves without causing any external injury. It was the greatest pain a human being could feel. There were no units of measurement to accurately describe the agony that he felt at that moment. The man could not faint, could not scream. He could only writhe.
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After a few minutes, the pain suddenly stopped. At the same time, he saw a familiar scene reflected in his eyes.
Was it all a dream? The ground was stained with the pool of blood that had spilled out of him, showing that what had happened to him was undeniably true. However, he was still alive.
Did he come back to life? He didn’t think he had God’s blessing because he lacked faith.
He checked his wounds, and they were closed. However, unlike a moment ago, the wounds themselves were not entirely gone. Faint scars remained. The wounds seemed to have healed rapidly and completely. How they had healed was beyond comprehension. It was impossible to know. Thus rose the curtain on his immortal life...
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