Aashish_Kookna

“If you could relive your life—not to chase fame or fortune, but to right your deepest regrets—would you dare face your own past?”

Yun Fei was an ordinary man in his thirties, living a life soaked in the bitter wine of missed opportunities and mistakes. A failed business, a broken family, friendships turned sour, and the loss of the only girl who truly loved him—his world was a long list of what-ifs and if-onlys. He wasn’t evil, but he had been weak. Not cruel, but often silent when he should have spoken. His was a life not ruined by one catastrophic event—but by a thousand small regrets that, over time, swallowed him whole.

And then he died.

Not in glory, not in battle, not even in some poetic tragedy.

Just… alone. Forgotten.

But death wasn’t the end

Born Again with My Future Regrets

The morning after the Composer vanished, the world didn't go back to normal.

Yun Xi sat on the rooftop of the safehouse Yue Lan had secured, staring out over Aerilon's fractured skyline. The city slept uneasily, unaware that something just beneath reality had shifted. He could feel it in the way birds no longer nested in the old clock towers. In how the wind whispered in chords instead of breezes.

Yue Lan joined him quietly, carrying two mugs of bitter herbal tea. She handed him one and sat with a sigh.

"You ever feel like we're not the ones moving anymore?" she asked. "Like the world's started rotating around you instead?"

Yun Xi took a slow sip. "Every time I breathe lately."

They sat in silence for a moment. But silence didn't last in Aerilon. Not now.

A low hum vibrated in Yun Xi's bones. Not a threat. A call.

"There's another fragment," he said.

Yue Lan raised an eyebrow. "Where?"

He placed his hand on the rooftop tiles—and sang.

The notes weren't loud. They were barely whispers. But they shimmered with a resonance that passed through stone, air, and time. The rooftop vibrated, and then cracked—just a thin fracture line, revealing nothing but darkness beneath.

Yun Xi looked at her. "The fragment's buried. Deep."

Yue Lan paled. "That's insane. No one's gone beyond the Wall in decades. That's the old city—pre-collapse zones, fractured timelines, abandoned Guardian Cores. It's suicide."

Yun Xi smiled grimly. "That's where the past goes to die."

He turned to leave, but Yue Lan caught his arm.

He paused. "You know what they say about the Wall?"

"They say time doesn't just break in there—it hunts."

"Good." She straightened. "Let it try."

They reached the outskirts by nightfall.

The Wall loomed like the spine of some long-dead god. It wasn't made of stone or steel—but petrified time. Shards of memory, reality, and collapsed history fused together into a barrier that breathed without lungs.

As they approached, the air thinned. Wind howled in reverse. Lights from their packs flickered despite full charge.

Yun Xi reached out—and touched the surface.

FLASH VISION – MEMORY INVASION INITIATED

A boy. A girl. A piano in a burning school. A scream. A promise. A betrayal. A mask. The blade again.

Yue Lan caught him. "What was it?"

"A warning," he whispered. "The Wall doesn't just guard the past. It remembers every version of it."

Yue Lan unsheathed her echo-daggers. "Then let's give it a new one."

Colors bled wrong. Streets bent into spirals. Echoes flickered like ghosts in shop windows—scenes playing over and over: families frozen mid-run, soldiers shouting into radios that had long since rusted.

Time was a prison here. And Yun Xi could feel it watching.

They walked carefully. The song in his chest guided him—pulling gently toward a collapsed opera house coated in vines of crystallized melody. Music drifted from it, weak and broken.

A shimmer in the air. A whisper of a familiar voice.

Yue Lan turned, weapons raised. "Did you hear that?"

And then the floor gave out beneath them.

They fell into silence—and woke in the center of the abandoned opera house, surrounded by shadows wearing their own faces.

Chapter 40: When the Past Watches Back