Awaken, into this Hell of Ours

Remember to feed me power stones.

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Pain. My chest was contracting, my muscles screaming in absolute agony, as they contracted in a desperate attempt to ease the pain my body was always under. It rebelled, doing anything possible to ease the pain, if even for a moment. But it was useless. 

 I woke up in a luxurious, beautiful bedroom that was scientifically and statistically crafted to be the most expensive and luxurious bedroom in the world. Gold, Ivory, Obsidian, and jewels encrusted every inch of the room, and the furniture made of fur from long-extinct animals brought back to life via Jurassic Park DNA Splicing and cloning. 

 The room was filled with the wonders of the world, artifacts expensive enough to make the room worth as much as the entire nation of Japan. A beautiful piano sat in the center, taken from the Grand Ballroom of the Titanic. The walls were made of Amber, from the Amber Room, once called the 8th Wonder of the world, before it was stolen by Hitler during World War II, and passed through hands before it came into my possession.

 Objects encrusted with Pink and Red diamonds, not covered, nor gilded, but made from pure, 100% gold. The Kusanagi lay along with several other mythological swords along the walls. Paintings lost to time, like the Mona Lisa hanging on the wall, looking down upon my bed. Artifacts from Chinese Warlords, Roman Emperors, Egyptian Pharaohs, American Presidents, Japanese Samurai, and Kings of Britain.

 The Armor of Oda Nobunaga, along with ancient Aztec Gold glittered in the background. Not hundreds, but Thousands of Priceless artifacts laid on the walls and around this room. It was sickening, enough to make me puke. I collected them in my youth, looking for another way to contact the Supernatural. I tried everything. Fortune Tellers, Rituals, Praying at literally every known shrine to every deity of every pantheon in the goddamned world.

My main thought was to try and get the Supernatural world to contact me, through my acquisition of various powerful artifacts and riches. I tried to make them find me. I stole, robbed, took, and traded my way for every item in this room. Yet, they ignored it. The strange and mysterious people who were tracking and guarding such artifacts simply disappeared once they came into my possession.

Yet after it disappeared, they acted like it never existed. No one tried to find it, to investigate what had happened to the national treasure. I hired private investigators to try and pin me for the crime so the Supernatural would find me, but they all failed. Even after I hired over a hundred of the world's greatest detectives and literally invited them into my house, showing them the thousands of lost items, including showing them the Kuunagi itself, they ignored it. 

They acted like none of those artifacts were stolen, mattered, or were important. The world itself refused to allow such a thing. The Japanese government issued no statement and no manhunt for the object. The world refused to allow me to be contacted by the supernatural. To be a thief, with thousands of stolen magical artifacts. It refused to allow me to be anyone other than what I was born as, a Nobody. 

In their stories, I couldn't be anything but a Nobody who hired them to solve a mystery. I couldn't be important, couldn't be the shocking twist villain, couldn't be someone who was connected to the case at all, beyond being a Nobody that hired them. 

It was sickening. But my greed and vanity refused to return them, to spite the supernatural and the world that refused to acknowledge my skill, my power, my deeds of taking them. I knew that each artifact held power, yet they refused to react or do anything other than act like a normal everyday item. It was the world laughing at me. 

I woke up in pain, coughing. Blood splattered against the face mask you usually see on hospital patients, hooked up to dozens of IV bags and Tanks of various chemicals. My coughing fit splattered the entire mack with blood, dripping into my mouth as I sat up, tears running down my face, my entire body in pain. 

 My heart felt like it would rip out of my chest, like a chestburster from the Alien franchise. It beat much faster than any heart should, reaching levels that would normally kill a person. I tried to breathe, but it wasn't enough. Each breath felt like I was climbing a mountain, with extremely thin air.

My lungs were contracting, and there wasn't enough air.

 I was going to die. I was going to die of asphyxiation.

I struggled to get the mask off, my fingers unable to dig under the bands that kept the mask attached to my face. I screamed, as I ripped it off and threw it to the side. Blood splattered against my blanket, made from spider silk, which cost thousands. I threw the blanket carelessly to the side, pushing myself to the side of my bed, hunching over as I coughed more blood up. 

My heart beat at well over 300 beats in a minute, double the lethal BPM in a normal heart, beating loud enough to drown out anything else, even my own thoughts. I clawed at my chest as if I was trying to remove the source of the pain. 

A few minutes of agonizing pain passed, and my coughing fit finally subsided. It was pure agony, unlike any pain I experienced in my past life. Yet in this life, this morning's coughing fit was rather merciful. It ended much quicker than it usually lasted. 

I pulled over a gold trash can, puking blood into it. It was not just a trash can made of gold though, being extremely technologically advanced, with it incinerating the blood before it hit the bottom, yet I felt no heat from the spontaneous combustion. 

After I recovered, breathing heavily with my entire body covered in sweat, I punched myself up, taking off the various needles that connected to IV drips. They were a painful reminder. 

Why was I dying every morning you might ask? Well, the answer was simple. The ever gnawing worm, Cancer. How pitiful, to have Cancer, and be this powerful, you might say. After all, I should be able to afford treatment that other Cancer patients could only dream of, right? And you would be correct. 

I suffered from Cancer. What kind? Well, every kind. At once. You see, as a youth, I was desperate. For powers, for anything to help me become the Main Character, I thought I was destined to be. And so, I conducted thousands of experimental treatments on myself. Used my infinite wealth to buy my way into power and happiness. 

Blasting myself with more radiation than the workers of Chornobyl ever experienced, trying to gain powers like the Hulk. Funding scientists to make Supersolder projects like Captain America, then making myself Test Patient One. Hundreds of Drugs, Telekinesis experiments, body transplants, and every other horrible test experiment I saw on television and in the media in my previous world. All in hopes of somehow miraculously gaining powers, just like the Heros in those shows and stories. 

I experienced thousands of times more radiation than the amount needed to kill a person within a day. I was a walking corpse, kept alive through billions funded into treatment for Cancer and other diseases. Trust me when I say, I was a miracle of science, that should have died years ago. 

But that wasn't all. Oh no, no no, roll out the pity parade. My infinite wealth had me eating so unhealthy I easily developed dozens of conditions like Diabetes. My smoking because I wanted to look cool around other school students came back to haunt me. I invented half a dozen diseases, that's how fucked up I am. 

Why did I do this? 

All for the pursuit of some power, some life-changing event, to make me into the Main Character. All thanks to the infinite wealth achieved through my knowledge of the future, mainly about Stocks and Cryptocurrency. 

I hobbled over to the Yata no Kahami, one of the Three Sacred Treasures of Japan, a Bronze Mirror. I looked at my reflection, and could only see a fucking walking corpse, that looked as if he were kept alive through the miracle of Child Sacrifice. 

Tall, and lanky, with disgusting, pale white skin. I tried working out, dieting, and thousands of other ways to gain muscle, but this world refused to allow me to make myself look like anything other than a Nobody. I tried Saitama's workout and hired hundreds of personal trainers, health nuts, and doctors to try and make me stronger, taller, more muscular, or faster. But none of it worked. This world refused to let me be anything other than a Nobody. Not that it stopped me from turning myself into a fucking monster. The monster in the mirror. 

My disgusting, pale, pure white skin looked unnatural and paler than a vampire. It was bleached and turned unnaturally white through hundreds of drugs and experimental treatments. It was unsettling looking, even to someone like me. Not that anyone noticed it, due to me being a nobody. It wasn't ugly, but it looked too perfect, like how an anime character would look. 

My dull, blank, gray eyes stared back, with unnatural black voids with no inner pupil. They looked repulsive. I was born with brown eyes, the most common in the world. And I hated that. So I changed the color of my eyes using surgery and money. To a blood red, then to heterochromatic blue and red, then shining gold, then a rainbow, sometimes with glowing symbols or patterns in my eyes. A cross, a star, a sharingan, a six-ringed purple eye. I even mutated them to change by themselves, like the Mangekyou Sharingan. Dark, sunken eyes with many dark circles beneath them showed many sleepless nights, lying awake in excruciating pain. 

But that was long ago. I reached down and took two contacts, and placed them in my eyes, allowing me to see. My constant changing of their natural color turned them permanently into a dull gray, that repulsed me. I was completely blind in my left eye now, and half-blind in my right, against all odds. The contacts allowed me to see, having a prescription a thousand times stronger than most glasses. 

I took in my features. They were asymmetrical. Repulsive. Unnatural. An uncanny valley that would make my skin crawl, if my skin still had the ability to have hair. It was perfect. Done through plastic surgery, for the umpteenth time after my features and skin had been horribly burned or scared through surgery. No blemishes or birthmarks, not a single imperfection. 

The nose was too in the center. My eyes were too perfectly in sync with how they moved, too perfectly lined on either side of my face. My jawline too perfect and smooth, my chin is too smooth as well. It was like an uncanny valley. My teeth were too white, perfectly shaped with one another, having been surgically replaced after being lost half a dozen times when picking fights, thinking I was somebody of worth. My canines were extra long and sharpened to look like vampire teeth, another foolish decision of my younger self. 

My hair was an ugly white. Of course, not my original colored hair. My hair was originally black, but like my eyes, I changed it constantly. Pure white, then Golden, then Ash Gold, then blue, red, and dozens of other colors. I took growth agents to make my hair grow faster when I wanted it to be long or a certain shape or type. Curley, straight, messy, I changed it on a whim, to make myself look cooler. 

Now, it was permanently bleached pure white, like my skin. My hair roots were also damaged to the point they didn't naturally grow anymore, and now I had to use growth agents again to simulate my hair getting longer. I grabbed a container from the side of the mirror, applying the white gel from it to my hair, to make it stand up. 

Not that any part of me grew anymore. Near the end of my time destroying myself, I had realized my error and tried to save whatever was left of me. But it was a realization, too late, too slow. I was running out of time. My body was decaying from 8 dozen diseases, so I had very little time. 

 So, I came to another stupid decision and conclusion. To give myself more time, I stopped myself from aging. And it worked. I was forever trapped in the body of a 14-year-old, with my current self only being 18 after many experimental surgeries to make myself age slowly, along with dozens of other hormone and growth agents to help my body try to continue to grow. Not that it helped much. 

 I looked in the mirror, and all I could see was a monster. A vampiric, disgusting waste of a human, that could barely be called human anymore. Not that it affected anyone other than me. My mother consciously knew, asking about my health and if I was okay, but even he couldn't truly understand what I had become. A freak of nature. 

 I lifted my jewel-encrusted comb, running it through my hair. Not that it did anything. My hair's structure was too weak to stand up straight, or even tangle with other hairs. Instead, I ran the comb through my hair, and a bunch of dead hair clung to it, like I was balding, or a dog shedding. I gave the comb a look of disgust, seeing all the hair on it, before through it, comb and all, into the incinerating trash. A priceless jeweled comb gone like that. 

 My hair was simple and straight on either side of my head, but still messy. 

 I took out a chapstick-like contraption that was as big as my hand and began to rub it along my neck, arms, and hands. It was basically sunscreen. When I said I looked like a vampire, I meant it in more ways than one. The sun's UV Radiation was strong enough to actually harm me due to my destroyed body causing pain and other problematic things to my body, causing me to wear sunscreen and dark clothing like some shut-in albino freak. I finished, before walking away. 

 I opened the door to my walking closet, several hallways long, with thousands of outfits and suits. Not that anything I wore affected anyone, as I was a Nobody, what I wore had no real effect or mattered. Dozens of suits, from every culture were hung along the walls. Being that my clothing was one of the few things I had left to make myself look good, it was something I took pride in. 

 I could have some sort of automatic system to select clothes, like how cleaners have clothes hanging on an upside-down conveyor belt, but the feeling of vanity and pride from walking through the closet was one of the few things I had left to feel good about in this life. 

I selected my outfit and put it on. A classic white undershirt, and black suit. Black dress pants, long black socks, and black dress shoes. I pulled on black gloves and a pure black tie. Despite hating my appearance, I liked the contrast between the black of his clothing and his pale features. 

 I then walked back to the bronze mirror, taking one last look at my features, before turning to the mannequin beside it. It wasn't a national treasure, unlike most other things in the room. It was a normal mannequin, with a black pure black mask covering its face. I took the mask off it, attaching it to my waist to wear later. It hid my unnatural features, something that I hated to look at myself, even if nobody cared what I looked like. 

I then plucked a bottle beside the mirror and began spraying its contents in puffs on myself. The glass bottle was unmarked and was relatively normal compared to everything else in the room. I looked at it, wrinkling my nose, despite not being able to smell. 

It was a perfume made to be abhorrent. It caused physical pain and irritation to the nose of anyone who smelt it. It smelt like acid, or something burning. But it was necessary. No one looked or treated me differently because of it. Only if I asked them what I smelt like did they acknowledge the horrid perfume, before acting like it was no big deal or didn't matter, because I was a Nobody, therefore what I smelt like didn't matter. 

But it was important. It covered up the smell of a rotting, decaying corpse, and the awful stench of fresh blood that wouldn't leave my body, no matter how hard I tried. Not that my sense of smell survived my own self-destruction. It had long since been lost to different radiation therapies. 

I looked at myself one more time in the mirror. Aside from my physical features, my attire looked good. One thing I loved was that all-powerful people wore suits. At least, that was what I told myself. Like James Bond. 

If you were to ask anyone else, they would disagree with everything I had just said. Sure, it may sound weird to a normal person, but remember, this is not the real world. People looked different here. In fact, to people in this world, I looked like a drop-dead gorgeous picture-perfect man. Tall, white hair with smooth skin. Imperfections and other things that normal people had were non-existent in this world. 

Anime Logic, as some might call it. I looked like an Anime Character. And a good-looking one at that. Perfect features, perfectly straight and white hair, perfect pale skin, white eyes, and a dark, brooding look that most girls would die for. In this world, appearance was attractive and not repulsive. In fact, here if I wasn't a Nobody, I would be called the handsomest man alive. 

But I wasn't from this world. I was from the real world. And in the real world, my looks were unnatural and an abomination. Like those hyper-realistic photo of a 2d game. Something that looks fine in a world of the same style, yet translated to another world, looks horrid. 

I turned around, walking to 2 large ornate solid gold doors, too heavy to be opened by a hundred humans. Hundreds of ancient carvings were etched into it. I pressed my hands against it, and its mechanisms groaned as they slowly opened, each door weighing well over 20 tons each. 

 The doors slowly and dramatically closed behind me as I looked back. Each and every part of this room was bathed in luxury, greed, and vanity. It was nearly enough to make me sick. But it was one of the few things I had left. In this cursed world, my own vindictiveness and spite against this world that cursed me was one of the few things I had left to hold on to. 

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In Hell, we Lament.

A title of a song from one of my favorite fandoms. Is that foreshadowing? Maybe. 

I always wanted to write a protagonist like this. Not an Anti-Hero, or an Evil MC, or a Dark Knight. Just an asshole. This story will combine some slice-of-life along with world travel and action. Either way, I was very unsure of whether to include the part about him having diseases, but I feel like if he is an asshole, I should go all the way. The next chapter will also be introductory and a slice of life, then actual action. 

I would love to hear your opinions about this story. Do you like a protagonist who is an Anti-Hero, a Dark Knight, or just plain Evil? You think I overdid it with the self-pity and diseases, on top of the wealth? Either way, I promise it will be interesting nonetheless. 

Remember to feed me power stones, to satiate my hunger and give me motivation. Feel free to leave a review!~