Where do people go when they die?

  Hell if I know.

  Heaven? Hell? Reincarnation as a worm? Take your pick. Everyone’s got a theory.

  Be a good person, get a ticket upstairs. Be a bastard, go down with the rest of the garbage. Simple math. Or so they say.

  But I’ll tell you something — most dying people only start believing in gods when they’re five seconds from death. That’s when the panic sets in. That’s when they start begging, bargaining, making promises they’ll never get the chance to break.

  “Just one more breath.”

  “Let me live.”

  “Let me fix it.”

  I didn’t get that luxury.

  Didn’t even get a proper last thought.

  No profound wisdom. No teary flashbacks. No prayers whispered between bloodied teeth.

  Just... that damn cat. That little thing staring at me. Then nothing.

  Or... not nothing exactly.

  I don’t know what I expected — maybe darkness, maybe the eternal void everyone’s so scared of. But this?

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  This was something else.

  Black. Blinding black. Then—words. Symbols. Everywhere. Floating. Flashing. Filling up my vision like some bootleg sci-fi movie intro. For a second, I thought I’d landed in hell — the corporate kind. Endless ads, glitchy screens. A personal nightmare tailor-made for someone like me. It felt like some VR headset had been strapped to my skull while I wasn’t looking. Except I didn’t own one. Could barely afford socks.

  The words didn’t make sense — not at first.

  They weren’t familiar.. Not anything I knew. Swirls and lines and shapes that didn’t belong here.

  Foreign? No. Close — almost. But it started to change. Slow and creeping.

  My brain was cracking open just wide enough for the pieces to fit. The symbols twisted, reshaped, settled into place until — shit — I could read them.

  Clear as day.

  And I hated that.

  What the hell was this? Where the hell was I? And more importantly — who the hell thought I wanted to read after being unconscious?

  The words kept coming.

  Line after line of alien symbols crawling across my vision — faster, sharper — until they twisted into something else.

  A shape.

  Veins, almost. Glowing lines like blood vessels stretched thin over pitch black. And then — people.

  No, not people.

  The first one looked human enough — an old man. Balding. Wrinkled. But he wasn’t breathing. Wasn’t blinking. Just standing there, frozen. Stiff like a mannequin. More figures showed up behind him — a crowd forming in the dark. But their faces blurred. Like my brain refused to load them properly.

  And then — a voice. Rough and gravel.

  Words I didn’t understand erupted straight into my skull. But the weirdest thing? I could feel them settling in. Like my brain was bending around them, reshaping itself, slotting foreign sounds into familiar meaning.

  And just when I thought maybe — maybe — I was starting to get it—

  Gone.

  Everything.

  Back to the dark. Back to floating. Back to nothing.

  I wanted to scream — and not because I was brave or cool or anything stupid like that. No. I was confused. Scared, yeah — a little. But mostly pissed off.

  Because I couldn’t feel anything. Not my hands. Not my legs. Hell, I wasn’t even sure I had a body anymore. At some point — like a real genius — I told myself maybe this was just anesthesia. Some doctor poking around in my brain after scraping me off the pavement.

  Yeah.

  Right.

  Except Doctors don’t drop you into a bootleg minecraft server and leave you to rot. Not unless healthcare got way more creative while I was out.

  Because that’s what it felt like now — like I’d woken up in some idiot teenager’s hardcore survival world. Wooden walls. Crude floor. Rough blanket tossed over me.

  And I could smell it.

  Wood. Dust. That sharp, dry scent of old timber baked in sunlight. I could feel the scratchy fabric against my skin. I could see the jagged texture of the planks making up the walls.

  And that’s when it hit me.

  This wasn’t even a hospital.

  This wasn’t my apartment bedroom.

  This wasn’t anything that made sense.

  So I did the only reasonable thing left.

  I lay there, staring at the ceiling, smelling wood and regret, and thought —

  What the actual hell is this place?