CH prologue 2

“Hmm? Where am I…?”

I had been executed by hanging after avenging the death of my beloved. The faces of the prison guards who had taken me from my cell and brought me to the execution grounds with bitter expressions were still vivid in my memory. The sensation of the floor beneath me giving way and my neck snapping was still faintly present.

Yes, I should be dead. So, this place might be the afterlife, which means it could be hell. However, hell seemed quite different from what I had imagined.

I was still wearing my prison uniform and standing in a barren wasteland with nothing around me except for the reddish-brown earth. There was no sign of anything reaching the horizon, and the sky was overcast and gloomy. There were no landmarks from the hellscape paintings I had seen before, such as the jailers who tormented sinners, the River Styx, the needle mountain, or the lake of blood.

“Or perhaps this is my punishment—to be stuck in this empty place forever?” I wondered to myself. “If that’s the case, then I must accept it…”

Suddenly, I felt something hit my foot. “Huh? What’s this?” I looked down and saw a tablet device lying on the ground.

“Why would there be something like this here? It seems so out of place,” I muttered to myself as I picked up the tablet and touched the screen.  It started up spontaneously, perhaps a reaction to being away from electronic devices during my time in prison. As I did so, the device turned on and a mysterious logo appeared on the bright screen.

I had never seen this logo before, but it must have been made by a manufacturer that I was not familiar with. I was not well-versed in electronics, so I only knew of the top companies in the world.

“Ah, there’s text on the screen… it says Questionnaire for the Deceased with Mitigating Circumstances.”

According to the text that appeared on the screen of the tablet device, it was clear that I had fallen into hell. Considering that I had killed six people out of personal revenge, it was only natural. However, they had decided to conduct a questionnaire for only the deceased with mitigating circumstances on a trial basis. Apparently, the results of this questionnaire would determine the punishment for those deceased individuals, which in this case was me.

I couldn’t help but wonder if they couldn’t just hold a proper trial, but since there was no one to complain to and since it seemed that I couldn’t leave this place without answering the questionnaire, I had no choice but to accept it. It was quite a heavy-handed approach, but I suppose I had to accept it since I was a sinner who had fallen into hell.

Besides, this was probably just a hallucination that I was experiencing as I approached death. Like a “life flashing before your eyes” kind of thing. It was absurd to think that this unrealistic landscape and situation were real. I never thought I had any attachments to this world to be experiencing such a hallucination, but let me answer the questionnaire for now.

“The first question is ‘Do you think it’s unfair that you’ve fallen into hell?’ and my answer is, of course, ‘I don’t think it’s unfair,’”

I had killed people. That was an indisputable fact, and even if the other person had been the scum of the earth, I couldn’t deny my own guilt. That was a conviction I couldn’t bend.

I answered the questionnaire calmly and dispassionately. My response to the second question, ‘Do you regret your actions?’ was ‘No.’ As for the third question, ‘Do you think your life was happy?’…I hesitated, but ultimately answered ‘No.’ Although there were happy memories, when I looked back, only painful memories came to mind.

There were at times questions I didn’t understand, but I answered them earnestly and honestly. Why did I take these questions so seriously, even though I knew it was just a delusion? Anyway, after struggling with the questionnaire on the screen for about ten minutes, I finally reached the last question.

The fiftieth question was a difficult one to answer: ‘Do you like yourself?’ It was the last and most challenging question they had asked me.

I didn’t hate myself for sticking to my beliefs, but I couldn’t say I liked the person who killed for selfish reasons. My human conscience didn’t allow me to accept the fact that I turned into a vengeful monster and killed a human being.

This was just my nature, and it was not something I could easily come to terms with. Being too serious and inflexible, I’ve always had trouble accepting my clumsy way of living, so maybe I didn’t like myself after all. With a wry smile, I typed ‘dislike’ as my answer.

At the bottom of the screen, there was a submit button. After touching it, the message ‘sending’ appeared. After a while, it changed to ‘verifying’, and then ‘receiving’, until finally it read ‘touch here for verdict’.”

I thought it was quite poppy or casual, but perhaps it was too haphazard. It was just a product of my own illusions after all, limited by the extent of my imagination. With a self-deprecating chuckle, I touched the designated spot.

“The verdict is to go to hell. That’s to be expected… But what does the punishment of ‘surviving for a hundred years’ mean?”

The truth was that I had researched about the hell I would likely go to while in prison. According to what I found, torture for several hundred years by the prison guards was standard punishment for those who fell into hell. For particularly cruel criminals, the torture would be even more severe, lasting for several thousand years or more.

My knowledge of hell was only a small part, and furthermore, it was limited to Buddhist concepts. However, regardless of the religion, if there is a concept of hell, those who fall into it will undoubtedly experience similarly severe punishments. Nevertheless, isn’t a sentence of only one hundred years too short?

Besides, it was strange that the punishment was to “survive.” I had so many doubts in my mind, but since this was a mere hallucination, I suppose it doesn’t matter. I selected “no” for the “Do you want to request a retrial?” option at the bottom center of the screen.

With this, my sentence should be final. The tablet device screen displayed “Thank you for your hard work,” and the power abruptly got cut off, turning the screen black. Immediately afterward, the world around me crumbled. The dark, cloudy sky shattered like glass, and the barren wasteland cracked open, causing me to fall into the crevice.

Ah, it was finally over. Rather than being afraid of disappearing, I was relieved to have escaped a life filled with pain. As my vision gradually faded to black and my senses began to dull, the last sound I heard was a mechanical voice saying, “WELCOME TO HELL!”