Aurelius opened his eyes again cautiously, screaming in pain as the stab of broken ribs permeated his body once more.

  Tears decorated his eyes as the sunlight graced him once more, and the crowd around his desecrated body murmured in a city rich with sound…

  No. I should not get excited yet.

  In fact, Aurelius should take this as cynically as possible.

  “Aurelius! Don't go towards the light! I can't go to jail!” Tiberius screamed once more. A horribly familiar string of letters that he had heard twice already in the past 24 hours.

  Aurelius sat up carefully, emptying his mind of all thoughts.

  He would NOT be staying in that void again so soon.

  It’s dangerous to even think right now…

  Taking the potion from the familiar merchant, Aurelius let all sound fade into the background along with the potion that washed over his pain.

  Please tell me this is over... Aurelius thought to himself, groaning as he stood back up to his feet with the help of his friend.

  He leaned against Tiberius.

  They would head for the chapel straightaway.

  One step… Two steps… Three steps…

  …And… Yep. There it is.

  “AHHHHHHHHH!” Aurelius screamed in agony as golden chains materialised to grip him in its grasps once more, crushing his already broken ribs.

  This one hurt a lot more than last time! You goddamn MOTHER-

  And for the 5th time in his godforsaken life, he was dead.

  ???

  -FUCKER. Aurelius completed his last thought to himself, becoming slightly overwhelmed with terror again as he stared out into the void.

  Aurelius was now setting a new record for how short a loop could be! A horrifying, groundbreaking research that would test his sanity!

  As Aurelius found out just an eternity prior, even panic attacks were dulled in the vast nothingness.

  He wouldn't feel the tightness in his chest, nor the shortness of breath that should rake his body. Completely natural since he didn’t quite have a heartbeat, and air refused to enter his nostrils.

  Whatever panic attacks that screwed with him were purely psychological. And this actually made it much more tolerable the last time he had come into the void.

  Calming himself down like an expert sage, Aurelius started to go through an analysis of his situation.

  …Haa… It is definitely the commission. Aurelius thought to himself.

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  After he had been stuck in the void the last time, Aurelius had sunk into deep thought after the cycles of panic attacks and the 5 stages of grief.

  In that time, he had come up with two possibilities about his newfound predicament.

  One theory stood with The Fae Queen and the other involved the Commission.

  The soul was something under the ‘domain’ of earth based magic, and it was almost certain that the Fae Queen had done something with his soul through the ‘skin stretching orb’ in that particular death.

  If the fact that he was dying through those golden chains in the last 2 loops were anything to go by, Aurelius could have considered the Fae Queen as a candidate for causing his… suffering.

  However, given that the Fae Queen was a pure Earth elemental goddess, She would likely have just taken control over his soul entirely through magical soul brands or something else… creatively morbid.

  Killing him did not quite achieve much of the Fae Queen’s objectives.

  Even if She attempted such actions, the Commission contract should have killed him on the spot given that the spell went blatantly so against the Commission.

  So what was responsible for his current predicament?

  Obviously the Commission FUCKS.

  They had a TEENAGER sign a contract with a notary strong enough to carry out its terms even after death. What a bunch of horrifying, heartless, moralless, soulless, political, power hungry bastards.

  And it was likely the terms of not ‘going up against the Commission’ term in the contract that he had breached.

  Or perhaps it was the ‘check in with the Commission if something happens’ term that had done him in.

  …This technically was better than becoming the Queen’s slave for the rest of eternity throughout the loops, a terrifying possibility that seemed to have become… much more plausible now.

  However, Aurelius found his current situation akin to selling your own soul to a devil. Aurelius could certainly not remember the full contents of the contract, and he was almost certain that some of those terms would be broken simply through his ‘resurrection’.

  How was he going to convince the Commission that he was a Sage’s apprentice? Or better yet, how was he going to tell them ANYTHING about his predicament? He was bound BY DEATH to secrecy!

  What was more horrifying was the fact that the contract was still binding him like a parasite.

  Most contracts worked at the level of the body, binding, through wind magic, the soul to the vessel of the body with a mystical connection.

  And after reflecting on his death and reemergence in the void after the battle over Tlacualtzin, Aurelius had become more and more certain of the nature of this vast black ocean.

  His body reformed in this place from the weird ‘skin orb’. That meant that a contract that was bound to the body should have been broken immediately upon his death, given that the body no longer held any mystical significance as a corpse.

  Some low level contracts were even broken the moment that the body became unable to hold onto the contract’s required level of ‘life’.

  …Maybe I should ask someone to explode me into like a horrifying amount of pieces in the next loop to see if that would break this disgusting contract… Aurelius thought morbidly to himself, another iota of sanity slipping past him.

  The level of power that this contract had was almost… divine.

  Aurelius would not easily escape the clutches of this contract, and worse still, he would be unable to explain it to the Commission easily.

  But still, as much he hated it, there was only one thing that he could do in the next loop.

  Go to the commission.

  …And Aurelius had the plan to do that in the most perfect manner possible.

  ???

  The familiar wave of pain racked his ribs once more as he opened his eyes to the staring crowds of Tlacualtzin.

  With a deep breath that hurt like hell, Aurelius mustered up all the acting prowess that he could make.

  “Who are you?” Aurelius asked in bafflement to a teary Tiberius.

  The crowds seemed to fall silent at that moment, eyeing Tiberius suspiciously…

  Tiberius himself seemed rather horrified himself, and broke down into another horrifying torrent of tears.

  “NO AURELIUS! You’ve gone and completely broken your BRAIN! How could this even HAPPEN? WAAAAAA-” Tiberius cried out in horror, as he started to bang the cobblestone floor in a dramatic show worthy of the greatest theatres of Teotlcan.

  …Aurelius felt the urge to punch him.

  The merchant stepped forward nervously, the bottle of potion in his hand as usual with a rather ashen face.

  With trembling lips, the poor, poor merchant bid farewell to his profits as he whispered the following lines of actual bliss into Aurelius’s blank face.

  With a ghastly appearance, the merchant offered with shaky hands the bottle of potion over to Aurelius and spoke words that Aurelius was waiting for.

  “Oh dear me… I-It seems that we need to call the Commission…” He said, unable to hold back his tears…

  Bingo.