Chapter 28 The Pain Of Rejection

• Thud!
• Clinton fell back down into the decaying forest, at the edge of this first level of the dungeon where he also collapsed in during his first time here.
• Like the first time that he collapsed here, Clinton did not move immediately.
• Sensing no danger behind him, he confirmed that the humans were either too preoccupied with dealing with whatever it was that affected the skeletons or they were too scared to come down here.
• Well, it worked in his favor because at this moment, Clinton was not in the mood to do anything.
• He just wanted to sit down like a corpse there, tired and exhausted.
• Lying down in a pile of dried tree leaves, Clinton looked at the gloomy sky of the decaying forest with his hollow eyes, despair reflecting from the image.
• At this moment, Clinton was simply tired.
• And for the first time in both of his lives, this ever exuberant and boisterous personality felt tired of living.
• The mere thought of it would have pushed him into a fit of laughter in his previous life but incredulously, at this moment, Clinton felt tired of living.
• Beep!
• {Warning! Your HP is below 1 stat point!}
• {You will die!}
• For the first time in like forever, Clinton didn’t react defiantly to the taunt of the miserable undead system, rather he reacted like he didn’t see it.
• Clinton saw it but his mind and soul was too dead to react.
• Clinton went up there, back to the world of light to achieve goals. To grab one of these bones to see if he could use them as the base material to craft a truly powerful weapon that will help him finally escape from this level of the dungeon.
• He also went back up to the world of light with hopes, fleeting hopes to see if humans existed in this world.
• In a way, he experienced both good news and bad news.
• The good news was the confirmation that indeed, humans existed in this world while the bad news? The bad news broke him from the very depths of his being, from the core of his existence.
• Staring into the eyes of the lean human, Clinton experienced emotions of joy, excitement, relief, but everything came crashing down due to the opposite reaction of the human.
• Staring into those eyes only to be met by hostility, unfamiliarity, wariness, and guardedness, Clinton felt like his heart was placed in an anvil and was struck repeatedly till it was shattered in a thousand pieces.
• He felt like groaning but he felt too weak to exert his voice.
• For the first time in Clinton’s storied life, he started questioning things that he usually took for granted.
• ‘What is the use of fame?’ He thought.
• ‘What is the use of fame when there’s no one to acknowledge it?’
• Clinton always said when people told him to his face to put himself in other people’s shoes that he was not capable of that.
• But ironically, here he was, in shoes worse than those people he knew ever wore and for the first time, he understood how they felt.
• ‘What is the use of fame without a body to admire?’
• He finally what it meant to be ugly. He finally understood what it meant to be rejected, devalued, and ostracized.
• The pain of rejection…, Clinton experienced it for the first time and boy how hurtful was it.
• Clinton felt like a nail was being driven into his heart while it was being screwed and turned repeatedly like a wrench.
• The pain was unbearable.
• The mental stress and trauma were unbearable.
• Clinton just wanted to end it all. He was tired of living, what was the use of living when there is no one to acknowledge your existence?
• Clinton strained to raise one of his skeleton hands as he looked at it with hollow eyes. Staring at the white bones that stared back at him, he felt like chuckling but in the end, he simply dropped his hand back down.
• Looking into the gloomy eyes of this decaying forest, he said, “Curse you Angel Athena”.
• “Curse you for turning me into a skeleton”.
• “Curse you for dumping my soul into this body”.
• “Curse you for this punishment”.
• Clinton was stubborn. From a very young age, his parents complained about his stubbornness and pride.
• No amount of punishment that his parents ever subjected him to ever got to him. To him, punishment was meaningless.
• He would keep on living his life to the fullest regardless with zero regards for everyone. He would keep on doing what he liked without caring about anyone, he would continue being an arrogant prick.
• Afterall, what was life without being rude and proud?
• Being humble? It was just constraints that the weak and ugly were subjected to.
• For handsome and famous boys like him, they were the true privileged. To them, it was normal to be proud and rude.
• To them, it was normal to slap girls on the face.
• To them, it was normal for girls to flock around them and it was even more normal for him to sleep with any girl that he wanted without giving a damn about the repercussions.
• To them, it was normal for girls to abort children on their behalf.
• To him then, that was the life, until today.
• Today, against the humans, Clinton was subjected to the greatest reality check of his whole life.
• For the first time in his life, Clinton was made to understand that he was nobody.
• For the first time in his life, he was made to understand where he stood in the grand scheme of things and the world.
• He was made to understand that he was just a cog in the grand wheel of existence, a cog that could be rejected and discarded at wheel.
• For the first time in Clinton’s life, he felt ugly.
• For the first time in his life, he understood rejection.
• “Uhh,” Clinton groaned as his hollow eyes looked at the gloomy skies of this forest. “Now would be a good time to end it all, right?”