Why Do the Stars Burn Long After the Heavens Closed Their Eyes?
Chapter 21: Why Do the Stars Burn Long After the Heavens Closed Their Eyes?
( The Saintess's POV—I )
“Saintess.”
Someone called her that.
Again.
She didn’t bother to answer. She didn’t have to. The title would cling to her existence whether she spoke or not.
“Saintess,” the voice tried once more. “We’ll arrive in Seoul in three hours. Do you wish to rest?”
Rest.
She almost laughed.
Instead, she closed her eyes.
The word kept echoing anyway.
Saintess.
Saintess. Saintess.
Saintess. Saintess. Saintess.
SAINTESS.
A thousand voices, in a thousand accents. They all sounded the same in her skull now.
Old men, wheezing it out between rotten teeth as she pushed their death back one more winter. Children, sticky‑faced, clutching her skirts and thanking her for a sun that would burn them later. Priests, sweating under heavy vestments, screaming it while they used her name to justify their filth.
Enemies, spitting it with hatred.
Lovers, whispering it because they had nothing else to call her.
She hated it.
So much, so much.
Saintess.
All of them, calling *me*.
There is nothing else they call me by.
There is nothing else *I* can call me by.
She tried once.
Tried to remember another name. Something with consonants that stuck funny in the teeth. A syllable a mother might have shouted across a courtyard. A lover might have sighed.
When she tried to recall them, she got shapes without edges.
A consonant that might have belonged at the start. Vowels that wobbled like bad glass. She shoved her hand into the pile of lives in her head and came away with mush.
Snow.
At some point, the layers had packed too thick.
When snow piles and piles, you don’t see the individual flakes anymore. You get a blank, heavy sheet. It looks pure until you fall through it and drown.
Her memories were like that.
Too many lives. Too many deaths. It all pressed together until there was no pattern left. Just this one word stamped on the outside.
“Understood,” the Inquisitor said when she didn’t reply. She took a breath like she wanted to say more, then thought better of it and left the berth.
Silence again.
Opposite, chained to a chair carved out of blessed wood, Han Si‑woo slept.
He looked peaceful.
That was a lie, of course. His mana lines, if you knew how to see them, were a tight, ugly knot of pain.
Ordinary eyes would have seen only that.
Hers saw further.
The soul in the centre of his chest pulsed in her sight. Thick. Warped. Heavy. Like something that had been hammered too many times and still refused to flatten.
Beautiful.
She opened her eyes and watched it.
****
The worlds she remembered was not the first world she had lived in.
There was no beginning.
She knew that because there were gaps before it. Empty spaces in the sequence. Faded colours that suggested there had been something, once, before the moment everything started repeating.
Memory began in the middle of a scream.
Not hers.
Past hers or strangers.
She would see fragments.
Sometimes.
The sky had been wrong. Torn, bleeding light that did not match the colour of the sun or the moon. Stone floated where it had no
right to float. People ran in crooked lines around holes that had teeth in them.
In the centre of it all, a girl knelt.
She believed it was a girl. The form was small. Sliver Hair. Hands soft. Hair falling into eye
The girl pressed her palms to the cracked ground and prayed.
Not because she was devout.
Because she was afraid.
“Please,” she had whispered. “Please, not yet.”
Something answered.
A light that did not belong to the sky, or the torn earth, or the screaming people. It poured through her, burned, rearranged. It set the broken pieces of reality back into something like a pattern.
The rift closed.
People lived.
They looked at her like she had done it.
She believed them.
She got up, shaking and half‑blind, and smiled because that was what they needed, and they called her something.
Saintess.
The sound had tasted sweet, that one time.
She patched plagues. She closed realms. She channelled fire against things that didn’t know what fire was.
She died.
A knife in a dark street.
An arrow through the throat.
A ritual that demanded every drop of holy power in her bones and then reached out for more.
There were hands. Tears. Flat lines. Bells.
Then there was a different sky.
No sun. No moon. Just colour. Wrong colour. An artificial blue so uniform it made her eyes ache.
Symbols swam in it. Letters. Numbers.
Words she didn’t have names for then.
The presence that filled that place was not god.
It was older.
Or newer.
Or simply other.
It could have been her emotion.
It could have belonged to a stranger.
She had lived so many lifetimes that everything felt fictional.
She wanted to deny it.
She couldn’t.
The memory refused to line up cleanly.
“What happens if I stop?” she asked.
“Can you?” it asked back, almost curious.
It knew the answer.
So did she.
The blue broke apart.
When she woke again, people were already calling for a Saintess.
***
At some point, she started to decay.
She didn't know why she was doing it anymore. Or living like that.
So tired of it.
When did this begin?
No—why did it begin?
Why me?
Who am I?
Why this.
Why this light that won’t go out no matter how hard I crush it.
Why do I wake up already….
Why do my hands glow even when I want them empty.
Why does the world keep mistaking me for mercy.
Why am I cursed for eternity.
Why do they call it grace.
Why do they call me holy.
Why does it hurt even when I obey.
Why does it hurt more when I don’t.
Why—
Why—
WHY—
WH—
—hh—
“Why God?”
She didn’t find the answers she was looking for.
But she did find God.
Or the System, as it called itself.
Once, long ago, there was a girl.
That's what it told her.
She lived in a world that cracked. She prayed. She bled. She did what people do when they are loud and alive. Then a gate opened overhead, or a god fell, or some other story began, and she stood between it and the screaming crowd.
She saved them.
That part was always the same.
And as a reward, it granted her a wish.
“What did she ask for?”
“Why did she ask for eternal damnation?”
“Why would her past self wish for that?
“Was that even her?”
“Why would anyone want it?”
It didn't answer anything, it laughed. “████░░░░”
Then she woke up in another body.
Another world.
Another Saintess.
Repeat.
How many times?
She did try to count.
And died.
And died.
And died.
And died—
—and woke up somewhere else.
“Saintess.”
Again.
And again.
And again.
She tried to kill herself.
Strangled. Burned. Pierced. Swallowed. Drowned. Stepped off towers. Stabbed Herself. Let monsters chew through my bones. Thrown myself into the core of things that unmake reality.
It never worked.
No matter how carefully I broke the vessel, I always opened my eyes somewhere else, in someone else’s body, with holy light humming under my nails and memories already rotting.
Once you have rotted enough, you stop looking for exits.
You start looking for knives.
She felt bone shatter. Organs split. Blood spread in a pattern that might have been artistic if anyone had been allowed to look at it longer than a breath.
She felt consciousness loosen.
Just a tight darkness, thick like wet cloth, and a voice inside her.
“Attempting to kill ourselves?” it observed.
“Let me go,” she hissed.
She clawed at the dark. At her own face. At anything.
“You don’t need me,” she spat. “Find someone else. Spread it out. Rotate. Give us an after. A before. Anything.”
“You have already been integrated,” it said.
“I don’t care.”
“That,” it said, maddeningly mild, “is why you are suitable.”
She screamed at it.
It did not stop it.
The dark thinned.
When she opened her eyes next, there was a hand in hers and a priest crying with relief because “the Saintess” hadn’t died after all.
After that, she got more creative.
You learn where a body’s limits are when you have used so many.
Poison in quantities that would have dropped a dragon.
Standing very still in front of monsters and not raising a hand.
Bleeding herself dry in rituals that did not demand it just to see if there was a difference.
No matter what she did, the result was the same.
Death stopped meaning anything more than a scene change.
Pain was just bad acting.
Fear dulled. Then it rotted. Then it came back in a different shape.
Not fear of dying.
Fear of continuing.
She found herself, in her fifteenth, seventeenth, twenty‑third world, praying again.
Not for the lives of the people tugging at her sleeves.
For her own end.
Silence.
Sometimes, for a joke, It would crack, or a candle would go out.
***
The worlds did not get better.
At first, that had been the hope.
Maybe the next one will be less ugly. Less cruel. Less... human.
They weren’t.
Different flavours of rot.
One where gods had turned their followers into cattle and drank them. Another where everyone wore smiles so wide their faces tore when they lied, and they still lied.
One world had looked promising. No divine intervention. No system windows. Just people with tools and theories.
They locked her in a lab for twenty years and cut pieces off her in the name of progress. Each time the pieces grew back, they wrote papers about “reproducible miracles”.
The ugliness wasn’t an accident.
It was how things breathed.
People weren’t worth the effort she spent saving them. She knew that. She knew that better than anyone.
She kept saving them anyway.
Because not saving them hurt in a different way.
There is a special kind of madness reserved for those who understand that nothing matters and still get up in the morning.
She lived in that place for a long time.
Other wanderers began to show up.
There were others like her.
Transmigrators.
Most of them were filth.
You’d think an endless cycle through worlds would make people wise. It doesn’t. It makes them bored. Bored minds do ugly things when no one can stop them.
Everyone else moved through life like it was a tightrope with one drop at the end. They had fear, urgency, the frantic stupidity of things that know they only get one try.
Transmigrators, regressors, “players”—they walked differently.
Too casual. Too reckless. Throwing themselves into danger not because they were brave but because they wanted to feel something, anything.
All trash.
One man she met in her thirty‑something life built a city out of living people.
Literally.
He had the power to fuse flesh and mana. He decided to stack humans instead of bricks. When he was bored with the architecture, he tore them apart and started over.
“It’s art,” he told her, as she walked through streets that screamed. “You, of all people, should appreciate creation.”
She burned that city.
It didn’t kill him.
He just respawned somewhere else later and complained about her lack of vision.
Another woman thought individuality was the root of all suffering.
She succeeded, for a while, in making a whole world where everyone had the same face and the same thoughts. No one disappointed anyone.
It was quiet.
Like a graveyard.
Then a glitch, because there are always glitches—produced a child who was different. The woman tried to erase that child.
The world ripped instead.
She watched that too.
She watched all of it.
She watched them play with worlds like toys, because when nothing can hurt you for long, everything starts to look like a game.
She did not like them.
They did not like her.
She kept her distance when she could.
Sometimes they forced proximity.
They treated her like an NPC. An overpowered quest‑giver. A scenic encounter.
They called her Saintess like everyone else.
Amid the mould, there was one soul that did not make her want to scrub the universe.
He appeared without fanfare.
