You know your day is gonna be shitty when, first thing in the morning, you die.

It wasn’t even a fast death. She hadn’t been given that mercy. Instead, her time in the mortal plane had been painstakingly prolonged for the last four months, the doctors filling her with medicines, attempting every therapy, stretching her thinner and thinner. And now, today, while waking up, she felt herself snap.

She knew, with the certainty of the dying, that today was her last day.

She relaxed in the hospital bed. Nobody was there to keep her company: the doctor was taking care of some other patient, probably knowing the same thing she had just realized; the nurses were gone too, again, probably, for the same reason. Her parents were home: not because they didn’t care about her, no, they had just been told to leave and rest a while. They had promised to come back soon. Maybe they’d even manage to keep the promise.

She looked out of her window, where a stretch of blue sky greeted her, together with the very top of a naked tree. It was autumn. A mild one, as they came. They kept getting milder, summer reaching outside its domain, bringing warmth in a season where clouds, rain and fog should have ruled.

Yet, there was the sun. Shining brightly on her face.

She mumbled something unintelligible as she lifted her arm to cover her face, and her mind registered the tugging of the IV tube and electrodes connected to her. Unpleasant, but she had grown used to it.

That was more or less when she stretched the last bit and, finally, oh so finally, broke, the seams giving up, her body looking around at the world and deciding it had had enough, that it wanted a relatively permanent vacation.

But, as always, it wasn’t a fast process. It started, quite simply, with a little cough. It didn’t even hurt.

A nurse came in, hearing her. She checked her parameters on the screens, noticing the oxygen was a bit low but not even being alarmed, because that was the norm for her. Nobody would blame the woman for what came next, because nothing could have stopped it.

The nurse brought her breakfast, some biscuits and tea. She half expected the tasteless things to be stale. They weren’t. Then she took out a little treat, giving her a conspiratorial smile, and handed her a few squares of chocolate. She did it sometimes. She shouldn’t, but nobody saw her, and the patients never complained.

After that, she just sat and waited. She tried to read, but the coughing made it impossible soon enough.

The doctor came, then called his colleagues. Then came her parents. Her mother was crying. Her father just stared into the room, arm around her shoulder, trying, and failing, to comfort her. Then the mask covered her face, oxygen being forcibly pushed into her lungs. Followed soon enough by a tube feeding air directly in her. Of course she wasn’t quite awake by then. She wasn’t there anymore.

She was… somewhere. Inside her mind, maybe. Quite awake, thinking fast.

She remembered how, one time, she had read that in the moments before death, the mind accelerated, slowing down the world around you, letting you think about anything and everything. It was that moment that books and movies liked to call “seeing your life flashing before your eyes”.

She walked the corridors of her mind and looked around, seeing her past and feeling the present. She distinctly felt the tube going down her throat, the air slowly entering her airways. She heard the slowed voices of the doctors, her mother crying.

And she felt, in real time, the beeping of her heart on the monitor. It was so fast!

Somewhere, in the distance of her mind, a little lightbulb turned off, obscuring a part of her brain forever. Then another. And another. Faster. As fast as the beeping of her heart.

Until it, too, stopped. And all the lightbulbs exploded, her mind going dark.

Of course, they didn’t give up.

They used the defibrillator, and it managed to turn back on a few lights here and there. For a moment. Then all was dark again.

It’s useless, she wanted to say. But she couldn’t.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The fast beeping of her heart stopped and became one, long note again.

And that was that.

It was really dark.

Let’s hope Buddhists were right, she thought in her last moments: I want another chance. One without disease, without the medicines. Just me and life.

Dark.

Then a little light.

A small, white, box.

And, within, a few words.

[Disease Immunity] Obtained!

[Poison Immunity] Obtained!

“...Huh?”

[Respawning as…]

Error…

Error…

Unable to respawn as [Human]...

Looking for acceptable [Species]...

Searching…

Searching…

[Species] found!

Lucky.

The rectangle of light disappeared.

It was dark again.

And then… there was a suffused light. And she could feel her body again. She felt constricted, folded in on herself. She also felt cumbersome. She still felt the phantom sensation of the bed under her back, firm and comfortable, even if now she felt like she was floating in something… warm.

Is this what the afterlife feels like?

She tried to move an arm, and felt it was weak. She also felt it was touching something: a smooth surface. A wet, smooth surface.

She tried to push with both her arms. The surface gave in slightly. So she kept going, pushing harder with all the strength her unused muscles could muster, feeling the rest of her body pushing as well.

A crack formed on the smooth surface. She immediately moved her hands there, trying to pry the crack further, Then she bent even further, pushing with her… legs… that felt like a lot of legs right there! Like, more than the two she was used to. Her brain was disconcerted. Another part of her, a new part, told her to SHUT THE FUCK UP AND KEEP PUSHING! And she did.

The fissure on the surface grew in size, bigger and bigger.

More light streamed in from it, blinding her. Her eyes felt so sensitive, as if they had never been used.

Then, finally, with one last push, it broke.

She tumbled out of her prison, head over heels, rolling like a little ball. She felt… grass, and something soft and silky on her body.

Then she stopped. Or rather, was stopped. By something. A lot of somethings, long and thin.

She looked up, and saw eight little legs keeping something big, black, and furry up. It rather looked like one of those strange tables you could find if you looked too deep in an Ikea catalog. Or on Amazon. Unable to control herself, she giggled at the thought.

The eight table legs (another giggle) moved.

And now she was staring at a big, blue, stretch of sky, contoured by verdant oaks and birches. A bird, small and colorful, reminiscent of a sparrow, flew in that span of sky, before disappearing. It was all beautiful, in that simple way that only nature could be.

But she wasn’t quite looking at that. Oh, no, she was looking at the woman staring right down at her. Her hair was a fiery red, tied in a very long ponytail that reached down to her midriff. Her eyes were a simple, kind, brown. And her smile was warm, filled with joy. The pale skin at the corners of her mouth was a bit wrinkled, as if trying to make sure the woman always kept smiling.

She was wearing a white shirt that reached down to, again, her midriff. Where, normally, her legs should be. Only, there were no two legs there, but a spider’s body. Black, furry, eight legged.

“Jorogumo” was the first thing that came to her mind. The japanese spider demon (she liked anime).

The other, new, voice in her mind corrected her: Arachne.

The “arachne” woman on top of her smiled and shouted: "Got a lively one here!"

Then she looked at her and, chuckling, reached down and closed the newborn’s mouth: "Don’t want your first meal to be a fly now, do you?"

That was more or less the moment when her brain noped out of it and she fainted.

[Respawn Completed Successfully]!