Life is priceless.
Is that really the truth though?
Time is money, and money is time.
I don’t believe I ever really took that saying to heart… that is… until today.
Today, when I awoke, my mind a scattered mess, I found the entire world had drastically changed.
From one night to the next, it was completely different from what was in my memories.
The world contained identical scenery and the same people, but there was a gigantic difference.
Something that was never possible before, but was unique to this version of the world.
The ability to sell things that were previously impossible to be sold. As for the medium of such transactions, they were accomplished through specially written contracts by blood.
For example, the most important; the sale of your remaining lifespan, the years from the present until the day you died. You could sell all of it and die immediately or a portion of it.
The opposite to this also was possible. The ability to sell the years you’d already lived. When you sold the years you lived, you sold your memories, your very existence; and you forgot what was in the memories you sold to the buyer. The people you met in the period of time sold forgot about you and their memories were altered. You were replaced in their memories by whoever you sold your time to. Your body also regressed in age as a result.
Of course, selling the years you lived was a double edged sword that came with a steep price attached. Your remaining lifespan scaled proportionally to the already lived years you sold.
For example if you were 50 years old and your total lifespan was 100 years, if you sold 25 years of life you’d lived for and regressed to a 25 year old, your lifespan decreased to 50, not 75. Thus such trades were extremely uncommon as it was a destructive mechanism that reduced the global lifespan supply in the economy.
The system wasn’t closed though. The global lifespan reserve in the system had one means of increasing, the birth of a new life; in other worlds, children so to speak. As such, children were viewed as an extremely valuable resource to a country. If a country's birth rate was high, it was prosperous. If it was low, it was in decline. When the death rate was greater than the birth rate, the country was typically in an economic recession with an extremely strained political system.
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Your life belonged to the country, thus your life was taxable as well. The country’s people, in a literal sense, was the blood that kept the country afloat. When a country ran out of lifespan, a country, like it’s people, met its untimely demise.
Aside from these two mechanisms, it was possible to only sell memories or specific details in your memories if special conditions were written into the blood contract. This sort of trade required you to sell an equivalent amount of your remaining lifespan as collateral to keep the years you’d lived.
When selling the years you lived it didn’t necessarily need to be from present back, it could be a chunk instead. Although you’d still age in reverse by the amount of time you sold. Like this it was possible to sell your childhood memories, but only keep your memories as an adult.
However, there was extreme risk that came with this that led to it being outlawed by the government. Doing such a trade could make a person lose sense of themselves and commit suicide. Suicide meant a reduction in the global circulating lifespan.
There were also other negative backlashes that could occur. As the things from childhood shaped the person we became in the present, an entire change in personality was possible. It could result in a large increase in mass murderers who’d lost the love from when they were raised up as a child.
There were several other possible negative effects from this sort of trade which was why this was considered illegal.
Overall, there were many things that could be sold via blood contracts that couldn’t be sold in the world I remembered.
In theory, with a system like this you could live eternally, but never remember anything you’d lived through. It was a bit terrifying when you thought about it.
Like this you could rise to fame overnight and the entire world would never notice a thing had changed.
There was one aspect of this system that was truly scary though.
That was… theft.
When someone died, it was possible to collect the years they lived and forcefully assimilate into your own. Thus there were people who intentionally murdered others. By doing so they also replaced themselves in the memories of the people of the world. Even video recordings and photographs were no exception, they took it all for their own gain.
Because of this once someone was killed, there was no means by which to apprehend the murderer.This one gigantic flaw made crime a common occurrence. Law enforcement had the most difficult job. They could not wait for someone to be killed. They had to act out and discover those with such ill intent beforehand. If they didn’t the moment the murderer killed his target, they would effectively become the target in everyone else's memories. Memories would then be altered so such an event never existed to meld the contradiction.
At least, this was the present running theory in the world as there had never been a person reported as murdered before.
This world was far different than the peaceful one I remembered. With life now assigned a price tag like this, I finally understood just how much I’d taken life being priceless for granted.. When life became a quantifiable everyday commodity that could be purchased at a price, our society turned into cold and heartless murderers.
As for why the world I remembered was so different. It had to be related to an illegal or unorthodox trade involving my life.
Who was I before I woke up?
I don’t really know.
The only thing I could do now was slowly think and figure it out.
I had to find myself within this deep ocean of blood.