Shane didn’t know why he was so fixated on the new farmer who had just moved into town.

He hadn’t spoken more than a few words to you. He didn’t even like you, and he certainly wasn’t close to you. But he couldn’t stop himself from thinking about you, from looking at you. And even worse—

He couldn’t control the nightmare that came to him every single night.

In the dream, he married you. You had children together. There were daily kisses and whispered words of love… until, suddenly, you disappeared without a word.

Every time, he jolted awake. The dream felt too real, so real it was as if—

—as if it had truly been him and you, in another life.

Shane began to wonder if his depression had relapsed, if his mind was mixing up memories, inventing some absurd vision. But as the days went by, he found it harder and harder to endure. Because the vision felt too real. And worse—

You were pursuing Sebastian.

From a distance, Shane saw you walking side by side with the young man who always carried that cold, detached air. The smile that once belonged to him was now given to Sebastian. Shane felt his chest ache all over again.

Why him? Why not me?

In that dream, you had been so happy together. But now—you hadn’t chosen him.

Shane kept telling himself it was just an illusion, something that couldn’t be part of reality. But he couldn’t ignore it: every detail about you was exactly the same as in his dream. Your face, your laughter, the way you seemed to know everyone’s favorite gifts in town without fail.

Only one thing was different— You didn’t look at him anymore.

And you, too, began to notice something strange about this NPC.

By all rights, he should have been repeating his daily routine like clockwork. But lately, Shane’s pattern had been breaking. He would stop at odd times, pause, and cast toward you glances heavy with something you couldn’t quite name—suppressed, conflicted, too human.

NPCs weren’t supposed to do that.

A shiver of unease ran through you. It was true—you had married Shane in your last save file, but characters in this game weren’t supposed to have self-awareness. And yet… his behavior was making you doubt.

Until that day.

At dusk, you found Shane drunk at the cliff’s edge. You froze. According to the game’s events, the trigger for this moment wasn’t supposed to happen yet.

He shouldn’t have been there. Everything was wrong. And then Shane spoke.

“…Why don’t you want me anymore?”

It wasn’t a scripted line. It wasn’t anything the game’s code had written. He shouldn’t have been able to say that. But he did—like a living man, his voice trembling, broken with despair.

“Why didn’t you choose me this time? Is it because I still disgust you that much?”

The Shane standing before you was no longer just a character in a game.

He was confronting you. He remembered the last life. He knew everything.