After Ten Lifetimes, I'm Done Struggling

I closed my eyes, bracing myself for the sensation of weightlessness, ready and waiting to die.

Instead, there was a loud thud.

As it turned out, Kevin Cortez had lunged in the wrong direction, lost his footing, and landed face-first, tumbling all the way down the stairs.

And just like that, I'd dodged the lethal shove intended for me by the "fake" young master of the Cortez household.

I opened my eyes, glanced at the empty space beside me, and shrugged. It was too bad that I didn't manage to die after all.

Kevin's heart-wrenching wails echoed up from below, but I just ignored him. I turned away to find a suitable spot to tuck myself in and wait, once more, for death.

After a quick search, I set my sights on a ventilation duct above the toilet. The cover wasn't shut tight, and it was dark, cramped, and encased in sheet metal.

A perfect morgue compartment.

I nimbly climbed inside, folded my hands across my stomach, and closed my eyes, feeling quite content with myself.

Downstairs, Kevin's sobbing had drawn the entire family over. He wailed and said, "Kenneth said there was no room for me in this house since he's back! He even pushed me down the stairs on purpose!"

Mom, Dad, and my eldest sister, Kathy Cortez, were furious. The whole family stormed up to the second floor, hell-bent on settling the score with me. They tore through every room until Kathy finally kicked open the toilet door.

A flashlight beam cut into the ventilation duct, shining onto me, lying there stiff as a corpse.

A deathly silence fell over the room.

Kevin's wailing cut off abruptly like a squeaky toy being squeezed shut.

Mom pointed up at me, her finger trembling as she asked Kevin, "Didn't you say he pushed you down the stairs?"

Kevin's face drained of color before turning red. He even forgot to keep crying.

But he was quick in his thinking. He immediately grabbed Mom's hand and began to wail even more pitifully.

"No wonder he avoided me when I tried to greet him! I wouldn't have fallen, but just as I stood up, I heard a noise from the ceiling and I thought it was a ghost!

"I got scared and my foot slipped, and I fell… That's why I thought that he was the one who pushed me."

He clung to Mom's clothes and asked pitifully, "Does he hate me that much? Was he purposely pretending to be a ghost just to scare me away?"

Kathy shot a vicious glare toward me inside the ventilation duct.

"Kenneth Cortez! You have a perfectly good room! Why on earth are you hiding in the air ducts like a rat? It's clear you were hiding there on purpose to terrify Kevin! You wanted him to fall to his death!"

I opened my eyes slightly and cast a hollow, indifferent glance at them.

"Oh, my apologies. I had no idea that simply lying here could frighten him. Should I crawl a bit deeper inside and stay completely silent? Would that be better?"

I shifted further back, my back striking the sheet metal with a dull thud. However, that sound sent Dad into a rage.

He grabbed a golf club from somewhere and struck the exterior of the duct with all his might.

"Kenneth Cortez! Nobody has ever dared to lay a single finger on Kevin ever since he began living here 17 years ago, but the moment you came back, you turned this entire house upside down!"

He continued to roar, his face twisted in disgust.

"Is the Cortez household so short on space that you can't find a bed for yourself? Get out here now!"

I didn't crawl out.

Even if I wanted to, I wouldn't know which room to go to. They hadn't even bothered to prepare a room for me at all.

In the end, two bodyguards dragged me out of the duct by force. I was tossed onto the living room floor, completely covered in dust.

Mom looked down at me while gently patting the shaken Kevin in her arms. "Go get cleaned up. You can pick any room in the house you like. But you are absolutely forbidden from playing ghost to scare Kevin again."

They welded iron grilles over every single opening later on to keep me from crawling back into the ventilation ducts again.

I wandered around the second floor. There were plenty of rooms in the house—a music room, a study, an art studio, a walk-in closet, and so on—but all of them belonged to Kevin.

Even for the empty utility room, tucked away at the far end of the hallway, a servant rolled her eyes when I approached it. She told me, "That was just converted into a home gym for Kevin yesterday."

I nodded, signaling that I understood.

Since there wasn't a room in this house for the living, I would simply find a spot suitable for burying the dead.

In the end, I pushed open the door to the greenhouse in the backyard.

As it happened, there were several long, unused planter boxes in the corner. I chose the one with the softest soil and lay down inside.