My Wives Are A Divine Hive Mind-Chapter 72: The Third Attempt: Face The Fear, Reach The Future

The air was still, so sterile that even the ticking of a clock would have been a symphony.

Pale white walls pressed in from every side.

Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead in uniform silence.

A thin desk sat in the middle of the cubicle, cheap metal legs supporting a laminated faux-wood surface.

A single chair beside it.

A blanket crumpled in one corner. A cup of instant noodles resting cold near the monitor.

The smell of plastic and mild seasoning lingered.

Kivas sat cross-legged on the floor. Her hands rested limply on her lap, her halo flickering in dim pulses like an overworked machine unsure if it still functioned. Her wings were gone.

Her clothes had changed—loose pajamas, the same she used to wear during her nights of dread.

The dim reflection of her face on the turned-off monitor reminded her of what she once was, long before Fathomi, long before divine constructs, long before she tried to matter.

She knew this place.

Her old apartment.

Or rather, her old box.

No windows. No real kitchen. Just a unit where people stacked their dreams and hoped they wouldn’t rot before morning.

"This moment..." Kivas murmured, eyes lifeless and barely attempting to see. "I remembered it."

It was two days before her first big interview.

The one she thought might change her life.

The one she prayed for even if she didn’t believe in anything at the time.

Her shoulders trembled. She let out a dry chuckle. "Right. This again."

She remembered how it felt.

The crushing pressure of waiting. The stagnant, immovable weight of a future too small to contain hope, but too massive to ignore.

The interview was supposed to be her lifeline. A golden string. She clung to it with her entire being. freēwēbηovel.c૦m

Every second of waiting scraped against her nerves. She paced. She practiced. She wrote mock answers.

She looked up articles on eye contact, posture, tone. She read forums on what colors to wear, what shoes to avoid, what greetings came across as desperate. Her mind spiraled, and the spiral became a noose.

She didn’t sleep.

The fear of screwing it up made rest impossible. The fear of missing her alarm. The fear of waking up and realizing she’d never even had a chance. She lay on that bed, then on the floor, then in the chair.

She counted hours. She watched the walls until they started pulsing like a living thing.

And when the interview came—when she walked into that building with her printed résumé clutched in sweating hands—she smiled.

She performed.

She made jokes. She gave examples. She mimicked confidence like a perfectly cast puppet. She wore her desperation like perfume.

They thanked her for coming.

They smiled politely.

However, she didn’t get the job.

Kivas leaned back against the faux-wood desk and laughed again. A low sound, hoarse and sharp, edged with self-deprecation.

Then the walls were gone.

The cubicle disintegrated into paper fragments, peeling away one line at a time.

She sat on an endless road now, one that curved upward into the impossible distance. On either side stood buildings—tall, gray, modern—but every window was hollow, every room abandoned. Lights blinked behind the glass with no source.

Pavement cracked with quiet sighs.

Kivas rose to her feet and took a step.

Each footfall echoed longer than it should have.

She kept walking.

Memories swirled through her mind like a fog parting.

"I remembered everything." Kivas uttered. "But I hate reenacting the emotion I felt even more."

She remembered crying after that rejection. Silent, violent crying that came from the stomach and chest, curling up in the corner of her room with the lights off, wondering why she even tried.

But past Kivas didn’t know back then that she managed to get back on the road again after that horrible crash,

She didn’t stop.

She found another job. Not glamorous. Not special. But it paid. It helped. She chipped away at her debts. She lived. She endured. She made enough to stand.

She found comfort in silence, in slow mornings with microwaved leftovers and cold air brushing through cracked windows.

It wasn’t happiness.

But it was momentum.

"Yet, despite remembering everything, it took me reliving them to fully understand it once again, huh."

She reached the center of the road.

A desk stood there, exactly like the one from her old cubicle. Behind it sat someone in a clean working uniform, blazer folded perfectly, tie straight, hair tidy.

It was her before she became the Kivas who crash-dived in Fathomi.

Older.

More composed.

Her expression was soft, but professional. She gestured to the chair in front of the desk.

Kivas sat, her halo dim but steady. Her posture slouched from exhaustion, but she raised her head to meet her older self’s eyes.

Both of them sat before each other, separated by a desk.

It felt like an interview.

The woman across from her smiled, and asked with a voice practiced in the art of surviving bureaucracy, "How many crumbs of emotion do you have left in your jar?"

Kivas blinked slowly. "Two scoops," she answered. "Maybe."

The older version of herself nodded, noting something in a notebook that hadn’t existed a moment ago.

"What kind of person do you want to become?" she asked.

Kivas looked down at her hands. "Stable. Capable. Dependable. Someone who can live without falling apart."

"And when the future seems bleak, do you still see anything in the distance?"

Kivas stared into the faraway curve of the road. "There’s a flicker. Small. But I want to keep it. I want to grip it. Even if it cuts."

The older Kivas looked up again. Her smile remained unchanged. "Are you ready for a new attempt?"

"I don’t know."

"Are you afraid?"

"Yes."

"Is the fear of the inevitable truly what you experienced right now? Or is it the fear of failure, the fear of an unstable outcome?"

Kivas exhaled, a long breath that felt like it had been waiting for a decade. "Yes, the latter."

The older Kivas stood and reached behind her desk.

A door materialized there. Its surface writhed. Arms pushed against it from inside.

Teeth bit at the frame. Faces stretched the wood as if it were paper. The air around it trembled. Soon, dreadful half-burned arms protruded from it, teeth, fire, and scream echoed from the door.

The adult Kivas gestured to it.

"It’s hideous," she said softly. "And dark. There’s no light in it. It will hurt. It will scare you. You will doubt every step you take. You will question whether you’re even supposed to walk at all."

Kivas stayed silent.

"But maybe, just maybe," the older Kivas continued, "there’s another door waiting at the end of that pain. Or maybe not. Maybe it’s more pain. Maybe it’s a hallway of knives and regrets."

She looked directly into Kivas’ eyes.

"But if you stand still, there’s nothing. Just waiting. Just fear. Just the room you started in."

Kivas wiped her eyes with her sleeve. The tears had returned without her noticing. They didn’t sting. They simply existed, like dew on grass before dawn.

She stepped forward, closer to the door.

"I’ll walk again," Kivas said. Her feelings were not there yet. Her smile was sour, she bit her lip, and her gaze remained low. "Even if I walk bent. Even if I limp. I’ll move."

The older Kivas smiled warmly.

"Then good luck."

Kivas moved forward.

It burned.

She entered it anyway.

The door that opened itself for her.

And Kivas stepped into the storm, unrelentingly at her own maelstrom.

Without knowing, Kivas was already attempting her third run of her life in Fathomi.

"Ngnn..."

The sound of birdsong was faint—distant, muffled by fog—but it existed.

Which was surprising because this didn’t happen as much in Vaingall.

Wind moved through high branches overhead. The leaves rustled with the slow cadence of a world not yet awake. The sky, tinted in the early blue of a sleeping dawn, curved wide and vast above the forest canopy.

Kivas stirred.

Her head was tilted to the side, resting awkwardly against the trunk of a tree wrapped in moss and braided roots. Her hair, unkempt and wild, clung to her face in clumps of silver and gold. Her halo hovered above, flickering faintly as if unsure whether it had permission to exist.

She also regained her pair of angelic wings back now that she returned to the start.

Breath entered her lungs, hesitant. Her eyelids lifted, slow, dragging against the weight of memory and sorrow.

She didn’t fall this time.

There was no crash, no crater, no headfirst impact into the unkind soil of a foreign world.

She was just... here.

Leaning.

Alive.

Still Kivas.

Her gaze flickered, catching a glint of motion nearby.

A figure sat on her knees a few feet ahead, hands gently folded in her lap.

She had a black cloak draped over her narrow shoulders, the fabric stitched at the hem with tiny silver crescents. Beneath the cloak, a dress of layered cloth wrapped her in muted grays and bone-white trim.

Her skin, pale as bleached parchment, reflected the dawnlight like mist. Hair the color of falling snow framed her face, silky and long, trailing into the undergrowth.

Her eyes, wide and gleaming, were red—deep crimson, not the angry red of blood, but the solemn red of burning incense or glowing coals.

She smiled.

"Oh good," the girl said, her voice calm and lilting, with a faint hush like whispered prayers. "You’re awake."

Kivas blinked again.

Her mouth felt dry.

Kivas sat upright with effort, back stiff from the awkward sleep, and looked at the girl.

"Who..." she rasped. "Are you?"

The girl tilted her head, her hair shifting like water. "You don’t remember?"

"I’ve never met you."

"Oh," the girl said, frowning briefly. "But we’ve met. At least once. Not that it matters now."

Kivas tried to stand.

The forest spun once, yet it was the very same forest and spot where she landed before.

Maybe somehow, in this third timeline reset, an anomaly happened, and this girl was somehow here, just in the right time and place to witness and help Kivas who crashed to the ground, who somehow woke up after crashing instead of mid-diving.

Kivas checked her Well of the Soul, nothing changed much from her last check, which was also surprising—since Kivas acquired a whole brand new remembrance skill and a Frugal Vow when she started her second run.

Maybe in this third attempt, this girl was the new variation.

Regardless, it might not be before long where she would meet Samael again.

And there was so many things she wanted to talk about with Samael about the ending of the last run.

Kivas knees shook but didn’t give out, so she began applying her Hemo Psyche to restore her energy and cleanse her fatigue.

To think that deity could feel this weak. Maybe the amount of faith and followers matters more than what she thought.

"You’re in Vaingall," the girl explained, remaining where she was, watching with no fear. "You were asleep for a long time. I found you leaning against this tree and waited. You looked like someone in the middle of a dream too heavy to be cut short."

Kivas didn’t answer. Not that she was required to. After all, this was not the world where she came before, where etiquette and basic manners exist.

This world might as well hate Kivas, but that was unlikely either.

Regardless, Kivas didn’t feel a single connection to this girl, and she didn’t want to bother trying to act nice when most of her soul had been drained on her second death of this world.

"Hah..."

The air here was breathable. The soil wasn’t cursed. There were no nightmare fogs. No screaming, no divine constructs, no towers of cursed flesh.

Just stillness.

But the ache in her chest remained. A wound with no edges.

"I’m sorry," the girl said. "I didn’t mean to startle you... Especially since you don’t remember..."

"And what makes you think that I’ve forgotten you?" Kivas asked with a light scoff on her smile.

"Because you will remember me," the girl replied with certainty. "Just not yet. You’re not... aligned with that timeline...

"Not the one where we spoke properly. Not the one where you called me by name."

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