The moss hung from the cypress trees like rotting lace, draping the estate of the Valerians in a permanent, humid twilight. Eugene walked the perimeter of the swamp, the mud sucking at his boots with a wet, rhythmic sound. He could smell the decay—the scent of stagnant water and ancestral sin.

Eugene was the last of his line, or so he thought. The truth was far more exhausting.

He remembered the first time it happened. He had died at twenty-four, a bullet in his chest during a family feud over a strip of salt marsh. Then, he had woken up. He was an infant again, cradled in the same mahogany crib, smelling the same lavender soap his mother used.

He had lived the same twenty-four years three times now.

In the first life, he had been a coward. In the second, a tyrant. In the third, a saint. But the ending was always the same. On the eve of his twenty-fifth birthday, the house would burn, and he would find himself standing over the body of the person he loved most, a bloody knife in his hand.

He didn't remember doing it. He only remembered the feeling of the blade sliding home and the sudden, crushing silence that followed.

This was his fourth loop. He had spent the last ten years trying to avoid the tragedy. He had burned the bridges, exiled the cousins, and locked himself in the attic. He had tried to rewrite the script of his life, treating every conversation like a minefield.

But the house had a memory.

As he walked toward the manor, he saw a figure standing on the porch. It was a woman who looked exactly like the one he had killed in the previous three lives. She smiled at him, but her eyes were empty, like two holes punched in a piece of white paper.

"You're late, Eugene," she whispered, though she was twenty feet away.

He looked down at his hands. They were shaking. He realized with a jolt of horror that the knife was already there, hidden in the folds of his coat, vibrating with a hunger of its own.

He wasn't a man reborn; he was a ghost trapped in a machine of flesh and blood, doomed to repeat the same slaughter until the swamp finally claimed the last of the Valerians.

*** Objective Tensor Code: [M1:8, M6:8, N2:0.7, K1:0.8] OTMES_v2: {V:0.8, I:1.0, C:0.6, S:0.3, R:0.1} Coordinate: (M1, M6, N2, K1)