Chapter 1

I remember the end of my first life with perfect clarity. The memories are not faded, they are sharp, and they burn.

On what was supposed to be my wedding night, my bride, Chloe Vance, did not come to our bed alone. She brought a body with her. It was Liam, her favorite junior developer, the one she had always adored. His corpse was cold on the white sheets between us.

"Kneel," she commanded.

Her voice was flat, without any of the warmth I had once foolishly hoped to hear.

I knelt on a bed of broken circuits and shattered motherboards she had spread on the floor. The sharp edges dug into my knees, but the pain was nothing compared to the cold horror of the scene.

"Apologize to him," she said. "Ten thousand times."

So I did. I knelt and apologized to a dead man while my wife watched.

"If you hadn' t tampered with Liam' s AI, he would have been the first to develop the most advanced one!" she screamed at me, her face twisted with a grief that was not for me, but for the man lying on our bed. "You stole his place! You stole him from me!"

I had won the competition.

Her father, the tech mogul Richard Vance, had set the terms himself. He had hand-picked thirteen of the brightest young minds, myself included, to be his apprentices. Each of us was given a prototype AI core. The challenge was simple: whoever could evolve the AI to its most advanced state would not only become his lead developer but would also be engaged to his only daughter, Chloe.

We were all designated fiancés, rivals in tech and in love.

I had loved Chloe since we were children. I won the competition for her.

My victory, however, led to Liam' s suicide. He couldn't stand the failure. That was the story Chloe believed. That was the story she used to justify my destruction.

"You separated Liam and me forever, making me lose my beloved," she whispered, her voice a venomous hiss as she leaned close to me on that horrible night. "Now go to hell and apologize to him!"

Her guards held me down. She injected me with a drug, a performance-enhancer made from toxic code. It didn't make me stronger, it just made me hyper-aware, amplifying every sensation until it was agony.

Every half hour, she sent a random hacker into the room. They were anonymous figures behind screens, their identities hidden, but their actions were brutally intimate. They used their skills to violate my digital presence, my finances, my very identity, while I was tied down, forced to watch my life be dismantled. They cyber-assaulted me, humiliating me piece by piece until there was nothing left.

Chloe recorded everything.

She uploaded the videos, crafting a narrative that I was a cheating scumbag, a monster who had driven an innocent man to his death. The world believed her.

My parents couldn't bear the public shame and the vicious online attacks. They died from the shock, their hearts giving out under the strain. With them gone, Chloe moved in swiftly, seizing my family' s tech empire, the company my father had built from nothing. She took everything.

I died in that room, a broken man, humiliated to death.

But then, I woke up.

I was back at the beginning, a year before the competition's end. The AI prototype was on my desk, humming softly. The memories of my previous life were not a dream, they were a warning. A roadmap of a hell I had to avoid.

This time, I would not be a sacrifice for their twisted love. This time, I would not win.

So I did the one thing that could change everything. I found Liam' s prototype AI, a device nearly identical to my own. And in the dead of night, when no one was watching, I secretly swapped it with mine. My advanced, meticulously crafted AI, a product of my genuine talent, was now in his hands. He would get the credit for my work.

Let him have the victory. Let him have Chloe.

All I wanted was to live.

This deep bond they shared would no longer be my death sentence.