Transmigrated into Eroge as the Simp, but I Refuse This Fate

Capítulo 361: You are a conceited woman

What makes us who we are?

Is it the soul? That invisible tether, the so-called essence of existence?

Or is it the body—the fragile vessel of flesh, bone, and blood that carries us from moment to moment?

Or perhaps it’s the collection of quirks, habits, reflexes, the so-called characteristics people point to when they say, “That is you”?

But what shapes those characteristics?

What bends the soul into something that looks like “identity”?

Is it consciousness?

And if it is—then what is consciousness, truly?

How do you know you are conscious? Because you think? Because you feel? Because the thoughts rattling inside your head insist that they are yours? But if consciousness is shaped by experience, then the question shifts: what is the measure of experience?

There’s a theory—one Damien had read, half-remembered, tucked somewhere in the corners of his old life. A theory about time and perception.

For a one-year-old child, living another year is half their life. An eternity. The span of existence doubled in the blink of birthdays. But for a forty-year-old man? Another year is only a fraction. A single line added to a crowded page.

The more you live, the less a year matters. The shorter it feels.

So what is the difference? Why does one man gasp at the weight of a day while another shrugs at the death of a decade?

Is it because of how much we’ve lived? Or is it because of what we remember?

Memories.

The unbroken string of recollections, stacked one after another, weaving the story we insist is us. The moments that etch character, the failures that dig scars, the victories that ignite pride. We aren’t born with them; we gather them like hoarders, jealously stacking them against the void.

Take, for instance, a man who slips into a coma.

From the outside, he lies motionless, a husk. Machines keep his heart steady, his lungs working. To the world, he is vegetative. Unliving.

But inside?

Inside he dreams.

In that dream, he grows. He gets a job, finds a wife, builds a family. He lives decades beneath the phantom glow of a dreamscape sun. He watches his children grow. He buries his parents. He suffers. He rejoices. He grows old.

And then—one day—the lamp flickers differently. The light bends. He opens his eyes to find himself back in the hospital bed. His body unchanged. His face untouched by time. The world insists no years have passed.

So then—what is his age?

Do we count the years outside?

Or the lifetime he carried within?

Who decides which is real?

Damien’s lips curved as the thought settled sharp in his skull.

‘And that’s me, isn’t it? That’s the joke of it all.’

He had lived as Damien of Earth. He remembered school, the cities, the choking smog of trains rattling through nights, the glow of monitors. But he also remembered this Damien—the boy of the Dominion, the hollow youth who wasted every chance, who hated his father, who adored and obsessed over Celia with a sick fervor that poisoned him.

He knew the Elford estate as intimately as he knew the cramped apartment he had once rented back on Earth. He remembered two childhoods. Two families. Two griefs.

So who was he?

‘Am I Damien Elford? Or am I not?’

The question clawed at the back of his throat even as he grinned at Erin Valeheart’s suffocating pressure.

He remembered the Elford boy’s feelings, as if they were his own. The paternal sting of Dominic’s coldness, the desperate ache for recognition, the buried, bitter need for love that had never been given. He remembered Vivienne’s warmth, her expectations, her disappointment like a knife slid between the ribs.

He remembered Celia—the obsession, the cowardice, the pathetic dream of clinging to her skirt and never letting go.

He remembered it all.

And because he remembered it, it lived in him. It was his.

‘That’s why I still despise him from the moment I woke up,’ Damien thought, his smirk hardening. ‘Because it wasn’t some stranger’s life I stepped into. It was mine, and I could see every crack, every failure, every rotting thought for what it was. And I hated him because I couldn’t pretend I wasn’t him.’

So then—was he not Damien Elford? Was he not Vivienne’s son? Dominic’s blood?

The world would say no. His grandmother would call him an intruder. A thief. A mask.

But memories did not lie.

They didn’t vanish.

They shaped him as surely as the ones from Earth had.

And in the end—did that not make him both?

He had never once—not once—looked at Dominic and thought, that man isn’t my father.

He had never looked at Vivienne and thought, that woman isn’t my mother.

He’d been angry at them, sure. Bitter. Disgusted at how they’d failed the boy he used to be. But the idea that they weren’t his? That had never crossed his mind.

‘Because they are,’ Damien thought, teeth grinding. ‘They’re mine as much as Earth ever was. That’s not even a question.’

And now, standing under Erin Valeheart’s suffocating gaze, the cold pressure gnawing at the edges of his soul, he felt the question burning up inside him like acid:

Is it right for her to call me an intruder?

Did he force his way into this world? Did he choose to wake up in this body? Did he force himself into Damien Elford’s skin like some parasite, waiting to strip it clean?

‘Was it easy for me?’ he thought, rage curdling behind his smirk.

Did she know what it was like to open his eyes and feel a stranger’s bones grinding against his own? Did she know what it cost to drag himself out of the rot, to tear himself from gluttony and cowardice, to burn away weakness day after day until his lungs ached and his muscles screamed?

Was Cradle easy?

Was any of it?

‘It was not,’ Damien thought, the fire rising sharp in his chest. ‘It was every fucking minute of pain. Every second of hunger. Every day of fighting myself and this world and everything that said I couldn’t.’

And now—now—his grandmother stood before him, cloaked in her Mystery, eyes like knives, as if the very fact she couldn’t read him made him less. As if her failure to comprehend meant he must be a fraud.

The smirk slipped into a cold, cutting smile. His eyes locked on hers.

“What a conceited woman you are,” Damien said, his voice steady, low.

Vivienne hissed his name. “Damien!”

He didn’t look at her. His gaze stayed fixed on Erin, his tone sharpening.

“What?” he said. “Am I wrong?”

The chamber seemed to tighten at his words. Even the threads of fate around him shivered like plucked strings.

He took a slow step forward, blood still wet at the corner of his mouth.

“Just because you can’t read me,” he said, voice rising now, “just because your powers don’t work on me—does that mean I’m someone different? Does that mean I’m a stranger to you?”

He tilted his head, mockery glinting in his eyes, but beneath it—a raw, burning anger.

“You think your eyes are a window to truth. Fine. Maybe they are. But tell me, grandmother—” his tone cut the air like a blade “—are you a god?”

The words rang out in the chamber like iron striking stone.

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